Financial planning is complex and stressful and both elements must be dealt with accordingly. Here, Nick Bamford, chairman, Informed Choice, suggests three steps we can all take to get control back over our working environment.
There are some things in life that you can’t change and there are some things you can. Experience tells me that it’s best to concentrate your energy on the latter and try as much as possible to ignore the former.
A lot of people claim to be stressed by the work that they do. There may be too much of it or the environment in which they do it isn’t conducive to getting the tasks completed.
What can you do about it?
I believe that there are three steps that you need to take to get control back over your working environment. They require a little bit of time and effort but if you implement these steps you will find that your working life becomes less stressful.
By the way, it’s easy to blame other people for the work stress that you suffer, the demanding boss, the lack of resources or simply the volume of work that you are expected to do, but the smart team player uses these three steps to regain control of the situation.
The first step is organisation.
You need to know the amount of tasks that you have to complete. If you are “mature” (my code word for “old”) you might have a list written on a piece of paper. Younger people probably have this list in some electronic format.
One way in which I de-stress my life is to have a constantly updated list of the tasks that I have to do. I also get a ridiculously high level of pleasure when I tick an item off that list!
But a list is only part of the solution. Each item needs to have a) detail of the steps needed to be taken to complete the task; and b) an indication of the amount of time it will take to complete the task, or the amount of time available
Depending on the type of work that you do your list might also need to have a note of other people that you might need to consult, or meet with, to complete the task. How often is a work item on a list simply because the jobholder hasn’t been able to get data they need or a decision from a third party?
This is about both taking back control of the work load and also having evidence of what the work load is that my be shared with colleagues and those team members to whom you report
The second step is prioritisation
Let’s accept a simple fact of life. For most people the chances of them completing everything on their list during the working day just isn’t going to happen. The complexity of the world in which we live is such that relatively few tasks are going to be a simple ten minute job. In the Paraplanning world for example a report might take many hours, possibly days, to complete.
Prioritisation is key. Maybe there is a tax year end sensitive item on your list or perhaps an item where a guarantee has a deadline date to meet, these clearly are the items that need to be prioritised.
Think of them as “mission critical” tasks. Is someone, client, firm or both, likely to lose out financially if this task is not completed in a timely fashion? If the answer is “yes” then they are critical to the success of the organisation and where our focus should be.
If the whole of your list is “mission critical” then something is wrong and that’s not really your problem, in fact that is down to the organisation you work for to get sorted, perhaps by applying greater resources.
The third step is communication
You need to be telling people about your list and your priorities. This needs to be done clearly and regularly so that whomever you report to knows exactly what the position is. They need to know how much you have to do and how long it will take and what your priorities are.
Talk to the right person. Moaning to your colleagues about having too much to do will increase your stress and probably theirs as well!! It’s really not going to help you.
There is a lovely scene in the film Saving Private Ryan where Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is explaining to his platoon that complaints never go down, always up, through the chain of command. “You complain to me and I complain to my CO.”
Talk to the people who can actually help you, the decision makers if you like.
Constant communication also helps if priorities change. You may be working on task “X” because you have identified that as the priority. Along comes an internal client, your financial planner for example, who asks you to change your priority to task “Y”.
As a result of your organisation, prioritisation and communication the two of you can then determine if the task change is the right decision to make.
So, these are three steps you can take to start de-stress your working life. They require input and don’t expect other people to do it for you. A lot of stress stress it seems is self-inflicted; it’s down to you to eliminate it.
[Main image: radu-florin-CwTBt6jyagQ-unsplash]
