‘This world that we live in is built to distract us’: Managing time as a broker

These ideas were unpacked in a recent episode of Business Accelerator. Hosts Jason Back and Alex Whitlock analysed the day-to-day of a broker, understanding that busyness is often unavoidable, but there are two types of busy.

“I ask people how they are in our industry all the time, and I say, how are you? They say, busy. And my response is always, good busy or bad busy? And that really does get brokers thinking because I don’t think they know the difference between the two,” said Back.

Being busy is good for business. Being overwhelmed isn’t good for anyone. This can be especially troublesome for those in the broking industry as many are working for small businesses or are solo practitioners, reducing the support systems available.

“Marshall Goldsmith wrote a fantastic book, Triggers, and he talks about the planner and the doer. Roughly 50 per cent of our industry are solo practitioners. Around mid-65 odd per cent are brokers with less than three staff. What that means is that when they wake up in the morning, most of them start off as the planner. They’ve got a list of things that they want to get done. They’ve got this idea about their day ahead of them. And as soon as the clock ticks over, the doer kicks in and the planner goes out the window,” Back said.

“And all of a sudden, we get into distraction. Your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system are a constant battle. Your prefrontal cortex is effectively where all the adulting happens, and your limbic system is where all the fun factory stuff happens. So, we’re constantly at odds with trying to get things done because we get serotonin and endorphin releases by doing all these little tasks, and we feel like we’re getting things done. But to your point, when we get to the end of the day and we say, what did we do today? Probably nothing monumental.

“It was lots of little things that made us feel good, but we never really got anything achieved because the planner got booted out the window and the doer kicked in and we said we got busy and we felt like we were being productive, but in fact we were just active. Productivity focuses on outcomes, busy focuses on activities. And for a lot of brokers, they just focus on the wrong activities.”

Back said that productivity goes beyond time management. In fact, there are three key components for becoming more productive.

1. Managing time
2. Attention
3. Energy

“When we talk about time, diary management, using better systems or actually time blocking, using things like the Pomodoro technique, understanding how your body works and your attention focus works so that you’re putting in,” Back said.

“Dean Mannix, a good colleague and friend of mine, was speaking at a conference recently and he talks about winning the morning. If you’re thinking about my best energy levels when I should be doing my most focused work, how do I manage that time? Well, I put all my really complex stuff in the morning and my light work in the afternoon.

“A lot of people talk about it and I always see that time is a construct. I feel like it’s something that I actually can’t manage. But what I can is I can manage the activities that I put into the time that I’ve actually got. There’s a thing called Parkinson’s law. Parkinson’s law states that time expands and contracts depending on how you allocate it. So, if I said to you, Alex, this afternoon, I’ve got to write a credit paper, it will take you this afternoon. But if I said, Alex, I’ve got to shoot out of the office in 45 minutes. That credit paper might only take you 44 minutes.”

Structuring diaries and putting a larger emphasis on planning can help brokers seize the day, said Back. Having a “shotgun approach” to handling business stands to put productivity at a disadvantage and can result in wasted time and wasted potential.

“Brokers should be able to control the activities within their diary, not be controlled by other parties. But it’s the psychology of how you feel about your business on a Sunday night at 8:30. When you look at your diary for the week coming up, if you’re going, oh my God, this is a nightmare, think about your state of mind. Think about how you’re turning up to meetings. Think about you’re already exhausted before you get there,” Back said.

“The other two, attention and energy. [The] industry has a real high degree of overwhelm. We get ourselves into a state of flux because we’re constantly promising things that potentially we can’t deliver. We’re a distribution network for a manufacturer, so we’re taking on things we’re telling clients, leave it with me. So, we take on all these responsibilities, but then we don’t necessarily control the outcomes.

“This world that we live in is built to distract [our] ability to do deep work over what we call surface work. I use noise-cancelling headphones. I put them on my mind goes into a state of deep work. I then can do really complex tasks or write complex content or be working with my complex client solutions because I’m getting into this habit of putting headphones on. It’s a small thing, but it takes me away from the general distraction.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full episode of Business Accelerator, click below.

Jack Campbell is the editor of Broker Daily. After graduating from the University of Wollongong in 2022, Jack began his journalistic career working on Broker Daily’s sister brand, HR Leader. In August 2023 he was made the news editor and worked alongside some talented journalists writing articles and recording podcasts.

To reach Jack, email him at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.