Week 25: How Efficient Are You?

That’s not breaking news.

What is new is that many agents no longer seem to have a slow season. The fourth quarter ends, open enrollment wraps up, and instead of coming up for air, we roll straight into service work, compliance questions, quoting, and meetings. More and more agents are telling me they are just as busy in March as they were in October.

If growth is the goal, not just survival, then efficiency is no longer optional. But before we talk about how to become more efficient, we need to start with a different question.

Weird question, right?

The answer, of course, depends on how you define a thing. For this discussion, a thing is any time you shift gears and start something new. A phone call, preparing a quote, a client visit, a Zoom meeting, or an email exchange that represents one complete conversation all count.

And if we are being honest, this includes the personal items that fill our day. Getting ready in the morning, meals, household tasks, and winding down at night all take time. And time is the only real inventory we have.

So how many things do you think you do in a typical day? Most people assume the number is well over one hundred because it feels like we are constantly moving. But when you step back and look at the math, the number is actually much lower.

If you sleep eight hours per night, you have sixteen waking hours. Even if every single activity you performed took only ten minutes (which almost nothing in our business consistently does), the absolute theoretical maximum would be ninety-six activities: 16 hours x 6 “things” per hour.

If the average activity takes fifteen minutes, that number drops to sixty-four: 16 hours x 4 things per hour.

And that assumes no wasted time, no interruptions, no fatigue, and no context-switching loss. In the real world, the number is lower still.

I have tracked this many times over the past few years by keeping a simple running list of each new thing I did throughout the day. I call it my “done list”. Some people call it a ta-da list instead of a to-do list. From the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep, I rarely exceed seventy individual items. Most days are closer to fifty or sixty.

So if you are willing to trust the math for a moment, the next question becomes much more interesting.

Again, some of those sixty activities are things that happen every day no matter what: getting ready, eating, basic household responsibilities, and the routines that bookend the day. Activities of daily living. Call that twenty. Now we are down to forty “productive” things.

But not all of the remaining activities are actually productive business tasks. Some are part of being human: the ten-minute conversation with a co-worker in the morning, a short mental break we need to keep our sanity, or a few minutes of scrolling to reset your brain. Those moments matter, but they are not usually the activities that move your business forward.

So now, most of us are left with roughly thirty meaningful work activities in a day.

Eight working hours. Thirty real opportunities to make progress. That’s probably a lot less than you thought, huh?

And the realization is sobering. It forces us to move past the vague feeling of being busy and ask a much more important question: are these the right thirty?

At first glance, this sounds like bad news. We are not doing nearly as much as we thought we were.

In reality, it is incredibly good news, because it means that even small changes create significant results.

If you identify three low-value activities that you perform regularly and replace them with three high-value activities that take the same amount of time, your productivity immediately increases. If you automate a routine task, you create additional capacity without working longer hours. If you outsource something that does not require your license or your expertise, you buy back time.

Even something as simple as completing three additional meaningful activities in a day represents about a ten percent increase in productivity when your baseline is thirty. Most people think they would need to find time for ten extra tasks to improve by ten percent, but the real number is much smaller.

Add six to eight meaningful activities, and you are approaching a twenty percent increase in output without adding a single hour to your schedule.

A good real-world example of this is the shift many agents have experienced when working from home. For some, the increased productivity has nothing to do with working longer hours and everything to do with reclaiming activity slots. Eliminating a daily commute alone can create several additional opportunities to get meaningful work done. The same is true for the natural interruptions that come with a traditional office environment: the quick drop-ins, the extended coffee conversations, the unplanned meetings. Those interactions have value, but they also consume time. When even a few of those are converted into focused work, it is very easy to see a 10–20% increase in output without changing the length of the workday. It’s not that people suddenly became more disciplined; they simply gained control over more of their daily activity slots.

That is the opportunity. We do not need to overhaul our entire business. We simply need to make better use of a finite number of daily activity slots.

If you are skeptical, test it for a week. Keep a simple running list in the notes app on your phone and write down each new activity as you shift from one thing to the next. Don’t worry about timestamps or duration, just capture the sequence.

At the end of the day, count them.

If you want to take it a step further, total your activities in two-hour blocks. You will start to see patterns. You will notice when you are most productive, when your energy drops, and when you are engaged in longer, deeper work that naturally reduces your activity count. That awareness alone can change the way you structure your day.

This article is not about giving you all the answers (that will come later). Instead, it is about creating awareness. Once you accept that you only get about thirty meaningful opportunities each day to move your business forward, you begin to look at your time very differently.

In future issues, we will talk about practical ways to eliminate low-value work, automate repetitive tasks, delegate strategically, and increase your output without increasing your hours.

For now, start with the question:

How efficient are you — and are you using your thirty the right way?