Journal of Financial Planning: January 2014
Bill Winterberg, CFP®, is a technology consultant to financial advisers. His comments on technology and financial planning can be viewed on his blog at www.fppad.com.
People are using technology to track everything today. There are apps that track what you eat, how much exercise you get, and how much money you save, and/or spend each month.
But why bother to track all these inconsequential data points? Because knowing and quantifying past activities helps identify the effect minor changes in your routine can have over a long period of time.
As a financial planner, your days likely include a number of mundane tasks you repeat over and over. If you can save a few minutes or even just a few seconds on each task, you have the potential to capture significant time savings as the minutes and seconds add up.
Here is a sampling of apps and tools I regularly use that add up to significant personal time savings.
Track Time
If you want to quantify your personal efficiency, you’ll first need to use an app like RescueTime (www.rescuetime.com). I recommended this app in my January 2012 Journal column (“Maximize Your Technology Spending in 2012”), and at $9 per month or $72 per year, RescueTime logs your activities on a computer without being overly intrusive. RescueTime won’t highlight areas where you can increase your efficiency, but without first establishing a benchmark, you won’t truly know whether or not you are being more productive each day.
Text Shortcuts
As a journalist, blogger, and owner of a never-empty email inbox, I type a lot. As a financial planner, you likely spend a significant amount of your time typing as well, from drafting financial plan commentary to documenting client meetings.
Chances are you repeatedly type many of the same kinds of things each day. For me, I consistently type things like:
- My phone number
- My mailing address
- Today’s date (both “January 1, 2014” and “20140101” for scanned documents)
- Website URL
- “CFP®”
When typing phone numbers and website addresses, it is too easy to transpose letters and numbers, leading clients to a dead end. Also, it takes time to format phone numbers with parentheses around the area code and to add the full “http://” prefix to a website address.
One tool I use to save time typing this information (and saving keystroke errors, too) is TextExpander (smilesoftware.com/TextExpander). TextExpander is available for a one-time purchase of $34.95 and runs on Mac OS X. Windows users should consider alternatives like PhraseExpress (www.phraseexpress.com) and AutoHotKey (www.autohotkey.com).
Instead of typing my frequently typed words and phrases, TextExpander allows me to build shortcuts called “snippets” so that when I type the shortcut, TextExpander automatically converts the shortcut into my long form text.
Saving a second or two of keystrokes might seem inconsequential at first, but TextExpander has a handy statistics window showing how much total time I’ve saved by using the tool. I purchased TextExpander in February 2012, and as of November 2013, I used more than 12,000 snippets saving more than 500,000 typed characters. Assuming a typing speed of 70 words per minute, TextExpander has saved me more than 25 hours of time.
Faster File Search
Another area for significant time savings is the way we search for files on a computer. Historically, we’ve defaulted to using a computer’s file explorer window to click through an endless list of folder trees and file hierarchies. Modern search capabilities make that a thing of the past.
New Mac and Windows operating systems include powerful search tools that facilitate the discovery of files, presentations, photos, and more. Mac OS X features Spotlight, and Windows 8 offers universal search capabilities in its search bar.
These tools index the files on your computer, looking not only at filenames but also at content inside the document. The search tools allow you to perform a full text search based on the information you believe is contained inside the document you need. Like Internet search engines, you can use simple techniques such as surrounding your search phrase with quotation marks to force the tools to only display exact matches.
Spotlight searches documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and Internet browsing history, and also can launch an app by simply typing its name and pressing “return.”
Windows 8.1 universal search only searches for files that are organized under the \Users directory. You may need to manually add additional folders through a convoluted process found in the “indexing options” section of the Windows control panel. Things get a little more complicated if you need to search for files in a directory that hasn’t been indexed by Windows, as you must return to the regular file explorer in Windows 8 desktop mode to do so.
Both operating systems also allow you to increase file discoverability by adding tags or metadata to documents. Tags work very well in a solo practitioner environment, but tags and labels can get out of control in a mid- to large-size firm. It is important to establish naming conventions and standard tagging rules so everyone in your organization follows the same approach to identifying documents.
Allow me to blatantly show my bias by commenting on how much faster and easier the searching and document-tagging process is in OS X Mavericks. Tags are integrated directly into the “finder” save window when saving new files. When browsing among existing files, documents are tagged by dragging a tag from the left-hand “finder tags” column and dropping it on top of a file name.
In Windows, one must right-click a file, open the file’s “properties” dialog box, click the “details” tab, and then type in tags and keywords. How many keystrokes and mouse clicks does that take?
Faster Video Playback
Many financial planners consume more content through multimedia sources including YouTube videos and iTunes podcasts. Did you know you can speed up the playback of videos and podcasts to digest the same material in less time?
To speed up the playback of YouTube videos, you will need to activate the YouTube HTML5 player by visiting www.youtube.com/html5. Once the HTML5 player is active, simply click the gear icon in any YouTube video and change the speed to 1.5x or 2x normal speed.
For iTunes podcasts, playback speed adjustments are built right into the podcast app on iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Find the toggle icon at the lower, right-hand side of the screen to increase podcast playback speed to 1.5x or 2x.
Playing back resources at 1.5x normal speed gives you a 33 percent boost in the amount of content you can consume. For the standard one-hour presentation, that’s a time savings of 20 minutes.
Small Changes Add Up
As you can see, small changes in the way we type, search for documents, and consume audio and video media can add up to substantial time savings. These apps only scratch the surface on the number of ways all of us can be more efficient and get more done each day.
Keep the dialog going by sharing the tools and apps you love that add up to big time savings. Post your feedback to The Technology Edge community on FPA Connect (connect.FPAnet.org) to let me know what tools save you the most time.