The beginning of a new year is an opportunity to start with a clean slate. In January, people are making resolutions and feeling excited about the prospect of making changes and setting new goals. However, by the time March rolls around, many of those resolutions and goals have fallen by the wayside, and people often revert to the old way of doing things.

This same scenario can play out in advisors’ practices as well. We kick off the new year with fresh energy and renewed focus, then the team’s attention inevitably shifts to seemingly more urgent short-term matters, and we lose sight of the longer-term goals we resolved to work on at the start of the year.

So, how can financial advisors and their teams keep the momentum going for the entirety of 2025 and beyond to achieve those big-picture goals and move the needle for their enterprise?

Focus on managing energy, not time

For many advisors, the annual resolution process starts with building out qualitative and quantitative measurements to gauge progress toward their goals. But achieving goals is about more than measurement; it’s also about harnessing and focusing your energy.

We often believe we can achieve our goals by managing our time more effectively. But the reality is, we can’t manage or control time – we can only manage ourselves within that time. And the best way to do that is to manage our energy.

So, although we’ll be discussing strategies on goal setting, I encourage you to think about how you and your team are managing your energy as you work toward your goals.

Here are some questions for teams to consider regarding energy management:

– What tasks and processes have been getting our best energy?
– What results have we failed to achieve, and what role did energy play in not achieving those results?
– Do we know how we work best? For example, are team members more effective with a crunch-time mindset, or does slow and steady work best?

Three steps for effective goal setting

Once the team has a better understanding of how to optimize energy, it’s important to ensure everyone on the team is on the same page when it comes to the specific goals they want to achieve, both individually and together. Any absence of clarity around goals can hinder the team’s potential to achieve results and will undermine motivation, cohesion, and accountability.

Once the team has clearly defined what they want to achieve, it’s time to create a framework that details how to get there.

Following are three steps we suggest for effective goal setting.

Step 1: Establish your rocks

You may be surprised to learn that the word “priority,” which is defined as the very first thing someone gets done, was only used in its singular form until around the 1940s. But as our world became more complex, the plural version, “priorities”, entered the vernacular.

Today, we all establish (multiple) priorities. The problem is that people establish so many priorities beyond the mission-critical items that it becomes overwhelming and nothing gets done. Those seemingly urgent tasks on your to-do list end up hijacking all your time.

To execute well and not get bogged down by less-critical tasks, it’s important for organizations to create a prioritization system. One system that can make priorities more manageable and actionable is to break them down into “rocks”.

Establishing your rocks involves identifying and prioritizing the top three to seven mission-critical initiatives for your practice during the next 90 days. These are the areas that demand focused attention and resources to drive the success of the organization. Clearly defining and aligning these rocks and then determining how much time should be allocated to each one ensures everyone is working toward common objectives and fosters clarity and direction. This approach also promotes a sense of individual and team accomplishment as each rock is completed, which contributes to progress and momentum.

Step 2: Implement time-management tools and techniques

In addition to managing your team’s energy, there are several time-management tools and techniques you can adopt to help team members record progress, stay accountable, and increase the probability of reaching their goals. Applying these tools and techniques gives the team permission to focus on what matters most. It can also help team members be more proactive in their day-to-day activities and avoid the tendency to simply react to issues as they arise.

The easiest way to improve performance potential is to get organized, and this begins with your calendar. When we know what our priorities are and have all our actions in one centralized location, we can focus our attention and energy on accomplishing what’s most important to us. So, let’s discuss some steps you can take to get organized.

First, determine your priorities are for the week. At the start of each week, ask yourself what you need to focus on. Specifically, what is going to help you make progress toward your quarterly rocks? Record your goal in an appointment entry and identify the activities that need to be completed during a given time.

When setting these priorities, be specific. For example, your weekly goals might be to make five follow-up calls from a networking event you attended, get two discovery meetings established for the following week, and schedule one lunch meeting to discuss your financial planning process. These activities should be prioritized in order of importance and impact. You can utilize color coding to help you see what your day/week looks like at a glance.

Next, make it a habit to regularly review your calendar in advance. This means reviewing it both at the beginning of the week and a day in advance to ensure your time is allocated effectively. You may also consider setting aside time throughout your day to take care of urgent matters that pop up so you can still focus on your priorities. This could be allotting 15 to 30 minutes between meetings or blocking an hour at the beginning, middle, or end of your day. Besides setting aside time for urgent matters, it’s also important to schedule small breaks to recharge and replenish your mental energy.

Get better at saying “no.” I’ve struggled with this myself, but creating better boundaries helps us avoid creating obstacles for ourselves that thrust us into reactive mode. Remember, we are managing ourselves and our energy during the time we have.

Step 3: Measure, report, and review

When it comes to measurement, keep in mind that it goes both ways: Whether we are measuring the right or wrong things, that measurement should still result in action. So, we need to be thoughtful about what the team seeks as behaviors and ask ourselves, do these behaviors move the needle toward the goals we are trying to achieve?

Here are a few steps you can take to answer that question and help ensure team and individual goals are aligned:

– Establish key performance indicators that measure the right things. Hold a collaborative goal-setting session with the team where everyone contributes their ideas of what success looks like for 2025 and beyond. Prioritize the most impactful goals that align with the organization’s strategic priorities and define clear metrics and milestones for each team goal.

– Build out lagging and leading indicators. A lagging indicator reflects historical data and provides insights into past performance. They are valuable as they provide a retrospective view that helps teams gauge the effectiveness of strategies they’ve implemented.

A leading indicator provides insights into future trends and potential changes before they occur. They aim to predict the direction of your business when it comes to sustaining growth that is aligned with your vision and mission. These indicators are essential to making informed decisions on where team members are seeing success so you can develop consistent activities and incorporate them into your strategic business plan.

– Regularly report on metrics and review processes as a team. For the team to have ongoing improvement and accountability, it’s important to commit to tracking progress on leading and lagging indicators through regular reviews. Doing so can provide valuable insights into the expected outcomes of the team’s efforts.

By being intentional about implementing these steps, you and your team will be positioned to adapt to change, refine your approach when success is not being reached, and consistently deliver exceptional value to your clients – in 2025 and beyond.