Ask a group of successful financial advisors about their most critical and scarcest resource and what will you hear?

Without exception, the answer will be the time and energy they can bring to bear against their business.

As a result, it's essential that you actively manage your daily agenda - making conscious decisions about how to spend your time rather than reacting to events.

Here's a simple exercise to to actively manage your day.

Take a look at last week's calendar, then ask yourself three key questions:

First, what were the best, most productive uses of your time, the ones that drove results?

Second, what were the time wasters - the uses of your time that were of only marginal value or no value at all?

Finally, going forward, how can you spend more time on the high impact activities and less on the low impact activity?

For almost every advisor, the answer will relate to spending time effectively interacting with your most important existing clients and prospective clients - whether it be face to face or over the phone, in today's environment nothing will give you a better payoff then meaningful conversations with top clients and qualified prospects.

Take a look at next week's calendar. How much time are you spending engaged in conversation with the right clients?

If it's not at least half your week, then step back and ask yourself why not?

A couple of final comments.

First, remember that clients are not all equal. One advisor found himself being distracted by calls from his second tier clients. It goes without saying that these clients deserve attention - but not at the expense of your top clients. He began giving his direct number only to his key clients - everyone else got put through to his assistant, who would attend to their question if possible, if not tell clients he would return their call later in the day. He blocked out the time from 4 pm on each day to return those calls - getting back to them in a timely fashion without disrupting his day.

Second, watch out for avoidance behaviour. In tough markets, it's tempting to take our eye off the ball - whether it be money manager lunch presentations and conference calls, reading firm research or trolling on the internet, there are a limitless number of ways to avoid doing the hard work that will truly drive your business going forward.

One successful advisor makes it a firm rule not to go to lunch with colleagues - he makes it a rule only to go for lunch with clients and prospects, otherwise has a sandwich at his desk.

Another does all of her reading evenings and weekends, allocating one or two hours nightly to do this - her comment was "Workday hours are too precious and valuable to spend them doing things I could do at home."

In good times, we can be successful without being hugely tough minded about how we spend our day.

In these times, it's essential that we actively, proactively manage our day.