A recurrent theme at the recent Top Advisor Summit related to bringing discipline to running an advisor's business. Of particular interest was finding ways to work smarter and more efficiently rather than harder.

Here are a few of the things speakers had done to improve their efficiencyand effectiveness.

• Laying out priorities and plans for the week ahead before leaving the office on Friday
• Having structured meetings with staff every Monday morning to set up the week ahead
• Starting each day with a five minute team meeting on everyone's top priorities for that day
• Organizing quarterly meetings with your assistant to review progress on the business and discuss plans for the 90 days ahead.
• In the case of one larger team, holding annual planning sessions - in which three year goals were brought up to date and action plans agreed to for the year ahead.

As I listened to these speakers, I was reminded of one of the most successful advisors I know who spoke at a conference I ran in the 90s.

Among the keys to his successes, he discussed a five minute weekly habit he had gotten into early in his career which he still does twenty years later - and which he considers instrumental in having move his business forward.

Each Sunday evening at 9 pm, he takes five minutes to review his calendar for the week just passed and ask himself three questions:

• What did I do that really worked well - that I want to do more of?
• What did I do that didn't work as well - that I want to do less of?
• What am I going to do differently this week as a result of the lessons from last week?

Early on, he wrote down the answers to these questions in a special notebook - today he keeps them in a file on his laptop. Having written them down, once a quarter he reviews his notes to ensure he hasn't missed any key lessons he should be adopting.

In today's time pressed world, it's easy for us to get consumed in day to day client demands - and fail to take the time to step back and reflect on whether all of our activity is as productive as it could be. How and when you do this isn't important - five minutes may not be the right length of time for you, weekly may not be the right frequency and Sunday at 9 might not be the right time to do it.

However, building in a regular time to step back and reflect on your business could be one of the most productive investments of time you can make.