Sitting on a cruise ship in the North Atlantic for three weeks with limited and spotty Internet led me to a different perspective about my use of the Internet and consequently my devices that get me connected.

Let me back up. Early in June, I got my Apple Watch, which I must say was great fun and, well, all consuming. Day one I barely took it off to recharge, checking my e-mail at 3 a.m., just in case something important came to me overnight. By day three I was surreptitiously checking the weather in London, following the FTSE market movements and answering e-mail at dinner. We then boarded a ship bound for Iceland. The last time I had been aboard, the Internet connection was seamless and I carried on as though I never left home. This time, however, I was disconnected for five days.

The first things I missed were e-mail, LinkedIn, Facebook and my subscription to hundreds of blogs where people I had never met complained about their family, the neighbors, their portfolio performance, last night’s theater presentation or the lack of anything to see on TV, despite their access to 1,237 channels and 10,000 movies on demand. Next, I missed my subscriptions to 14 digital newspapers, 16 magazines and, my absolute favorite app, Zite.

Finally, I missed days of news from CNN, NBC and all my other favorite online stations that kept me up-to-date on important current events, especially the minutiae. Probably more than anything, I missed the ability to Google information at a whim.

I sat down to relax and listen to music, but Pandora was unavailable, so I passed some time humming to the Texas Tech fight song, the only thing I had recorded on my iPad at the time. (Everything else was loaded in the cloud.) I needed input—and fast.

Now I’m a voracious reader, and while I had many books on my iPad, most had not been downloaded from the cloud, so I ran through what I had pretty fast. For amusement I began to listen to conversations around me, some of them pretty funny because I couldn’t hear very well and filled in any blanks with my own words.

In final desperation, with absolutely nothing else to do, I began to think. I thought about my clients, our next generation of advisors, some processes that we needed to refine and some marketing strategies. I let the ideas flow, then began to take notes. What resulted were solutions to an array of items that had needed attention for a long time, but that I really never thought I had time to attack. There was no interruption, no input but thoughts I generated. I was synthesizing and analyzing the morass of data I had collected in my head for decades. This is the essence of critical thinking.

As advisors we practice critical thinking daily—for example, how will this retirement strategy work for my new client, or what will be the impact on the portfolio if I increase the international holdings? Our critical thinking is generally deliberate. We have a problem. We define it, look at it from different perspectives and pose possible solutions.

We get paid for this thinking, but somehow don’t connect thinking about our practices or our human resources as profitable thinking. Yet how you deliver your advice is just as important as the advice you give. How you mentor and groom your staff matters greatly to you, to them and, most important, to your clients. How you think about and solve your business practice issues can immediately affect your bottom line.

First « 1 2 3 » Next