After the market meltdown and throughout the following spring, summer and fall, all the industry conferences reached out to practice management consultants and asked them to talk about "streamlining" advisors' practices. I don't think I ever saw so many presentations about how to get more done around your office at less cost.

Each time, one of the first three suggestions out of the consultant's mouth would be that you should maximize your use of software. These are people who spend time in planning offices, and their consistent report was that all of you have unused time-saving features in your software that you've never found the time to uncover and incorporate into your practice. Chances are, you're using one or more older versions or outmoded programs when huge productivity upgrades have been created. But how would you know with so much work on your desk? Who has the time to find out about that stuff?

Often, the audiences would do what I suspect you're doing right now—mentally check out. Advisors would put down their pens, wonder if they should check their phone messages and wait impatiently for more interesting advice that would hopefully involve cutting bonuses and firing somebody.

The entire profession seems to be suffering an advanced case of tech lethargy. We've become numb to the unfolding miracle that is the personal computer on our desks, and curing this may be the biggest productivity and revenue-enhancing opportunity we have in the profession.

TIME FOR T3

We are rapidly approaching one of the most important and beneficial conferences of the year, which annually re-energizes 300 to 500 advisors out of this productivity-destroying malaise: the Technology Tools for Today (T3) Conference, this year in San Diego, Feb. 18-20. For three days a year, T3 manages to bring together all the software vendors in our industry in one place: the paperless office systems and the planning, portfolio tracking, rebalancing and CRM tools, often with the principals of the companies ready to give you quick side-by-side demos of what might help improve your business life. Advisors inevitably leave with a new appreciation for just how much productivity there is to be gained and a new sense of wonder about what that little box can do for one's life and practice.

Since there are roughly 100,000 readers of this column and only about 500 of you will attend T3, I want to devote some space to helping the rest of you capture a little bit of that tech-empowerment feeling. Many of you started in this business at least as far back as the 1980s. (You younger readers should try to imagine, from now to the end of the column, that you've acquired the wisdom and cynicism of your elders and that your staff suspects that you're slightly senile.) Think back to the days when PCs were the coolest and most mysterious business tools you ever saw. All they had were slightly clunky word processing programs like WordStar and a database program called dBase whose user interface consisted of a dot on the screen.

In that simpler age, you could buy financial planning programs that cost $20,000 or more, which would project, at the mere touch of the keyboard, a static rate of return forever into the future, affected by a static, never-changing tax rate. If you wanted to do more customized projections, you could manually enter the same data into a spreadsheet like Lotus 1-2-3.

The productivity gains from not having to retype a letter every time you caught a spelling error and being able to do your retirement projections on-screen instead of with a calculator were beyond enormous. Being able to find client names and addresses in a database rather than somewhere in the filing cabinet seemed revolutionary, and it got even better when you could track the names of clients' children and their various birthdays.

A lot of us at the time thought this computer thing had a bright future. There was talk of creating more automated ways for two computers to share files in a way that would be even more efficient than carrying floppy disks between offices, and we dreamed of the day when a computer could run more than one program at a time. One advisor boldly predicted that someday Monte Carlo software would be used to test your assumptions. Visionaries wrote articles predicting a day in the distant future when you'd be able to share client data between two or three software tools and use your 1,200-baud modem to pull in transaction confirmations and track client portfolios automatically. Wouldn't that be keen!