I love the inherent double standard of the New Year’s resolution. What other holiday couples self improvement with a tradition of getting as lit as a Christmas tree?
“This year, I am determined to floss more often and get six pack abs. Just as soon as I finish nursing this hangover.”
As the obsessive consumer of productivity and self-help literature that I am, I’ve decided to share with everyone the main recurring theme I read over and over again. It’s a short list. Not a five or a tenner, just a oner:
1) Being organized reduces stress.
There. That’s pretty much all there is to making life more enjoyable and less stressful.
Whether it’s Steven Covey urging you to live a “Quadrant 2″ life, David Allen insisting that you get your tasks and nagging thoughts out of your head and into a capture system, the Pomodoro Technique’s relentless assault on ordering the day, or Gretchen Rubin urging you to clean out your closet and begin your bedtime routine earlier, the message is unmistakable:
Getting your stuff neat and orderly makes your brain operate better.
For the law firm, time to look at ways to consolidate your scattered information. Get your stuff out of a hodge-podge of Word, Outlook, Excel, and filing cabinets and adopt a web-based legal practice management and time and billing software. Put your calendar on Google so you can access it from everywhere. Go paperless and put your docs in Dropbox so you can access them from wherever you are.
You’re in the legal advice business, not necessarily the stress business. So getting even a little bit more organized will do wonders for you and your soul in 2011.
Print This Post
Larry,
You are so right. In addition to the health benefits of de-stressing, you’ll also likely see an increase in productivity and value given to the clients. The stress of what we do is seldom hidden from our clients. Good post.
“The stress of what we do is seldom hidden from our clients.”
Wow – I never thought of it that way. I guess when you’re run ragged it’s tough to hide it.
In my spare time! The problem I have, and I doubt or maybe pray that I am not alone, is day-to-day survival, which, as a solo, takes up 25 hrs/day. Maybe I have too much work, or maybe I work disorganized (probably yes to both) but if I stop it will be like jamming on my brakes in the midst of the Indy 500. Lotsa crashes (and one Suspension).
Before going into private practice I worked in banking, sucessfully and with organization. Now, I am the plate spinner in the circus, hoping there will be no more plates added as I am barely keeping up now.
I have tried outsourcing work to other attys – it doesn’t work here, in Western western western MA. Well, it might work if you never want to see your client again. I tried hiring another atty – he was too busy with his Amway telephone calls. I convert 8 of 10 porspects to clients – he managed 3 in 10. He’s gone and I lost a h-e-double hockey sticks (thank you Bill Murray) of a lot of money.
I need to utilize my case mgt system (Amicus) much more, but no time to train me or my paralegal or my sec’y/legal asst/receptionist/filing clerk. Oh, and encrypted e-mail?
The one good thing about “cloud computing” is that it is nice to return to he 80s and what was then called DDP (distributed data processing). Other terms are shared services, the world wide web and, the carrier, the internet (Thanks Al).
I asked for a sky hook and wall stretcher for Christmas and didn’t get those. Maybe next year I will ask for a time suspension machine so I can get productive enough to be productive
Richard Isacoff
I love Bill Murray!
I think you’ve hit on a good point – how to you stop to get more organized if you’re busy spinning plates?
Normally I do not come right out and say so much, but cloud legal software is a good bet for this situation. By it’s no-contract nature, it HAS to be easy, and it HAS to deliver value or else people will stop using it.
Also perhaps it’s playing to strengths? If you can convert 8 in 10 clients, perhaps you need to move full time to that role and back-fill some of your other work with a partner or associate?
A colleague of mine and I just started our own firm (effective 3 days ago!), and have spent the past 3 months running around like chickens with our collective head cut off. I spent 4+ years working for an attorney in a 3-atty firm prior to that, and I learned one thing if nothing else: if you don’t MAKE the time, you will never HAVE the time. We had Time Matters for 3 years and my boss simply refused to learn to use it, even though we were under contract to it. It’s a waste if you’re not going to make the time to learn. The same is true now: even though we don’t have time to figure out the programs, we have even less time NOT to. So I’m forcing the firm to make time, just an hour twice a week for 3 weeks, to take training on our programs, so we can be as productive as possible now, and not have try to change bad habits (other than those we already came in with) later. Best of luck to you!
It’s hard to carve out that time, but if you never do it, I agree, it’s impossible to extract yourself from your situation.