COULD YOU TAKE 18 DAYS HOLIDAY WITHOUT ANY WORK INTERRUPTIONS?

A common complaint I hear from law firm owners is that taking time off is hard.

Worse, they often say that when they do take a holiday, they still end up working. They may be fortunate enough to avoid doing any fee-earning work, but they still have to deal with questions from the team or clients. So they never really get to ‘switch off’.

Does this describe you?

It was definitely a good description of me until quite recently.

With my emails and the Business Instructor team ‘chat’ so easily available on my phone, it was hard to avoid ‘just checking’ from time to time.

But soon, a ‘quick check’ turned into ‘here’s my suggestion of how to deal with this email’ or ‘here’s my view on the question that one of the team has raised’.

It seemed like it was just ‘minor interruptions – no big deal’, but in reality it meant that most days I was still thinking about work.

Even though I was grateful to have a team who could take care of things, I felt addicted to ‘knowing’ everything that was going on.

So, it was time to make a change.

Last August I took an 18 day holiday in France with my husband.

In advance, I agreed with my team I would be completely offline. I was ‘banned’ from the team chat and committed to not opening my business email on my phone at any point – not even for a quick peek.

My team knew that if I really needed to deal with something, they could text my personal mobile to let me know. This helped me feel confident that I didn’t need to worry about whether there was something urgent they couldn’t deal with—because if there was, they’d let me know.

As I expected, there were no text messages whilst I was away.

I got back to find everything had progressed without me, and there was just a short list of things that needed my response or attention, none of which was urgent enough to disturb my holiday.

I’ll admit this hasn’t been an overnight transformation.

We’ve been working hard as a team to work better together (and for me to trust the process more!), which has included:

• systemising?all the regular tasks in the business, so that I don’t need to have input into daily tasks; and
• using an online project management tool?to store all the tasks and processes and help everyone stay on track with deadlines. This means I don’t need to worry that the team might forget a task and therefore I don’t feel the need to constantly remind them!

At the same time, I’ve been working on my own mindset and breaking some of my ‘addicted to information’ habits. But I wouldn’t have a hope of doing that if I didn’t have the systems and processes in place that reassure me things can happen without my daily input.

Take action

If you’re not getting the interrupted time off that you want (and deserve!) then I hope my experience will inspire you to think about how you can achieve this for yourself and your team.

Systemising your tasks and processes so that your team can be more independent of you as the business owner is just one way to increase your profitability without you working more hours. To discover more strategies and to create a step by step plan to increase your number of clients, fee income and profits in the next 90 days without working more hours, join me at my next?Profitable Practice Growth Secrets workshop in London.