Time Management

“It is not enough to be busy... The question is: What are we busy about?” – Henry David Thoreau

As attorneys, our time is our stock in trade. Effective time management is, therefore, the name of the game. Maximizing our time is essential to our personal productivity. More importantly, time management allows us to maintain our sanity.

Here are some time management practices I have found to be very useful in my own practice:

• The telephone. Nothing is worse than being bombarded with phone calls when trying to focus deeply on an upcoming deposition, trial strategy, etc. The brain needs time to go deep into a focused state and does not respond well to constant interruptions. As my practice grew, I realized it was hard and frustrating to answer random, unplanned phone calls constantly. The phone was draining not only my ability to focus but also my time. Now, I don’t take unscheduled phone calls. I explain this protocol in my initial welcome letter to new clients so they know about this policy from the start (always send a letter to new clients warmly welcoming them and in that letter name the person that will be handling their file). This phone policy applies to clients, attorneys, insurance adjusters, and whoever else calls. If the call is not on my calendar, a team member will schedule me to call the person back the following day at a specific time. This helps save so much time and avoids unending phone tags.
• Email. I am a recovering email addict. I used to check my email constantly. I used to erroneously think that by constantly checking and responding to emails, I was working and being productive when in reality, all I was doing was checking email and wasting time. That is classic busy work, as opposed to productive work. I decided to end this toxic habit. Now, I check email each weekday only at 10:45 am and 4:00 pm, and only one time on the weekend. If I have to check my email for something urgent and truly important, I jump into my inbox and jump out as fast as possible. I also unsubscribed to unnecessary email subscriptions to tame the email beast further. I have discovered that by extinguishing this addiction, my personal productivity has skyrocketed.
• Open door policy. I found that as my practice started to grow and more team members were added, I was getting interrupted more and more by team members coming into my office for “just a quick question.” This impacted my productivity because it eliminated my ability to focus on a particular case, business strategy, etc. I have “office hours” each day from 11:00 am-12:00 pm. This forces team members to solve problems on their own, reducing their dependency on me. They now only come to me when they truly can’t solve something on their own. After all, the whole point of having staff is to empower them to be problem solvers so that you can focus on high-level decision-making and execution.

Protecting your time requires intentionality, self-discipline, and commitment. You can just guard it like a hawk.

If you have other time management tips that you find helpful, please email me at [email protected] because I would love to hear them.