How Time Management Skills Can Make You A Better (And Wealthier) Attorney

Summary: If you feel your falling behind in your law practice due to time constraints that are also causing you to lose money, maybe your time management system could use some revising.

• If there is any one challenge that all attorneys face, it has to be time management.
• Of course, with numerous clients with needs and numerous cases in various stages of development, time management can be an afterthought in lieu of the daily demands of a lawyer?
• So, how does an attorney become more time management savvy for both themselves and their practice? Keep reading to find out.

At any one point throughout an attorney’s career, the main crisis that they can face is time management. This is because an attorney, what with his or her clients’ demands, can easily become overwhelmed.

Is there a remedy for this? Of course, there is, which is why it is incumbent that you as an attorney with a plethora of clients and a slew of cases continue reading this article.

Time Management: An Overview

In the article Essential Time Management Tips for Lawyers, first published on The Balance Small Business, time management for lawyers is one of the most difficult tasks in a busy law practice. Many attorneys are reluctant to consider developing a time management plan as if it is somehow beneath them.

However, having an efficient law practice and a good work/life balance doesn’t happen by accident. Smart attorneys implement a time management program into their law practices, so they can be better at their jobs while also spending more time doing what they enjoy.

Lawyers first venturing into time management often dive into complicated systems with too many rules. It is the quickest way to a time management program to fail. If the program is too hard to start, the attorney will quickly go back to his or her old bad habits.

The good news is that time management does not have to be hard. In fact, by implementing three simple procedures into a law practice, an attorney can increase productivity while improving career satisfaction at the same time.

The essential tips for effective lawyer time management are:

Eat the Frog

Mark Twain famously said that “if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.” Twain also said, “If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it for too long.”

In the book “Eat That Frog,” Brian Tracy used Twain’s words as inspiration for the main point of his book. Tracy says that you should take the worst, most unpleasant, ugliest task you have to do that you don’t want to do and do it first. Stop procrastinating, and just do the one thing you are dreading the most. Once it is out of the way, a burden is lifted from your shoulders, and you can move more rapidly through the rest of the day’s tasks. When the unpleasant task is no longer looming overhead, everything else suddenly becomes much easier.

Avoid the Phone

Nothing breaks a lawyer’s concentration on a case more than to repeatedly break away from it to discuss other cases with clients.

Ask any lawyer when he or she is most productive, and the almost unanimous response will be they get the most done when working at night or on the weekend. What makes the difference? The lack of interruptions, which come primarily from a constantly ringing phone.

Lawyers need to have blocks of uninterrupted time to be their most productive and work at their best. Schedule certain hours of the day for returning phone calls, certain times for appointments, and devote the rest of the time to work. While there are certain calls that have to be taken when they come in, the majority of phone calls are matters that could be handled by a secretary or that could just as easily be handled during scheduled telephone hours during a less productive time of the day.

Make a Prioritized To-Do List at the End of Each Day

Making a list of everything that has to be done is easy but taking the time to figure out what should be done first takes a little more time. While lawyers are reluctant to waste time figuring out how to spend their time, taking 15 minutes at the end of the day to prioritize what order the next day’s work should be done in can be a huge time-saver.

Don’t make the mistake of selecting the day’s priorities in the morning, or you will never eat the frog. Decide the day before what should be done first thing in the morning, so that the risk of pushing the worst task to the bottom of the list is eliminated. Ask yourself, “If I only get one thing completed on my to-do list tomorrow, what do I want it to be?”

What is a Time Management Plan?

Time management plans can work for virtually anyone, not just lawyers. To that point, time management plans are crucial additions which can benefit any lawyer at any time.

First published in The Balance Small Business, the following 11 steps are the most direct approaches to realizing a valid time management plan.

1. Realize That Time Management Is a Myth

This is the first thing you have to understand about time management, that no matter how organized we are, there are always only 24 hours in a day. Time doesn’t change. All we can actually manage is ourselves and what we do with the time that we have. Appreciate this. Internalize it. And move on as soon as possible to the next tip.

2. Find Out Where You’re Wasting Time

Many of us are prey to time wasters that steal time we could be using much more productively. What are your time bandits? Do you spend too much time internet surfing, reading email, Facebook posting, texting, or making personal calls?

In a survey by Salary.com, 89 percent of respondents admitted to wasting time every day at work:

• 31 percent waste roughly 30 minutes daily
• 31 percent waste roughly one hour daily
• 16 percent waste roughly two hours daily
• 6 percent waste roughly three hours daily
• 2 percent waste roughly four hours daily
• 2 percent waste five or more hours daily

Are you a time waster? Tracking daily activities helps to form an accurate picture of how much time you spend on various activities, which is the first step to effective time management.

3. Create Time Management Goals

Remember, the focus of time management is actually changing your behaviors, not changing time. A good place to start is by eliminating your personal time wasters. For one week, for example, set a goal that you’re not going to take personal phone calls or respond to non-work related text messages while you’re working.

4. Implement A Time Management Plan

Think of this as an extension of the third time management tip. The objective is to change your behaviors over time to achieve whatever general goal you’ve set for yourself, such as increasing your productivity or decreasing your stress. So, you need to not only set your specific goals but track them over time to see whether or not you’re accomplishing them.

5. Use Time Management Tools

Whether it’s a day timer, a software program, or a phone app, the first step to physically managing your time is to know where it’s going now and planning how you’re going to spend your time in the future.

A software program such as Outlook, for instance, lets you schedule events easily and can be set to remind you of events in advance, making your time management easier.

6. Prioritize Ruthlessly

You should start each day with a session prioritizing the tasks for that day and setting your performance benchmark. If you have 20 tasks for a given day, how many of them do you truly need to accomplish?

7. Learn to Delegate and/or Outsource

Delegation is one of the hardest things to learn how to do for many business owners, but no matter how small your business is, there’s no need for you to be a one-person show — you need to let other people carry some of the load. Delegation shares the tasks you’d be better off leaving to someone else, so you can make the most of the time that you have.

8. Establish Routines and Stick to Them as Much as Possible

While crises will arise, you’ll be much more productive if you can follow routines most of the time. For most people, creating and following a routine lets them get right down to the tasks of the day rather than frittering away time getting started.

9. Get in the Habit of Setting Time Limits for Tasks

For instance, reading and answering email can consume your whole day if you let it. Instead, set a limit of one hour a day for this task and stick to it. (The easiest way to do this is to assign a solid block of time to this task rather than answering email on demand).

10. Be Sure Your Systems Are Organized

Are you wasting a lot of time looking for files on your computer? Take the time to organize a file management system. Is your filing system slowing you down? Redo it, so it’s organized to the point that you can quickly lay your hands on what you need.

11. Don’t Waste Time Waiting

From client meetings to dentist appointments, it’s impossible to avoid waiting for someone or something. But you don’t need to just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. Technology makes it easy to work wherever you are; your tablet or smartphone will help you stay connected. You can be reading a report, checking a spreadsheet, or planning your next marketing campaign.

A Bonus Tip: Your Time Belongs to You

And here’s the most important time management tip of all. You can be in control and accomplish what you want to accomplish — once you’ve come to grips with the time management myth and taken control of your time.

In Addition…

In addition to the tips above, Attorney At Work lists additional tips you can use to more properly manage your time in their article Taking Control: Time Management Tips for Busy Lawyers. Those tips are:

Stop multitasking.

There is a widespread misconception that multitasking is doing two or more tasks simultaneously. But this is inaccurate; multitasking actually involves switching back and forth between different tasks (often with mediocre results).

This task-switching consists of two stages.

The first is goal-shifting: deciding to focus on another task rather than the one on which you’re currently working.

The second is rule activation: recalibrating your mind away from the “rules” of the first task and toward the “rules” of the second task.

This recalibration can squander as much as 40 percent of your productive time — hardly worth it. Instead, make a conscious effort to “uni-task,” (i.e., work on only one task at a time).

Block out time in your calendar and close your office door to ensure there are minimal interruptions during your designated uni-tasking time.

Clear off the mess on your desk, so you can think straight.

Rather than leave papers cluttered on your desk, apply the “touch it once” principle.

For each item, ask yourself if you have time, right now, to touch this item just once? After opening and reading it, can you deal with it quickly? Then decide whether it needs to be filed, responded to, or delegated.

Whichever of these three actions is required, do it immediately. If you don’t have time now to “touch it once” and get it off your desk, then leave it until you’re able to focus on it.

Conclusion

As you can see, these time-saving tips can bring efficiency to any person’s profession. However, because the profession of law can be so demanding in how it pulls an attorney from on task to the next, time management can have its greatest application within the legal field.

Sure, time management may will take discipline and dedication, but for the attorney who truly needs to rein in and hone their work habits to make them more efficient will surely benefit at the end of the day with both time and finally money saved.