About Time

Spring has sprung, our clocks have moved ahead and I am compiling information to file my income taxes. Yay, yuck, and ho-hum. All of these triggering events have a common theme — time.

Having spent 25 years working in law firms I am very familiar with living my workday in 6-minute intervals. Unlike many for me keeping time wasn’t a dreaded or unwelcome task. I appreciated being able to review my daily work in time entries. Why?

Timekeeping was an opportunity for:

• Reviewing who I was working with (and not working with) for personal marketing
• Reminding myself which work I enjoyed and which I dreaded
• Considering my workload and near-future workload in order to schedule family time without too much deadline stress
• Understanding my personal capacity for new projects
• Planning workload communications with colleagues who understood 6-minute intervals
• Looking for efficiencies, particularly for the work others didn’t appreciate or value

As a law librarian, there was work that my team and I absolutely had to do that enabled other work. Most of this work was of little perceived value to others. Our clients (inside the law firm) highly valued the ‘other work’ that we could not do without those necessary enabling tasks being complete. Enabling work, where some output has to exist before the valued output can happen, is usually not what someone is willing to pay for when they see a detailed bill.

A real-life example of enabling work is grocery shopping. You can’t put a delicious meal on the table without first putting some food in the pantry. To save your shopping time, place your meal service order.

A lawyer life example might be gathering research for a legal memo. You can’t have a decent legal memo without first parsing through irrelevant cases. To save time spent reading the irrelevant cases start your work with an objective legal memo.

As much as I appreciated reviewing my timesheets to find efficiencies, these days I appreciate the freedom of not keeping my time in 6-minute intervals. Even still, when faced with a task like gathering information for my accountant, I do use speed incentives like those I used when doing non-valued library tasks. It used to be a trip to Starbucks. Today, if my email goes to the accountant by 3 PM, I will celebrate with a walk in the forest.

How will you use the time you save by working efficiently?

Originally published at https://www.alexsei.com on March 22, 2022.