Triple Threat: 3 Ways to Increase Your Personal Efficiency

Despite what you hear, time never appears to be on your side. 

 

And certainly, everyone is looking to maximize their time.  In terms of business management, that means that you’re always looking to increase the volume of cases you can take on, which you can do by increasing your utilization rate.  But, this all starts with achieving a level of personal efficiency, because: if you can’t be efficient yourself, it’s very difficult to ask others, including your staff and associates, to be more efficient than you are – you’ve got to be the leader, in that context. 



So, if you’re struggling in becoming more efficient, here are three tips you can take to the bank: 

 

(1) Wrestling with email is a significant time waster for most lawyers.  Lots of attorneys have thousands of emails in their inbox, which is impossible to manage.  And, it makes it seem like Inbox Zero is light years away.  But, even the gnarliest of email inboxes can be cleaned out with a systematic approach that turns unanswered emails into tasks, or allows you to quickly delete or respond to those emails that do not require a long tail.  Using Getting Things Done (GTD) for GMail or Outlook may be a viable option for you. 

 

(2) Generally speaking, people try to multitask in distracting environments – especially during the continuing pandemic.  But, multitasking is not a real thing.  You can only focus on one task at a time.  And, if you can eliminate (or, at least, reduce) distractions, you can focus on that single task more effectively.  So, if every day (or at least most days) you can find a block of two hours, to work steadily on individual tasks, uninterrupted, in a distraction-free environment, you’ll likely be shocked at how much you can get done during these ‘power hours’ – especially if that’s a significant departure from the way you normally operate. 

 

(3) You know all those notifications you get: the pings, bings and popups that make up your business life.  Well, turn them off.  Seriously, they feed urgency addition, and cause you to lose focus.  And, it’s worse if you act on a notification: click on one, and you’re off-task for as many as 18 minutes. 

 

. . . 

 

If you want to get more efficient, spending a focused hour talking with us can help! 

Through a unique partnership between the bar association and Jared Correia's Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, National Creditors' Bar Association members have access to experienced law practice management consultants at a special discount rate. 

To get started, visit Red Cave's NCBA landing page, and start running your law practice like a business.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Top Shelf: How to Maximize Lawyer Staff in a Modern Law Firm

Image
Broadly speaking, lawyers take on too much.  You know: at work, emotionally.  They’re probably also trying to carry too many grocery bags into the house at one time.  You know how it is.     This, of course, leads to a whole host of problems, including that attorneys have higher incidences of alcohol and drug dependence, as well as depression, than does the general population .  Maybe you already knew that.  But, the fact is that this also has a direct effect on how much a lawyer can make. Hear me out: Because lawyers try to do everything, and to do everything perfectly, they’re also more prone than the general population to take on more work than they need to.  For example, they’re unwilling to delegate, including to paralegal and administrative staff, but also to other attorneys.  That means that lawyers end up being chief cook and bottlewasher, rather than focusing on the high-end work (strategy , client engagement), that they get paid th...
Read more

Transfer Portal: Sharing Files Securely is a Piece of Cake Now

Image
If you’re still sharing files with clients, referral sources and other attorneys, via email attachment – or, heaven forfend: fax! – you need to step up your game .  Email is an inherently unsecure technology; so, if you’re sending confidential information via email, you need to secure that information, by encrypting it – at the document level, or at the system level .  But, that takes additional time and effort, and cost s more.   Instead, why not share confidential information through a secure , encrypted platform, th rough which the person who is to receive the information logs into, thereby bypassing the email problem, where that information passes through several servers (some of which may be unencrypted), before reach ing its final destination .  With a client portal, your document stays where it is (safely encrypted), and your recipient comes in to get it.     Now, you can share files and documents via document storage programs in this fashi...
Read more

Hiring Percentage: What is the Law Firm Hit Rate for Bringing on Staff?

Image
Some lawyer s get burned hiring staff, whether it’s legal assistant s , paralegals or other attorneys .  But, just because you miss out once, in trying to hire somebody, doesn’t mean you should give up forever .  There are distinct advantages to bring ing on employees, including increased control over work product + improved revenue generation models.   In my experience, I’ve found that law firms connect on a successful hire (across all employee categories) about 40% of the time .  That may seem like a low number , but it represents about a 50% hit rate, meaning that every other hire should yield a viable staffperson , who’ll stay on between 3-5 years – which is not too bad, in the modern economy.     Putting that into baseball terms, which folks often do when trying to rationalize failure : your hiring batting average as a law firm, is about equivalent to Ted Williams’ 1941 season , when he was the last baseball player to hit .400 over a full seas...
Read more