First, the video:

If you struggle with procrastination, you might want to check out 5 Foundations of Time Mastery for Attorneys.  Users who implement the principles (me included) report a decrease in procrastination and a corresponding increase in productivity.

All too often, we (and I include myself) hear the “beep” or feel the vibration and pounce immediately, even in the middle of a sentence — our own or someone else’s.  And I’ve seen (and though I’d prefer not to admit it, experienced) the discomfort that can occur when someone knows there’s an email waiting but doesn’t pounce.  The ticks, the nervousness.  It’s almost pathological sometimes.

Recently, I decided to drive for a business trip rather than fly, and for safety’s sake, I didn’t want to be tempted to look at my BlackBerry everytime an email came in.  So I set the profile to ring for phone calls only, and to be silent otherwise.  I drove almost 150 miles before I had to stop for gas, and I checked the BlackBerry then.  I had about 40 messages, none of them urgent.  And I had a strange feeling that I subsequently identified as peace.  Peace!  No irritating noises, no demands, no irrelevant press releases.  It was a good change.

That was a month ago, and I’ve continued to keep my BlackBerry on “phone only.”  If I’m expecting something urgent, I ask for a phone call rather than an email, and it’s been truly instructive to discover how much better conversations are when I’m not wondering about the email I just heard arriving.  And the truth is, I have yet to miss anything important as a result of this practice.

Try it.  Just for today.  You can change back tomorrow if you like.  I predict you won’t want to, and I predict you’ll be more present to your work, the people you’re with, even your own relaxation.  And in turn, you’ll be more productive and more creative.

Not a bad return on eliminating an irritant, is it?

 

So I was mightily curious when I saw a recent article by Larry Bodine titled, Is the Party Over for Social Networking?  Larry starts out like this:

What if you gave a party, hundreds of people showed up, but almost nobody talked to each other? That describes the state of social networking for lawyers on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and the new Plaxo Pulse. The masses get the idea, but only the evangelists are using it.

Ah, so it isn’t just me.  Citing research by the ABA about the online networking habits of young lawyers, Bodine concludes that few lawyers (only 8% of the young lawyer respondents, who might be presumed to be early adopters of such technology) find social networking important.  LinkedIn seems to be the professional tool of choice for lawyers (at least, “old” lawyers, which I fear means those over 30 or so), and Facebook seems to be preferred for personal use and by younger lawyers. 

But here’s my question: other than using these tools to update contact information, employers, and the like, what are lawyers doing with social networking?  As a teen and college student, and even into law school, I used to play online and met some dear friends that way, through forerunners of IM technology, so I’m certainly not opposed to it — and I’d certainly prefer to network online while sipping good coffee than to schlep to another breakfast networking event (usually, it seems, in the rain) in hopes of making a connection.  I just don’t get how it works.

And so, I’m going to try an experiment.  I have one more week of very heavy travel, and then I’ll have a bit of a pause, when I’ll be in my office with computer handy for most days of May.  So, I’m going to give social networking a shot for the month of May and see what happens. 

As I prepare, I invite your comments.  Do you use social networking sites?  Do you find them fun and/or professionally useful?  What’s your favorite site?  How much time do you spend on social networking?  I’ll keep you posted on what I learn!

(And, an aside about the blog: one of the kinks yet to be worked out is image-posting.  They will return!)

What if it’s your mind that needs decluttering?  When your brain is filled with “must do” tasks of both professional and personal origin, when you’re worried about something, when you’re trying to make a difficult decision, and when all of your thoughts are further agitated by the “noise” of life, it’s easy to get lost in mental chaos.  One day when I was preparing for a major client meeting and dealing with my mother’s terminal illness, I stopped by the grocery store on my way home.  I knew I was distracted, so I’d takent he time to write down the items I needed to buy.  But I proved how distracted I was when I returned to my car to find it still running with the keys in the ignition!  I wish I’d had access to the recent terrific post by Zen Habits titled 15 Can’t-Miss Ways to Declutter Your Mind.  The tactics (with clarification available in the Zen Habits post):

1.  Breathe.
2.  Write it down.
3.  Identify the essential.
4.  Eliminate.
5.  Journal.
6.  Rethink your sleep.
7.  Take a walk.
8.  Watch less TV.
9.  Get in touch with nature.
10.  Do less.
11.  Go slower.
12.  Let go.
13.  Declutter your surroundings.
14.  Single-task.
15.  Get a load off.  (Vent!)

And I’d add one more: do something creative that gets you into a state of flow, where time passes without your notice.  Examples might be drawing or playing music.  Time spent in any of these areas is indeed time well spent.

• Business development: Perhaps you could set aside a couple of hours to evaluate your business development plan for 2007 and to lay out your strategy for next year.  Or you could make some appointments to take important contacts to lunch, for coffee, or whatever is appropriate.  If you’ve noticed that there’s something in your way concerning client development, invest some time now determining what you need to do to be more productive.  At a minimum, set aside a few minutes every day to take some marketing action.
• Time management: How are your hours?  If they’re low, what do you need to do to get appropriate work?  (Perhaps see the business development ideas!)  Are you billing for the time you’re actually working, and are you using that time well?  Do you need to update your methods for filing, time tracking, or scheduling?  Perhaps it’s time to check in with your assistant and see what ideas he or she has for using time more effectively.
• Professional development:  This is often a great time of year to pick up CLE.  Or check out some of the new publications in your area of practice or on practice management.  But first, check your progress on the development plans you set for this year.  What can you do to close out this year with a success?
• Career:  If you’ve been considering a move, this is a good time to put out feelers and position yourself.  You may not have an opportunity to interview until the new year, but putting yourself “on the market” now will be beneficial.  If you’re mid-search, you may find this a busy period as employers try to wrap up hiring decisions before the close of the year.If you’re planning to stay in your current position, what can you do to improve your performance?  How successful have you been this year, and what changes would be helpful as you move forward?  The holiday season is also an opportunity to show your gratitude to support staff and colleagues who have made your professional life work well and perhaps brightened your days: don’t miss your chance.
• Work/life integration: Are you happy with the amount of time and energy you’re putting into your personal life?  Do you need to rearrange your schedule, get some help on the home front, or turn off your BlackBerry while you talk with your spouse/partner/child?  Are you putting in time on the activities that will increase your energy, such as exercise and getting sufficient sleep?
• Other:  If there’s an area that needs attention, you know what it is.  Spend some time putting it right, whatever that may mean.

Taking these steps will help you to realize or exceed the goals you’ve set for 2007 and carry you forward into 2008 with momentum.  Choose the most important action in the most important area and do it this week.�

1.  Fundamental attribution error  This is a new term for me, though the idea is familiar.  Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project blogs about our human tendency to assume that other people’s actions reflect their character or attitudes and to overlook the environmental influences that may shape their actions.  So, when you’re walking down the hall and someone fails to smile and say hello, instead of assuming that person is an arrogant jerk or that she doesn’t like you, consider that she may be deep in thought or that she might have just received bad news.  (For a more poignant illustration, do visit the post.)  Sounds like justification, but checking the “frame” you apply to other people’s behavior is a path to greater happiness.  And frame shifts are a key aspect of coaching, as well.

2.  Does fall ever make you reminisce about being in college, getting in on fascinating conversations and being exposed to new ideas?  It certainly does me.  I am thrilled (to possibly an unseemly degree) to discover that the iTunes store now has a division known as iTunes U.  A healthy handful of schools, currently including Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Texas A&M, and others offer a variety of lectures (some audio, some video) on a wide variety of topics. 

Duke’s law school, for instance, has 52 offerings, including Learning from Lawyer Jokes, Creative Commons and Author’s Rights, and Practical Politics and the Law.  Vanderbilt’s Medical Center presents the Discovery Lecture Series, focusing on the “highest-impact research and policy issues in science and medicine today.”  An example is titled Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Discovery in a Postgenomic World.  Or learn about Neuroscience & Behavior from MIT professor Gerald Schneider. 

Best of all… All of these lectures are free.  Boring commute issues: solved.  You can find the link to iTunes U on the iTunes store main page.

3.  Bruce Allen of Marketing Catalyst has an interesting post titled Lawyers, Stop Trying to Cross-Sell!  The upshot: firms should develop client service teams that meet regularly to discuss clients’ business issues.  Message to clients: “I’ve formed a brain-trust around YOUR business and YOUR issues, and we’ve uncovered some ideas for your business that could go right to your top-line.”

If this post was helpful to you, please consider signing up for the Life at the Bar Survival Kit.  You’ll receive a weekly summary of blog postings, a special report titled 7 Secrets Law Firm Associates Need to Know to Find Better Work, Faster Advancement, and Greater Professional Satisfaction, plus other resources designed to assist you in building a successful and satisfying practice.  Visit http://www.lifeatthebar.com/MenuSignUp.htm for more information and to sign up.

On October 11 at 1 PM EDT, I hosted and recorded a free teleclass titled Five Foundations of Time Management for Attorneys.  I shared some of these strategies and tips and provided tested resources for great time management skills.  (When you register for the teleclass, you’ll also receive several additional resources that comprise the Life at the Bar Survival Kit.)  You’ll leave the call with ideas and strategies you can implement right away.

Topics covered include:

*  The first, most critical step in managing your time, which doesn’t involve time at all.

*  How you can conquer procrastination.

*  Why one of the strategies you may have tried to increase your productivity is actually working against you.

To get your recording of the teleclass, please visit this sign-up page. 

I know you have many demands on your time, and my commitment to you is that I’ll do everything in my power to make the 60-minute call as valuable as it possibly can be.  I’ll be sharing the practical ideas and suggestions I wish I’d had years ago.  If you have an inkling that this is something you should do, please sign up today. 

When it comes to managing one’s personal life while maintaining a practice, “simple” is the name of the game.  (And this is a good time to note a favorite distinction: “simple” is not a synonym for “easy.”)  For instance, it’s much less stressful to prepare a simple dinner — say, a salad with various store-bought toppings and dressing — than it is to prepare a meal that requires numerous ingredients.  Likewise, I find that dressing in the morning is much more simple when my clothes are in reasonably good order and my closet not overstuffed.  Aspects of life that are more complicated than necessary drain energy.

And the same is true in the office.  If my files are a mess and I can’t find anything, I’ll have to stop and launch a search everytime I need a document, and that takes a tremendous amount of energy away from the task at hand.  Having a cluttered email box pulls at me because when I check for new messages, my eye is drawn to all of the messages I need to answer or otherwise handle, and slick filing system that put the messages out of sight make my life even more complicated.

Simplicity is especially important when personal and professional life intersect or affect one another.  One of my favorite questions to clients working on work/life integration issues is, “What can you stop doing?”  Releasing an activity that isn’t productive (in pleasure or in business) is often one of the most simple and most impactful steps to take.

Unfortunately, though, simplifying isn’t always an easy thing to do.  An overcrowded, disorganized closet may take hours or even days to get straightened.  So, I was delighted to find Simple Living Simplified: 10 Things You Can Do Today to Simplify Your Life on the zenhabits blog.  Ideas include: 

– making a short list of top priorities (similar to an Absolute Yes list, which I previously discussed in this post);

– simplifying the “to do” list by identifying tasks that can be “eliminated, delegated, automated, outsourced or ignored;” and

– focusing on one task at a time.

And if 10 simplification steps aren’t enough, check the expanded list of the Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life.  Any list of 72 items feels unwieldy to me, but it’s worth a skim.

If this post was helpful to you, please consider signing up for the Life at the Bar Survival Kit.  You’ll receive a weekly summary of blog postings, a special report titled 7 Secrets Law Firm Associates Need to Know to Find Better Work, Faster Advancement, and Greater Professional Satisfaction, plus other resources designed to assist you in building a successful and satisfying practice.  Visit http://www.lifeatthebar.com/MenuSignUp.htm for more information and to sign up.

This morning, I’m making such a choice.  It doesn’t rival choosing between attending a child’s annual recital and speaking at a prestigious CLE meeting, but it’s painful to me just the same.  I am declaring blog-reading bankruptcy. 

Lawrence Lessig prompted this idea, by declaring email bankruptcy when he discovered that he was so far behind on emails he’d never catch up.  (Email bankruptcy Lessig-style is described in this Wired article that also has some handy productivity tips.) 

I have so many unread blog feeds that I will never get through them — unless I choose to ignore what’s current, which would be a no-win “solution.”  I’ve tried to catch up.  I find so much value in the blogs I read that it’s hard to make the decision to clear the backlog, and yet, that’s the only rational choice at this point.  So, with apologies to the bloggers who work so hard to produce such excellent content, I declare blog-reading bankruptcy.  I start fresh today.

Where do you need to declare “bankruptcy”?  Perhaps in old industry newsletters or magazines, bar magazines that are interesting but not informative on your area of law, or newspapers/magazines?  Perhaps personal email correspondence?  Consider what “stack of stuff” is tugging at you from a corner of your desk or office or home.  Can you eliminate any of it, through “bankruptcy” or concerted action? 

Next, a plug for bar activities.  Most of my time at the annual meeting was engaged in business meetings, and I’ve been exposed to a variety of legal issues far outside my area of expertise — robotics and their legal issues, e-privacy issues, VOIP, so on and so forth.  And I had wonderful conversations about the future of the profession, the roles of maturing lawyers, and more.  If I’d had a realtime brain scan going, I’m sure my neurons would have been firing in neon colors!  It’s intellectually stimulating in a way that will enliven me for weeks to come.  Moreover, I met and reconnected with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and it was a delightful time for both professional and social networking.  It’s a terrific way to spend some time, and it represents a marvelous opportunity for professional development and perhaps business development.

As I anticipate returning from my vacation, I’m thinking about what I can do to hit the ground running and maintain (at least to some degree) my relaxed state of mind.  Here are my favorite tips: 

1.  Set a time to plan my “return to work” activities, and don’t anticipate that time.  I’ve found that one of the quickest vacation mood-killers is thinking and planning what I’ll do when I get back, which has the effect of accelerating my return.  I’ll spend about an hour tomorrow while I’m waiting to board my flight setting my “to do” list, but aside from that (and writing this post) I won’t do any work until I return to the office Monday morning.

2.  Plan a “vacation recall” signal.  Have you ever felt that the relaxation from vacation fades all too quickly?  I discovered that choosing something that reminds me of a pleasant time on vacation lets me hit a reset button and recall that pleasure.  I’ve set up a screensaver that will show some of my vacation photos, selected specifically to bring me back to a dusky moment, just past sunset, watching the last ray of the sun slip away from the California coast.  Bingo — I see it, and I’m there.  (The photo at the top of this post is one example.)

3.  Arrange my first few days back so I hit the most important, hardest tasks first.  This is a practice I follow on a regular basis, but I find it even more important when returning from vacation.  This lets me reap the full benefit of my energy on being back in the office, and I get quick rewards. 

4.  Plan something to look forward to in the first few days back.  It’s easy to get sucked back into the flurry of work, to start feeling stressed, and to see the next few weeks or months as a long, grey tunnel with no escape until it’s vacation time again — or, worse yet, to think that taking time off was a mistake because of the necessary catching up that follows.  To counteract that, I plan something to look forward to no later than the first weekend back.

5.  Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based) goals.  The to-do list that I generate as a part of tip #1 above will set out precisely what I can realistically expect to accomplish, based on the urgent/important method of prioritization.  This level of specificity and realism gives me a concrete and feasible goal, and that keeps me on target; making sure that I’m attending to the important tasks first guarantees that my time will be well-spent.

I’ll share pre-vacation tips soon, too, because (as is surely no surprise) front-end planning facilitates the return as well.  Meanwhile, readers, any good tips that help you ensure a successful return from vacation?

If this post was helpful to you, please consider signing up for the Life at the Bar Survival Kit.  You’ll receive a weekly summary of blog postings, a special report titled 7 Secrets Law Firm Associates Need to Know to Find Better Work, Faster Advancement, and Greater Professional Satisfaction, plus other resources designed to assist you in building a successful and satisfying practice.  Visit http://www.lifeatthebar.com/MenuSignUp.htm for more information and to sign up.