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 Maine Board of Overseers of the Bar and Jared Correia’s Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, Maine attorneys have access to experienced law practice management consultants at a special discounted rate. 

To get started, visit Red Cave’s landing page for Maine attorneys, and start running your law practice like a business.

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