The Complete Lawyer

Weekly planning is the process of taking time to map out your week so that you are proactively making time to achieve both your long- and short-term goals every day. Research tells us that one hour spent planning will increase your efficiency by a minimum of four hours. Remember this when you are tempted to just jump in to your day or week: planning ahead of time doesn’t set you back, it makes you more efficient. You may feel as if you are wasting your time, but don’t be misled—planning where to jump in and what to focus on are very important.

Put Yourself In Position To Plan Well

Before you begin, make sure you’re on solid ground right from the start:

• Choose the right time. Find a time for your planning session that will not be bumped by court appearances or encroached upon by any other activity. Over what time slot during your week do you have the greatest control? For most attorneys, Monday mornings or Friday afternoons are the best opportunities for a planning session.

• Choose the right setting. If your office is stressful and not conducive to reflection, find a more enjoyable spot (and one that will allow you to use your laptop) where you can focus without distraction. Popular choices among our attorney clients are:

• Home office, patio or deck
• Coffee shop or breakfast place
• The firm’s library
• The firm’s conference room

• Review the Big Picture. To start your planning session, review your personal and professional vision statement or list of goals and objectives. It will remind you of the personal life goals you have established for yourself and the strategic goals you have set as stepping-stones. Why review? The answer is simple: You will forget. Client demands and every day urgencies compete for your attention much more successfully than your life goals do. To counter this, designate a “planning folder” and include the following items:

• Personal vision statement
• Strategic goals
• Client list
• To-do list

Finally, have your calendar either physically printed out or virtually available on your laptop or hand-held device. This is critical to your planning process.

Then proceed as follows:

1. Open your calendar and review one month out, three weeks out, two weeks out and finally, one week out.

2. Note client meetings, mediations, marketing opportunities, court appearances, and any other events, activities or deadlines on your calendar.

3. Work backwards from these events and deadlines by estimating how much preparation is required for each.

4. Look at your daily blocks of production time. Note the specific files you will address on your calendar. Make an appointment with yourself to work on the “Smith” file or “Jones” file so that you complete them prior to their deadlines.

Prioritize Before You Schedule

Another critically important part of creating your weekly plan is prioritization. Attorneys often find themselves overwhelmed by conflicting priorities. This feeling arises from the barrage of new problems they face each day; for many, it is triggered every time when they look at their seemingly inexhaustible to-do list. If you find yourself staring at your list in the morning, choosing a task at random and hoping that nothing falls through the cracks while you try to finish it, you understand what we’re describing.

Since most attorneys are goal-oriented individuals who strive to do everything at once and do each of them well, this is a painful way to work. The simple truth is that having too many priorities is the same as having no priorities. In the face of no clear priority, attorneys choose one seemingly urgent, important task that is easily done just to quickly check something off the list. Be aware, however, that urgency is quite often mistaken for importance.

It isn’t always easy to distinguish between urgent and important when you are in the midst of many urgent and conflicting priorities. Just because something is urgent does not automatically make it important. Urgent tasks are generally much more compelling than those that are merely important. Think of the squeaky wheels among your clients: you often feel compelled to solve their problems at the expense of more cooperative clients just because they’re making noise and the good clients are not. When you stock your practice with high-maintenance, impossible-to-satisfy clients, you have introduced a lot of urgency into your life without much long-term gain. In such a practice, it is entirely possible to spend your days responding to the latest client crisis leaving important work undone. At the end of the month you then must face the harsh reality that you spent a great deal of time on non-billable activities. Your profit margin will suffer if you attend to urgent activities and put off important ones.