A Simple Way to Increase Productivity

• Author: Heather Gray-Grant
• Date: September 21, 2018

Lawyers are intelligent, capable human beings who sometimes find it almost impossible to manage their time well. The reason could be that too much is expected of them; that they like to do things very well before moving on and that takes time; that they under-estimated how long an activity will take; that when activities involve dealing with others, time becomes a variable; that they have to spend valuable time cleaning up someone else’s work; that they have other people’s work dumped on them…the list goes on.

These are reasons but not excuses. Productivity is usually tied to efficiency and efficiency is about planning and preparing. As I’m fond of saying, it’s far more efficient to get the vaccine beforehand than to have to deal with the illness later.

The best way to prepare is to create a documented plan: determine your goals, then decide how you will achieve them. The best planning has lots of detail including precisely what needs to be done, and a deadline for when you will do it. More on that below, but for those who started sweating as soon as they heard the “p” word, you might want to start with a more immediate way to improve your efficiency.

One of the best tools I’ve discovered for teaching lawyers how to become more efficient is Stephen Covey’s four quadrants. Stephen Covey was an efficiency expert. You might remember his most famous book: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. Spoiler alert: facing life as it hits you is not one of those habits. Stephen was all about deep thinking, personal goal setting, and planning how you’ll get there. To help people who weren’t planners but clearly needed help, he developed the four quadrants.

Quadrant #1: Urgent and Important: For lawyers, this is the stuff that must be done right now. An injunction, dealing with a client in trouble, or doing some client work for a meeting that will happen in an hour and that you’ve known about for over a month but didn’t start to work on until ten minutes ago. This quadrant would also include the work that another lawyer dumps on you at the last minute (provided it’s important to your career to help them out of this pinch). Lawyers spend far too much of their time in this quadrant. Some even force themselves into this quadrant because they feel that the accompanying adrenalin will help them to produce a superior product. This is not true, as dealing with issues through adrenalin cuts off access to the part of the brain that can do creative problem solving and has empathy. Aim to spend 10% or less of your time here.

Quadrant #2: Not Urgent and Important: This is where we want to spend 80% of our time because time spent here will make us more efficient in all areas of a practice. This is where we develop systems and processes, create great precedents, build good relationships, learn important skills, and do planning and careful implementation. We can also create outstanding legal work in this quadrant, because we take the time to think deeply and broadly about an issue or process. This is where creative solutions and strategy really happen. Spending time here should significantly reduce the amount of time we spend in quadrants 1 and 3. Quadrant 2 activities make us more efficient and productive, and ultimately make us feel the best, in the long-run.

Quadrant #3: Urgent and Not Important: This quadrant usually holds...