When it’s not the clients fault or your staff’s fault, but it’s actually yours.
Let’s go through what a normal day may look like for you:
Wake up. Shower. Get dressed. Coffee. Breakfast.
Then you’re in the office.
You turn on your computer, and the first thing you see up on the screen is the last thing you were working on before you left. What’s on that screen? Amazon? Bloomingdales? Instagram? Your email? (GASP!)
You get distracted for a few minutes, and then your calendar pings, it’s time for your 9 am with Cinderella. You get on the call, and write notes on pen and paper of things you will do for her.
Then your paralegal pops in, and needs help with a different client matter and asks you to call back the Prince.
Then your kid texts and says he needs a poster for his science project, and you remember you need to get that before you go home.
You look down, realize it’s lunch time and you’re starving. You walk down, grab lunch, and you’re back on your desk.
You’ve got a 1 o’clock with the Prince and you tell him you’ll connect him with a commercial real estate broker who you highly recommend so they can look at properties together.
Your paralegal pops back in again, and has some documents for you to review for today’s deadline so he/she can send them out. You spend the next 3 hours doing just that.
You realize it’s 4 and you need to run and you’re already running late.
You get home, without the poster your son asked you to get. So you get back in the car, in traffic, and you remember again: shit, I have to send that email to the Prince and the commercial property broker.
You get home, and start prepping for dinner and the evening wind down.
You head to bed and while you’re in bed, you realize again, you forgot to email the Prince and the broker. You promise you’ll do it the next day.
You fall asleep with re-runs of Seinfeld in the background, and wake up the next morning.
For most of you, this is a normal day.
For most of you, you use your brain, or a sticky note, or a notebook to remember to do things - personally and professionally.
This is a total failure in your process, is unbelievably unproductive, and the death of time management.
Your brain is not designed to remember: how to drive, eat on time, various nuances of the law, project supplies for your kids, and the other 1,000,000 things you attempt to load into your brain.
This is literally why this emoji was created 🤯
You need a task manager. A grown up version of a TO DO list, that is DIGITAL and you can TAG and ASSIGN tasks to your TEAM.
Before I go, your email, calendar, and Clio are all shitty task managers.
And it’s not your paralegal’s job to be your task manager.
This week’s podcast episode is all about task managers, and my favorite one: Notion. Click here to see what a good Task List looks like.
Click here to watch one of the most life changing productivity videos:
To your wild success,
Nermin managing-tasks pro Jasani, Esq.