Solo Contendere

So it’s been a little while since I’ve posted, but I haven’t been on vacation. The hiatus is due simply to the unfortunate convergence of many deadlines at one time, and inspires the topic of today’s post: time management.

We are each granted the same 24 hours per standard day, but for solos and small-firm practitioners, it never seems like enough. There are thousands of posts out there for small business owners generally, and lawyers specifically, on time management, but most of them seem to focus on tools you can use to improve your time management skills. Yes, calendaring software is important. Yes, a good scanner and OCR program can significantly reduce the time it takes to find a particular document. But what I am more interested in is ways to look at the practice; ways to approach your work generally that can take the scary out.

I’ve heard plenty of tips on this; some work, some do not (at least for me). In no particular order, here they are:

• Don’t Let the Urgent Crowd Out the Important

Especially for those in a small office, the practice often seems like a game of Whack-A-Mole with each upcoming deadline. Knock one down, and another pops up right behind it. There are always 12 urgent calls to return, 6 client meetings to prepare for, and any number of small pieces of correspondence that are sitting on your desk staring at you accusingly. Behind it all, though, is that looming summary judgment motion, discovery deadline, or dispositive hearing. You watch with a sort of morbid fascination as the deadline approaches, all the while saying that as soon as you finish up one more day’s worth of smaller projects, you will crack into the large one. Then, suddenly, it’s a week before the deadline and you have to rush to get it done, all because you focused on things that were less important but were easier and seemed more urgent.

• Plan Ahead

Perhaps the easiest way to avoid getting plowed over by large projects is to break them into chunks. Have a huge, five-issue motion due in two months? Don’t try to set aside an entire week to do it. Break it up into five, or seven, or eight chunks, plan a few hours to do each chunk, and set aside a specific time to do it. Then stick to that schedule (I know, easier said than done). That way, when you’re sitting in your office at 3:00 (p.m., hopefully), you don’t think to yourself “I can’t even get a good start on that motion in the time I have left today. But I have a bunch of little things I can do instead.” (See above). Rather, you can spend three hours writing just the Facts section of the brief. Bam! You’re one eighth of the way done.

• Leave Your Phone at Home

I’ve been told this by a number of more experienced small-firm practitioners, and though I am solidly guilty of violating it, when I don’t, things seem to go more smoothly. You don’t have to actually leave your phone at home, of course, but set up times to answer your phone or return phone calls and emails (say, 11-12 and 3-4), and the rest of the time leave it on silent. Yes, you will miss calls. Yes, once in a while that may even lead to losing a potential client. But (surprise!) clients and potential clients do not always expect that you will be available to them immediately. I have never returned a call to a client two hours later and heard “What took you so long?” Clients — at least, the clients you want — have reasonable expectations. The upside is that you are not constantly interrupting your work to answer the phone. When you answer a phone call, you lose not just the time you spent on the call, but your train of thought on what you were doing, any momentum you had in your research or writing, and the time it takes to get your head back in the project you were working on. All that time counts against your 24 hours.

For other solos or small-firm practitioners, what tips have you found work best for you? How do you approach your day, or week, or practice generally in a way that makes it easier to keep ahead of the rising tide?