This week, we explore some of my favorite MUST HAVE time management tools and tips that actually work to help you focus and get things done. This is so much more than the tools you can find in a simple Google search! We will explore essential mindset shifts and discuss how to approach your work to make every day as successful as possible.
Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/L_sQrFtTHTo
New episodes every other Wednesday.
RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:
Free coaching consult: https://autumnnoble.as.me/freeconsult
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME:
SHOP THE LAWYER LIFE COLLECTION on Etsy
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
This week, we explore some of my favorite MUST HAVE time management tools and tips that actually work to help you focus and get things done. This is so much more than the tools you can find in a simple Google search! We will explore essential mindset shifts and discuss how to approach your work to make every day as successful as possible.
Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/L_sQrFtTHTo
New episodes every other Wednesday.
RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:
Free coaching consult: https://autumnnoble.as.me/freeconsult
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME:
SHOP THE LAWYER LIFE COLLECTION on Etsy
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast.
Episode No. 13
"Real Time Management Tips That Actually Work"
Welcome back, everyone, to the Lawyer Life Podcast. If you are seeking ways to find more time, be more productive, build your client base, set healthy boundaries, demystify business development, and authentically sell your services, you are in the right place.
If you are an attorney who is looking to make a change, maybe to a smaller firm or perhaps a larger firm, looking to go in-house, do some adjunct work, start your own firm, or even leave law altogether, and would like to learn about all of those avenues from someone who's already done it, this is the right place for you.
My name is Autumn Noble, and I am the founder of the Lawyer Life Collective, where we focus not only on all of those things, but ultimately how to make your career as meaningful and fulfilling as possible.
In the Lawyer Life Collective, we focus on one-on-one coaching, targeting your specific goals, where we develop a plan, execute, and put you back in the driver's seat of your success.
If you are new to the podcast, be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources or to sign up for your very own free coaching consultation with me to get a sense of what this coaching thing is all about.
If you've been here all along, you know by now just how much I appreciate you and all of your fantastic reviews.
Today, we continue our discussion from the last episode. Now that we have simmered down and moved past our overwhelm, the only question truly becomes: how in the world do we get all of this done?
Today, I'm going to be taking you through some of my absolute must-have time management tips that actually work to help you focus and get things done.
And of course, it goes without saying, if you're listening to this episode in the midst of overwhelm or on the verge of a complete meltdown, be sure to listen to the prior episodes on overwhelm and happiness because all of the time management tips in the world cannot help you if we're not thinking straight.
So let's go ahead and dive into my top time management tools.
No. 1: Get ridiculously organized. Sometimes we have a lot on our plate, we tend to utilize the ostrich approach where we just put our heads in the sand and we hunker down and we wait for the storm to pass. But in order to use your time efficiently, we have to do the opposite and start taking a look at those ugly to-do lists.
If you think about your energy as a bucket of water and consider every worried thought and every little task on your to-do list as a pebble that is dropped into that bucket, the more worried thoughts and the more to-dos you have floating around, the more pebbles you're going to have in that bucket and the more water you're going to have displaced, ultimately meaning that you will have less energy available to do any real work.
So that means that our first order of business is to get clear on where we're losing energy by worrying about all these things on our to-do list. Where are we adding just too many pebbles to the bucket that we don't have enough energy left over to actually do the job?
We do this by committing time every single week to identify the tasks and the to-dos that are distracting us and robbing us of our energy. From there, we will be better equipped to develop a strategy for those tasks so that we can stop wasting headspace on them. In the end, this will give us more energy to show up and be effective. It will mean fewer of those pebbles in our bucket of energy, displacing the water and wasting that energy all over the place.
So the first step to managing your time in a more efficient manner is simply to get organized. Schedule time once a week (I typically use Fridays) to go through your project list, update your projects, and prepare a list of all other little to-do things and tasks that are floating around in your head and taking up your energy. Write everything down, and this means every little thing, like buying flowers for your mother's birthday, calling the plumber, updating your address with the bar association, ordering groceries, cooking dinner, organizing your inbox, packing for a work trip, every single thing that's kind of distracting your energy like these little gnats all day long. We have to just get it all down in one place, and that's what we're going to do in this most critical step of being more efficient with our time. Just get it all out, like what is it that we're wanting to do with our time that's making it difficult for us to be present in this moment.
I personally also use this time once a week to plan my meals for the following week. And to do that, I use a specific board on Pinterest that I share with my husband. I don't think he ever looks at it, but it's there, and it's a board entitled "This Week." And on that board, I only put the things that I plan on cooking for dinner that following week. So every week, I'm kind of shuffling recipes on and off of this board so that I have a plan that my husband and I can be clear about as to what we're cooking for the week, so that we can plan our grocery shopping accordingly as well. I have the recipes right there on the Pinterest board, and when I'm ready to order groceries, I just go in and it's all very simple.
Not only does this save me a tremendous amount of time because during the following week, I don't have to think about what's for dinner, I have the recipes available to me on that board, I know it's in the refrigerator. But I also use that board to drive my grocery order, and I always have my groceries delivered because that saves me a ton of time as well. But it also saves me money because I don't have to do those sort of hangry last-minute grocery runs where I buy all of the things and end up at home with nothing that I actually wanted. So it's a very simple and easy way to kind of plan your week ahead, fold that into your weekly planning, and get organized and get some of that time back before the week even begins.
Tip No. 2: Start each day with clarity around your priorities. Once you have this list of all of the things that are giving you stress and taking away your energy, we're going to go through that list and give everything on the list a priority rating. And it doesn't have to be an overly formal process, you just need to know what items need to be addressed immediately and which ones you are going to wait to address when you're standing in line at the grocery store, something like that. We must be ruthless in this evaluation. Not everything in your life can be a priority because that is the type of thinking that gets us into those all-nighter conundrums.
This step is talked about even more in the prior episode on overwhelm because part of the reason we feel overwhelmed is because we are in that primitive brain mindset and we think that everything has to be done immediately. And so part of this tip for managing your time efficiently is to get really clear. I have all these things going through my head, they're causing me a tremendous amount of stress and worry. Once I get them down on paper, I can really ask, what is a priority? What actually has to be done? And kind of slip back into that logical thinking brain that's going to allow us to troubleshoot this list that we've just put together.
As we go through the list and we assign that level of priority, we must do this in a very factual manner because again, when we're feeling really stressed and overwhelmed, our brain is going to tell us everything has to be done immediately. So we have to commit to seeking out extra facts to get clear on what do I actually have to do today and what can wait? Do I really need to respond to that email today? Is it a real priority or a fake deadline that I'm creating or maybe the client's creating? Enforce yourself to answer that question as you assign that level of priority.
Do you really need to clean out your old office files today, even though they're sitting there in the corner glaring at you day in and day out? It might feel like it needs to be done today, but does it really? Can we save it for a rainy day and just know that we've got it planned for a time in the future and let it go? So that's part of the assigning priority process. It's said that our actions express our priorities, and unfortunately, for most of us in the legal profession, our actions are rarely tied to our priorities. We sort of run around putting out fires all day long and really get disconnected from the priorities that we know in our logic mind need to be attended to first.
But the truth of the matter is, in our line of work, no one's life is typically on the line and no one's business is going to implode if you don't respond to that email immediately. Making every hysterical email or phone call from clients or partners a top priority is ultimately going to prevent you from focusing on the projects that might actually be a priority, like that presentation that you need to prepare for that conference next week.
While I'm aware that this position is not likely going to be favored by everyone around you, it is rooted in some fact. You simply cannot treat everything as a top priority and attend to it right away. We have to choose what to do first. And so even though this might cause your bosses, your clients, the people in your life to bristle, it is the fact, it is the truth that we have to decide where we spend our energy first. And what I'm suggesting to you here in this tip is that we do it more intentionally and based upon the facts. What truly makes something a priority and what truly makes something not a priority?
I can think of so many times in my practice that I allowed frantic emails from needy clients or intimidating partners completely derail my plans to focus on other less exciting but more important projects. And over time, I realized that there was a part of me that was really driven by that sort of accomplishment feeling of dropping everything and being there for that person in the midst of their "crisis." There was a part of me that craved and had this urge to please those partners or those clients and I really relished the opportunity to make someone's life easier or to make someone's day, to be a team player and alleviate their stress, even when it was to my own detriment. And we've all done this. Instead of doing the hard work, setting the boundaries, focusing on the massive gross project that we're dreading, we choose a spotlight and we choose the emergency and we choose to pursue feelings of accomplishment driven by results.
When you allow your clients or your partners to dictate your priorities, you actually kind of create monsters in this very skewed power dynamic. There is such a skill as client management, another very unpopular position also very rooted in fact. Every client cannot be a priority in every moment and in every day, and every client cannot expect you to drop everything for them all of the time. It's an impossibility. Your time is limited and every single one of your clients deserves your focus and your best attention when it's appropriate. Allowing that squeaky wheel to dictate your day is a disservice to your clients and it creates unrealistic expectations.
Once your client or your partner gets used to having you at their beck and call, they're going to expect it every time. And why wouldn't they? They will never really see you as a partner. It's almost like you become more like this high-priced pizza delivery person who delivers 24/7, any day, any hour, whatever you want. That is not a healthy dynamic, and it's often not reflective of the work that truly needs to be done in this moment and what could wait until later.
So for this tip, instead of allowing each day's emergency to dictate your life, decide what projects or clients are a priority each day and start every single day with that clarity. Then when something else comes up, you can ask yourself, "Is this going to impede my ability to focus on my priorities today? Is this going to yield as greater results for me and for my firm as the priorities that I had planned on? What will I have to sacrifice if I say yes to this project rather than the priorities I had already identified? What negative consequence am I signing up for if I disregard my established priorities?" Asking those questions is going to help you get clear and give you an opportunity to honor the priorities that you set ahead of time.
You may not always be in a place to control your workload, but let's not lie to ourselves. If you're doing 1,000 things because you're avoiding something bigger, something harder, something that causes more discomfort, be honest with yourself about it because that is likely at the root of why you're feeling like you don't have enough time to do everything. We have to recognize when we are running around manufacturing fires and indulging in drama because then when the real projects stack up and those avoided projects get really critical, we fall apart. We kind of been mowing our workload and our inability to meet our deadlines and wallow in sort of this mess that we have created for ourselves.
So when you find yourself feeling overloaded and short on time, use it as an opportunity to figure out what role you played in getting yourself into that mess so that you can start taking active steps to remedy it in the future. A helpful exercise may be to keep a detailed list of how you spend your days every day for one month, down to the minute, for every single hour. The results of this exercise are always really enlightening. Did you know that you spent an hour chatting up your colleagues or going down the Facebook rabbit hole? Did you know that it takes you three hours to get round trip to and from the gym? It's pretty important information to have if we're wanting more time in our day. And also, when you keep it down to that level of detail, you can really start to see, okay, what types of work are gobbling up my day? And then ask yourself, is that in alignment with how I want to be spending my time? And is that in alignment with how I should be spending my time in furtherance of whatever goals I might have?
This exercise can be really freeing and an opportunity to truly look at your life. What are you making a priority? How are you spending your days? If you don't have enough time to do what you really want to do, why is that? Where is your time going? We can take a look and approach this experiment with honesty and curiosity. If there's something that you're wanting, like more time, more ability to focus on those harder projects, and if you don't have those things, it's likely because we aren't making it a priority and spending our time there first. And this experiment is going to help you get clear on that because usually it has nothing to do with not having enough time. Usually it has more to do with ourselves and how we're operating throughout the day and where we're choosing to spend our energy.
So this tip really focuses on being really honest with yourself about what's happening with your time and why you're making the choices that you're making.
Tip No. 4: This is my favorite. Learn to love your calendar as a means to find more time and get more done, but also to make time for freedom and relaxation. Once we have all of those things that are causing this momentary panic in your brain and they're down on paper, we've prioritized them, we have this list of things that are dragging our energy down, we take every single one of those things and we put them on your calendar in order of priority. So the biggest, highest priority things are going to go on your calendar first. Maybe it's an hour to that big hairy project, maybe it's two hours to that massive brief you have to do, whatever it is, but we take those items, we estimate how much time they're going to take, and we put them in blocks on our calendar. And we schedule everything. Give yourself plenty of time for each item on your list, and don't forget to schedule free time as well as time to eat, time to rest, and time to breathe.
So this is not meant to be a tool to help us be superhuman producers and make time to do all of the things we've always wanted to do and run ourselves into the ground. That is not the point. The point is to make sure that how we plan to spend our day is consistent not only with our priorities but with the things that need to be done.
The other part of this is by placing them on our calendar, we get those little energy kind of sucks out of our brain. We take all those little pebbles and we put them away, and now they have a place. And so now we have all of our energy back, knowing that everything that was kind of gnawing at us and nagging at us during the day, it's got a place. That thing that's been kind of bugging me, I gotta get a card for my mom, I need to send flowers to my secretary, I don't have to spend energy worrying about that and thinking about that while I'm trying to focus on something important. It's on my calendar, it's for a time tomorrow, and I will do it then. Moving on, redirecting my energy back. And so it's a means to keep your energy full and ensure that everything that's on your to-do list has a time and it has a place and it will be as good as done. But it's not gonna sit here and bounce around in your head, distracting you from the work that you actually have to do.
All of us have so many things in our lives that we want to do and so many ways that we want to spend our days, but we often overlook the need to actually make time for them. If you want to have a home-cooked meal every night, have you considered the time it will take to do that? To plan the meal, to get the groceries, actually cook it, and do the dishes afterwards? If you want to start a regular yoga practice, have you considered whether there is room in your day for it?
When we have things that we want to do but we don't consider how to actually make them a part of our lives, we kind of run around bemoaning the fact that we don't have time for the life that we want, like there's just not enough hours in the day for me to be the person that I want to be. When in reality, we just haven't really figured out how to do all of those things that we want to do. We haven't made time for them, we haven't developed a plan at all, and so instead, it just kind of sits on us like this albatross of things that we're wanting but we just can't have because we don't have enough time.
So part of this step is to get clear on if this is something that I'm wanting, this is how much time it's actually gonna take, and what does that mean for my day? Do I need to leave work early on nights that I want to cook a fresh meal? If my intention is to go have lunch at my daughter's school, what does that mean? What's the round trip like? How much time do I have to block off my calendar? And if that's important to me, what happens to everything else on that to-do list and the other priorities for the day?
It's about being really honest with yourself about what you're wanting, so much so that you're willing to develop a plan and follow through with it. And we do that by putting these things on our calendar and arranging our life in a way to make them almost absolute. When it comes to work projects, be sure to schedule prep time in anticipation of upcoming meetings so you can get your head in the game, get caught up on important facts of the situation or the client's issues. Right, we've all been in those meetings where we kind of blow from one meeting to the next to the next, and we sit down like, "Who are we talking about and what is going on here? 'Cause I don't remember." That is not how any of us want to show up. And so it's a matter of building in those cushions before those meetings to give you the best opportunity to prepare, get your head on straight, and show up as your best.
What I have seen is that deal lawyers and litigators often get into trouble with this process or with time management in general because they simply have too many cases or deals on their plate, which results in too many high-priority items in any given week or day. If you have a full day that's blocked off for high-priority items, you are never gonna have time to address that case or that deal that suddenly blows up. The ideal scenario instead for those types of attorneys is to have a day that's a mix of high-priority items and low-priority items so that when that case or that deal blows up (because it will), you can move them elsewhere. And as you do this work and you start putting things on your calendar, if you're finding that you have weeks full of only high-priority items with no wiggle room in the deadlines, that is a huge red flag that you need to employ some additional tactics to ensure that those things can get done when the case or the deal blows up (because again, you might as well just assume that it will). And when we go into it assuming that that's gonna happen, we can strategize in advance as to how those things are gonna get done when it does happen.
So if you have a week full of only high-priority items, it's a sign that we need to let an additional support move some of those things around, maybe downgrade their priorities if possible. Either one is going to help you best strategize through that week when unexpected things happen because that is the nature of that practice.
The real thrust behind this tip is about giving yourself the opportunity to show up as your best every time. Planning ahead like this is going to give you the best chance to avoid submitting subpar work, and it's also going to give you the best chance to ensure that those things that are important to you, those parts of your life that you want more of (time with your kids, time in the gym, whatever you know how to make it work), and you have a plan to execute on it.
Once everything from your list now lives in a time block on your calendar, we get to the even best part of this all is that we can throw that list away. You can burn it, whatever floats your boat, but just get rid of it because the energy attached to that list is part of the reason we struggle with time management. Because again, those little energy gnats kind of floating around in our head, they just distract us and impede our ability to really show up and do the work.
So once that list is done and it's on your calendar, get rid of it. And instead, we can rest in ourselves knowing that we have a plan of attack and that everything is as good as done. One of the added benefits of this approach is that it will allow you the opportunity to properly forecast how you can or cannot handle new projects that land on your plate.
When you get that new project and shouty caps in your inbox, you can look at your calendar and see okay, like if I take this project, if I do this thing, this is how everything's gonna have to shift and this is the impact that it's gonna have on me. Or when a partner or a client says, "Do you have capacity for this?" we can look at our calendar and clearly say, "I have high priority, top priority items for the next week and a half that are taking up 90% of my time, 80% of my time." We will have that clarity as opposed to looking at a list and going, "Gosh, you know, I don't really know which one, what's important, and if I can fit this in."
So sure, why not? It's gonna allow us to be a better manager of our own practice and communicate our availability to others.
Tip 5: Make decisions ahead of time and follow through
Would it surprise you to know that we make approximately 35,000 choices every day? And once you factor in the amount of time we spend sleeping, that means that we're making thousands of decisions every single hour. It's no wonder that we're so exhausted at the end of the day. Decision fatigue is a thing.
There are many ways that people make decisions in every moment, but what I find so interesting is that many of us are willing to hand over those decisions to other people rather than making a conscious decision in the moment. We subconsciously decide to answer to whomever or whatever is immediately before us instead of deciding how you want to spend your time in any given day. We just show up and we kind of go where the wind blows us, which essentially means we let other people make decisions about how we spend our time and attention, rather than making those decisions for ourselves.
Instead, we must make plans ahead of time using our prefrontal cortex. That's the part of our brain that's associated with rational thinking, cognitive behavior, and decision making. That's the brain that says, "Go to the gym, don't face dive into a box of red velvet cupcakes, tackle that big project, and don't put it off for another week." That is the part of our brain that we want to be leveraging for time management but also for our work.
Unfortunately, that brain is often a silent partner whose solid and rational advice is typically drowned out by the rantings of a lunatic toddler who is playing the role of your reptilian brain. That is the brain that wants immediate gratification, it wants to do the easy things, it doesn't want to do the hard project, and wants to feel good and avoid things that don't feel good.
So we have to allow that prefrontal cortex to make those decisions ahead of time when our toddler brain is sleeping because toddlers don't care about planning. That is why we take time every week ahead of time to plan for the following week. We do this at a time when our prefrontal cortex is driving the bus because there's nothing sexy going on and our reptilian brain is not paying attention.
Decide to meal prep on the weekend, decide to go to your daughter's school for lunch, decide what important projects you're gonna focus on next week. Make that decision before your week even begins and adjust your calendar accordingly to reflect that priority instead of just hoping that it will all work out and kind of hoping that people will make decisions that will allow you to do that for yourself.
Then once you have made that decision ahead of time, you have to stick to it, and that's where the real work comes in. It all starts with learning to make commitments to ourselves represented by our calendar, our priorities, and our plan for the day and the week ahead, and respecting ourselves enough to show up for ourselves and honor that plan.
If you can master that skill, I truly think you can master anything. Most of us wouldn't deliberately stand up a friend for happy hour or bail out on someone's meeting or that Zumba class at the last minute and leave them to suffer alone. Most of us wouldn't do that. But when it comes to honoring those commitments to ourselves, we don't really hold ourselves in that same regard.
When it comes to commitments to ourselves and the plans we make in furtherance of our goals, we are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad friends. We ghost ourselves on the regular. We make plans and we skip them. We put things on our calendar and then when it comes up, we ignore it. In those instances, we are letting our warm and fuzzy toddler reptilian brain run the show. We're reaching for the feel goods because it's so much more fun to sit here and drink wine and eat Doritos than it is to go to the gym.
And so when we say no to those best laid plans and stay here in the warm and cozy instead, the toddler brain wins. We are refusing to trust the earlier judgments of our prefrontal cortex and that adult brain that really knows what's best for us. We refuse to honor those commitments and we will spend all sorts of energy rationalizing our own flakiness.
Think of all the time and energy you waste second-guessing yourself and your best-laid plans. When you plan to go to the gym, we talk ourselves out of it. "I'm gonna stay into this work project instead." "Oh, I'm really sore from the last time." "I won't have time to do this if I do that." Imagine how much more you could accomplish if you simply just followed through on the decision and didn't waste any time or energy reconsidering it.
Because then we also have to consider the energy that comes afterwards. You skip the gym and now you're beating yourself up, and that energy is also not super helpful for getting anything done. So it creates this sort of bad cycle of wasting energy.
When we open the door to second-guessing the decisions that we already made about how we're spending our day today, we have to stop doing that. Make decisions in advance and commit to yourself that you will do it. Make a meal plan for the week and stick to it. Decide which days of the week you're gonna have a glass of wine and honor whatever it is. The goal is to tell yourself you're going to do something and show up for yourself in the same way that you show up for your friends, your clients, your bosses.
There is a reason that Nike slogan is "Just Do It." It's not complicated. Just commit to following through. There's no magical formula for this. Many of us struggle with this tip because we want to allow ourselves the opportunity to make decisions in the heat of the moment, guided by our feelings or our needs at the time.
When your calendar reminds you that it's time to go to the gym, your brain is going to respond like, "Why? I really feel like it today." Been there, I totally get it. The problem is that those feelings are fleeting, and our feelings are often driven by that primitive brain that wants us safe, happy, and comfortable. That is not the brain that will help you follow through on anything. It's not the cheerleader for healthy decisions or difficult workouts. That brain wants the dopamine hit from the chocolate cake and the takeout Chinese.
And therefore, that brain cannot be allowed to make any decisions. So we make decisions ahead of time using our prefrontal cortex while the primitive brain sleeps and is not at the table and part of the discussion. And then when the plan comes up on our calendar, we just commit to following through. We can listen to our toddler brain try and talk us out of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you, I'm gonna do this.
Knowing that when we made that decision beforehand, it was for our greatest and highest good, and we're gonna honor that. When we dispense with the doubting and the second-guessing, we conserve our energy and really focus on the task at hand, which ultimately creates more efficiency and more time down the road.
In summary, time management skills that actually work really all boil down to you taking back your power and your own agency. Part of being a skilled attorney, never mind a good wife, mother, sister, friend, is the ability to juggle many things and to answer to many different masters and have various things going on all at once.
But what I often see is that when those masters ratchet up the heat and those juggling balls become flaming wands, all of the decision making goes out the door. And in that instance, we hand over our agency, we put our heads down, and we just start taking the blows and being directed by whomever yells at us the loudest.
In those moments, it may feel like you don't have a choice, that this is just part of the job and this is just how life works. But the truth of the matter is, you are making a choice in that moment to answer the phone, to say yes to the new project, respond to that email, to skip the gym or to stay late at work. You're choosing to allow those loud distractions to slide to the front of your line of priorities.
Our lives aren't just happening to us and our days don't run away from us. We are the ones with the power and all the choices to be made. We just have to reconnect with that. The nature of having various projects on your desk or things going on in your life at any given time is that you are going to have to make decisions about which projects are important, which ones are priorities that must be handled first, and where everything else falls in respect to those.
When we allow the demands of others around us to overwhelm us, we really wear out our resolve and simply run out of our clear thinking. And at that point, we just keep drinking from the fire hose and hope that eventually everything will calm down.
What I offer through these steps is instead a different choice. Put in the leg work ahead of time to minimize the decisions to be made in any moment. We make decisions ahead of time so there is no decision to be made in the heat of the moment. Or if there is a decision to be made, it's simplified.
This means planning in advance from our prefrontal cortex instead of allowing our primitive brain to make any decisions whatsoever. This means getting clear about what is on your to-do list, what is bothering you, what is pulling your energy away from what you're working on, all of those little things. What are they? And then we prioritize them and then we put them on our calendar and we schedule them and we really streamline our focus and streamline our intentions in every day.
We know that work is gonna get crazy, so we have to start making decisions ahead of time as to what gets our attention in any given day. We don't invite the toddler brain to the dumpster fire. Instead, we trust that we have already made the best decision to allow us to make our greatest contribution for that day, and we're just gonna follow through with that.
When we go into each month, each week, and each day knowing our priorities, we can get to work the minute that we set down and there's no need to agonize over the to-do list or make any decisions about what you're going to work on or when you're going to check your email. We've already decided what is important and everything else has gotten its own place on the calendar.
This eliminates decision fatigue because the most important decision of the day has already been made, and that's where we're gonna focus our energy. Having avoided that decision fatigue, you will have the energy to reevaluate any new project or fire that comes your way logically and not swept up and overwhelmed.
And for each item presented to you for your attention, you can just simply decide how does this compare to my priority for the day? Is it consistent with my priority? Why or why not? Does this new project require heightened priority? What happens to everything else on my calendar if I say yes to this? Those are the only things that we have to address in the heat of the moment. We don't have to step into the pool of overwhelm about all the other projects on our to-do list. We don't even have to look at the whole list.
The only metric for comparison in that moment is your priority of the day, and we just weigh whatever requests come at you against those priorities. From there, we have all the information that we need to clearly communicate to whomever is demanding our time and attention in any given moment.
This approach does not allow room for "When am I going to get this done?" or "I can't say no to this project." "I'm never going to have enough time." In practicing law, we are going to get pulled in various directions professionally and personally. You will be challenged to do it all.
Decide not to hand over your power and start believing that you don't have choices and start believing that you don't have enough time. Take back your agency and start managing this as if it were a problem simply to be solved and not something that can't be overcome.
Do not offer your day to the mercy of others. Make decisions about your time and your priorities and evaluate everything else from there. Alright, my friends, that is all for this week's topic. If you want to go more in-depth on time management, be sure to check out the show notes for a link to my free instant access webinar entitled "Find More Time and Get More Done," where we walk through all of these tips and more in real-time.
In our next episode, we will check out the top challenges that lawyers bring to me in coaching. I'm thinking of this more along the lines of "The Secret Lives of Lawyers" that no one is talking about. I hope to see you there. Thanks again for listening this week. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us a stellar rating on your podcast listening platform.
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