And you’ve probably sent some email at crazy hours of the night and wondered what the recipient might be thinking about you. Are they thinking that you’re disorganized, under the gun, procrastinating, a workaholic?

Well, if you’re using Outlook and want to work in the middle of the night but have it look as though your email was composed and sent at a more conventional hour, you can use the Delay Delivery option to schedule exactly when the message will leave your outbox.

In the screen shot above, I composed the test email and ran the Delay Delivery feature at 12:18pm. I set it to be delivered at 12:25. Note that it appears as having been sent at 12:25.

In addition to the middle-of-the-night scenario, there are many other situations where you might want to delay an email going out until later in the day or the next morning, or even days or weeks hence.

For example, let’s say it’s 10:15 a.m. and you’re working on a file, and you want to inform opposing counsel of a document revision you’ve just concluded, but you have to turn your attention to something else for the next three hours. If you send the email, you know she’s going to get right back to you but you don’t want to deal with it until later. You can draft the email and use the delayed Delivery option to cue it up for delivery at 2:30 so you can, as the infomercial says, set it and forget it.

Or for a more systematic application of the feature, let’s say you want to remind your clients to send you certain documents at specific times. Your staff can compose the reminder email and schedule it go out on a specific date. This is great task for your administrative assistant: have them identify on a weekly or monthly basis which clients need certain reminders and then let them spend an hour or two composing them and cuing them up for delivery on the right dates.

Once you and your staff become familiar with the feature, you’ll find more uses for this great time management tip in your legal practice.

Here’s how to do it.
1. Open and compose your email
2. Click the Options tab/menu
3. Click the Delay Delivery button/item
4. Check the “Don not deliver before” box

6. Enter the date and time for delivery
7. Click Close
8. Click Send to cue your email

Note: the email will sit in your Outbox until the day/time you designated. Note, too, that your computer must be ON and Outlook must be running at that time for the message to be sent. If your computer is off or if Outlook is not running, the message will be sent when Outlook next launches.

By learning how to use the “AutoCorrect/AutoText” feature in Word (WordPerfect calls it “QuickCorrect”), you and your staff will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to produce documents. You can save hundreds of hours a year in unnecessary typing.

There are literally countless situations where AutoCorrect can be used. For example, instead of having to manually insert the symbol for “section” (§) via menus and multiple clicks, you could just type “ss” (or any other keystroke/s) and the symbol will appear. Names of people, cases, organizations, jurisdictions, etc can be entered by typing a few keystrokes. And common phrases or sentences can be similarly shortcut.

The reason most people don’t use the Auto feature regularly is because it’s not easy to access, and they don’t know how to override an autocorrection that they may not want to keep.

To help you overcome these barriers, I have created a PDF with instructions on how to add the AutoCorrect/AutoText icon to your tool bar so you can access it directly with a single click. This document also shows you how to handle overrides. You can download it here:

Many of you use document templates for common drafting tasks, and that’s great. But there are dozens of instances every week when customizing a template would take more time then writing up something from scratch, so you forgo the template. These are the perfect times to use AutoCorrect/AutoText.

To really leverage the value of this Brief, you might consider forwarding it to your staff, and then ask them to identify the most commonly used names and phrases they use (and the most common ones YOU use).

Here’s an instructional video from YouTube on getting started with creating your own own autocorrect shortcuts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52kfVEKnlIY

Since AutoCorrect is the built-in feature in Word that corrects spelling and, for example, changes “(c)” into “©” automatically, another benefit of learning how to use it is that you’ll know how to fix those unintended “corrections” that Word occasionally forces upon us.

This is easy to learn. Invest 30 minutes this week and save thousands of hours over the course of your career.

If you’re one of the very few who can honestly answer Yes, congratulations! However, if you’re like most of us, you have mixed emotions about your Smartphone while on vacation. It’s a constant (cursed) reminder of the work you’re supposed to be leaving behind, yet being separated from your device for too long creates anxiety (if not clinical withdrawal).

As I’ve written previously, the inexorable trend is that of increased digital connectivity, so it’s becoming increasingly important to exercise boundaries that protect your private, non-work time.

I recently heard an interview with William Powers, the author of the new book, Hamlet’s Blackberry. He and his family uphold an “Internet Sabbath” every weekend. They keep the TV and video games and regular cell phones available; their goal is to create more space and time for themselves as individuals and as a family so they nix the net, text, and email. His description of how this approach has enriched their lives (even his kids’ lives and his kids’ friends!) is inspiring.

And this past week, a client forwarded this excellent article about how to unplug when on vacation:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/02/vacation.unplugging/index.html?hpt=C1. It contains several realistic strategies for beating back digital encroachment while you’re away.

Obviously, there are circumstances that can justify your choice to be available for some clearly predefined situations, but these should be rare and of a much higher threshold than routine work. And yes, you have to plan more effective coverage prior to your vacation so that routine communication gets handled in your absence.

So, if you’ve just been on vacation, I encourage you to reflect on whether you – and the people with you – were happy with the amount of time you spent with your device on work-related matters. If you’re getting ready for a late-summer or fall vacation, challenge yourself to set some goals around how much time and under what circumstances you’ll be interacting with email and voicemail and text messages.

Ask yourself if that email is more important than the beautiful sunset or the look on your daughter’s face when makes her mini-golf hole-in-one.

The October 2007 Harvard Business Journal profiles the impact of a simple training program to help employees of a major bank manage their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy while on the job.

The bottom line? Compared to a control group of equal size who did NOT get the training, the experimental group of 106 loan officers outperformed their control group colleagues by 20 percent in year-over-year revenue. 68 percent of the group that received the training “ . . . reported that it had a positive impact on their relationship with their clients . . . and 71 percent said that it had a noticeable or significant impact on their productivity. . . .”

Tony Schwartz, co-author of the HBJ article, has developed an “Energy Audit” to help identify how we’re operating in each of the four “energy dimensions” mentioned above. You can take the audit and access some excellent resources here: http://www.theenergyproject.com/.

We all know that the practice of law is a high-pressure career and that those drawn to it tend to be skeptical of the role of “soft skills” in their professional success. However, Schwartz and others make a powerful business case for why these skills (such as attending to your energy during the day) matter.

Your cognitive acuity, your sense of personal satisfaction, your physical health, and your emotional well-being all flow from your overall energy — and contribute to your performance. So take a few minutes one evening this week to take the Energy Audit. Your clients, your colleagues, your staff, and your family will all benefit as you learn to even out your ups and downs and boost your overall effectiveness. And you’ll be happier as a result.

Whether it’s a complicated negotiation that’s become problematic or an administrative process improvement project, we can sometimes get stuck because we just know the outcome we want but we’re not clear how to get there. And since we don’t like that feeling, we start procrastinating.

Surprisingly however, the simple act of determining our next physical action to advance the work/project is sometimes all it takes to get unstuck.

The trick is to get extremely concrete (again, about the action). For example, the next action to get unstuck about the negotiation may be to go out to see your secretary and request a document status list for your review. (Rather than endlessly mulling over possibilities in your head based on incomplete information, such a doc list would help focus you.)

The next action on the process improvement project might simply be for you to find the two month old email you were sent outlining the document templates that your paralegal recommended for approval.

The point is that in both cases, you know, at one level, that you just want the thing done! Your eyes are on the horizon. But you have to take some step, and since you’re not sure what that step is, you don’t take any step.

So think of some matter or project you’d like to move forward but which hasn’t moved in a while. What’s the very next physical action to take? Don’t over-think it. Is it getting out of your chair to pull the file? It is picking up the phone to call someone?

Sometimes the bogeyman of procrastination doesn’t need to be exorcised at a deep psychological level. Sometimes it just takes getting clear on the next action.

The object is to retrain yourself to accept incoming communications on your terms, not on everyone else’s terms. For example, you could choose to check your email and voicemail every 90 minutes. (When was the last time you experienced 90 minutes free of digital interruptions while working at the office? And how productive and satisfying was it?)

Well, now I’m going to ask you to take it one step further by turning off the audio and vibration alerts for the text messages and emails you receive on your mobile device.

I realize this may elicit from you a reaction such as “Are you nuts?” But think about it for a minute:

How many times a week are you interrupted by that audio or vibration alert? It’s probably a few hundred. And where are you when these alerts divert your mind from whatever you’re doing? The car? A meeting with colleagues? On a landline conversation with a client? At lunch with a prospect? At your desk drafting a pleading? At dinner with your family?

Finally, how many of these seemingly benign “alerts” in an average week are important enough to justify the persistent fragmentation of your attention to the activity at hand? I submit it’s less than five percent.

By turning off your audio and vibration alerts, you can choose to check your device when you want to. You’ll still see that you have new text messages and emails via the icon on your device, but you won’t be interrupted and distracted nearly as often throughout the day.

Obviously, my seemingly contrarian suggestion regarding mobile alerts relates to the broader issue of “digital addiction.” Thanks to last week’s widely-discussed New York Times article on the negative effects of being plugged in all the time, the dialog right now is hot. (See Hooked on Gadgets and the fascinating related articles.)

The topic – and our behavior — is worth reflecting on because our already-ubiquitous technology is only going to become faster and more interconnected, and its use made even more “necessary” by the social and commercial forces that benefit from its expansion.

So, the sooner we learn to tame its intrusiveness, the better. If we don’t push back now, why do we think we’ll be able to two or five years from now when the milieu of instantaneousness is even more intense?

You can turn off your audio and vibration alerts by going the “settings” screen on most devices and then finding the “alerts” option. Or ask your IT person. Or Google the phrase “[name of your device] message alert settings.”

Yet, as we all know, changing behavior is often extremely difficult. We’ve lived within life-long patterns, and we’re predisposed to avoid the dissonance that comes with letting go of the familiar and embracing the unfamiliar (even if we know the shift would be good for us).

The secret of course, is to be sufficiently motivated to choose different behaviors. It’s just not enough to think something’s a good idea (e.g., to delegate more, to organize your office, or to set up-front expectations more clearly). You have to feel what it will be like to achieve your goal (e.g., to be able to leave the office an hour earlier than you usually do — and feel good about–, or to just be less frazzled during the day).

But what does it mean to feel sufficiently motivated? It means that you’ve imbued your goal with enough emotional energy to drive you forward, even in the face of internal resistance.

And this begs the question: can you consciously boost your motivation to change? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

First, visualize, in detail, what achieving your goal would look like and feel like. What are the good things that would come, for example, from your being able to spend more high-quality time with your family in the evening? Let yourself sit for even just a minute – right now – reflecting on that, and let yourself feel the blessings you (and they) would experience.

Next, focus on what you can do today to begin moving toward your goal. Start with one small, incremental step. Is there a task you could delegate that you’d otherwise do yourself that would allow you to leave earlier and still know that it will get taken care of to an acceptable level? Could you try to capture your time throughout the day instead of needing to spend time at the end of the day going through your emails and paperwork and in order to generate your bills?

Whatever your goal, first imagine the fruit of your success – and let yourself experience the feelings, the emotions, that success will bring. Then, target one specific instance of that success and focus on what you can do to realize it. Then do it again and again, one day at a time.

Even in the worst-case scenario of a Judge setting a trial date that conflicts with another, previously-set trial, you work it out, right? If you have no one to cover for you, the second claim on your time has to accommodate your calendar.

But what happens when you’re pressed to accept an appointment (e.g., a closing, a depo, a case status review) in the absence of a pre-existing, “non-negotiable” commitment?

All too often, you’re willing to accommodate whoever is making the meeting request – even if doing so winds up jamming you up. It’s as if because you don’t have one of those immovable commitments in place, you feel guilty or fearful about saying No to the request. You want to say No, and you know you probably should say No and offer a time that works for you, for the sake of your effectiveness and sanity, but you accept the other person’s timing anyway.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting that you blithely disregard the urgency of the other party’s request. There are times when the urgency is mutual and in your client’s interest (or in the interest of your firm somehow).

But I am suggesting that you consciously practice looking at your calendar and your upcoming commitments and workflow, and be willing to push back on appointment requests in order to preserve your maximum effectiveness. Take the extra few seconds to become aware of your mindset in the moment – and then negotiate the appointment from a place of confidence.

It’s very much like exercising a new muscle group. It will feel uncomfortable for a while, but with consistent use, you’ll be stronger for it. Remember, no one else has an interest in abiding by – much less protecting – your schedule. So you have to.

Here’s a fantastic solution: PureText is a no-cost utility which, with a single click, strips the formatting properties of whatever text you’ve copied into your clipboard so that when pasted, the text appears with the properties of the document you’re working on. (PureText is a Windows-based program, but there are a variety of “plain text conversion” options for the Mac, too.)

Once installed, PureText sits as an icon in your system tray, and all you do is click the icon AFTER you’ve copied the target text and BEFORE you paste it. One click. It’s that simple. PureText will save you hours of time and headache, and make you more productive.

You can download PureText here: http://SteveMiller.net/PureText

The origin of the word “deadline” is germane here: prior to becoming synonymous with “due date,” deadline referred to the specific boundary around a civil war detention camp beyond which escape-minded prisoners would be shot. Decades later, with advances in printing technology, journalists borrowed the mechanical meaning of the word (where ink stopped being printed at the edge of a page) to describe the day and time their stories had to be filed.

In both contexts, it’s the imposition of an external authority or condition that creates the motivation to comply. That’s why it’s so hard to give ourselves deadlines. What are the consequences if we miss our self-imposed “deadlines”? Stress and guilt sure, but we’re not going to be shot.

Obviously, it’s challenging (for many reasons) to keep the commitments we make to do specific things by specific times. We take on too much. We underestimate how long something will take. We struggle to stay on top of organization and priorities.

And most of us, to one degree or another, subconsciously want – or even need – the pressure of that externally dictated deadline. Why? Because true deadlines trigger adrenaline rushes, and we’re finally forced to focus our energy and time (i.e., we temporarily cease struggling with what to do next. There are finally no options.)

This isn’t “just a matter of semantics.” The psychological difference between establishing a mental deadline that sounds external and making a carefully considered commitment that comes from within is huge.

It’s a matter of being in integrity with yourself and with the words that come out of your mouth. The classic client service adage applies: “Under-promise and over-deliver.”

Try practicing this week. Set your intention to notice the internal dialog you have with yourself about when you’re going to get something done. And pay attention to the words you speak to others about those tasks. Ask yourself if you can really keep the commitment you’re making. Then amend your words as necessary.

As long-time readers of my weekly tips have heard me say again and again, time management is really self management. And improved self-management always starts with awareness.