Distilled from the best-practices of the world’s top productivity research and refined over years of application with practicing attorneys in wide-ranging settings, the Time Savvy System teaches you how to manage your activities and choices in order to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness.

The Eight Essential Steps

1. Isolate Planning Time
One of the main mistakes most attorneys make is to dive right into work the minute they get in to the office each morning without pausing to realistically plan their day. This lack of planning extends to further horizons as well, such that weekly, quarterly or annual planning rarely happens in a way that brings measurably improved results.

Of course you do have a general idea of what you need to accomplish for the day or week. That’s not a good enough standard however, because it keeps you captive to the raging current of demands on which you’re being carried along. Sure, you can use your oars to maneuver a little this way or that way, but you’re not in control. Unless you isolate time for thoughtfully determining your objectives and planning your actions accordingly, you’re destined to live in reactive mode, at the mercy of the current.

But if you’re willing to invest just 2% of your workweek to use the Time Savvy planning process (15 minutes each Monday through Friday, assuming you work a total of 60 hours, including nights and weekends), you’ll be able to step out of the river and navigate your path –both daily and longer term – proactively.

2. Organize yourself, your info, and your technology
“I know it looks like a mess, but I know what’s in those piles!” “It’s not that bad, it only takes me 6 clicks to get to the folder I need.” “The last time my inbox was empty? Are you kidding?”

You’ve heard the anecdotes about how much time is wasted looking for things that by all rights you should NOT have spend ANY extra time finding. Huge amounts of time and stress will be saved when you: 1) organize yourself and your environment properly, and 2) devote time to maintaining that organization.

From your furniture and desk organizers, to how you store your physical and digital files, to the software you use to do to your work and manage your practice – all have a tremendous impact on your productivity.

3. Capture and review your tasks using “The 5 Buckets”
To-do lists. Maybe you scribble them on stickies and scraps of paper. Maybe you have long lists of them in Outlook or your practice management software task list (some of which you do, most of which you ignore). Maybe you create a new list each day on a legal pad, cross items off as you complete them, and then carry over unfinished tasks to tomorrow’s list. Maybe you just keep your to-do’s in your head.

All of these approaches compromise your ability to take control of your schedule as they leave way too many open loops in your head.

The Time Savvy System provides a simple five category structure to capture and organize all the tasks you need done.  This way, you can trust your list to guide you in your daily and long term planning.  And you won’t have to worry about what you may be forgetting.

You learn how to collect the myriad to-do’s that pop into your head, and how to capture them as verb-based “next actions” rather than as mere noun-based names or ideas. And you learn how to systematically use the Bucket system in your daily and longer-term planning so that you’re focusing on the right actions at the right time.

4. Prioritize and schedule specific activities
Given that there will always be more things that could be done than you have time to actually do, your productivity is a function of the choices you make about where to put your attention at any one time. The challenge embedded in this obvious truth is maintaining a calm awareness of being in control of your choices, in order to make the best decisions the majority of the time.

And by regularly using the Bucket system as the trustworthy repository of all the potential activities and actions on your plate, you can choose more wisely and more confidently what to put into to your “white space” (i.e., the blocks of time that show up as free on your calendar).

Here’s the drill: You have so many hours of white space on a given day. During your morning planning time, you review your buckets to decide what activities you’ll work on during that time. Some of those activities will be related to legal work, some to business development, some to administrative tasks, some to personal items. You then block out time on your calendar during your morning planning so you have an outline of your day that’s based on a thoughtful assessment of your responsibilities, and so that no-one else can put something on your calendar thinking that you’re “free.”

Thoughtful choices about what to work on when – this is the essence of effective prioritizing and scheduling.  And it’s a process you can master.

5. Delegate and Supervise to build capacity
By not delegating effectively, you are wasting your valuable time on tasks that can and should be handled by someone lower down the ladder. You’ve built inadequate leverage of your production resources into your firm structure and your ability to increase profitability relies too heavily on your own long hours. This is a stressful and self-defeating approach.

If you permit the easy rationale that “I can do it better, quicker, easier” to become a self-fulfilling prophesy, you won’t assign work to your legal or support staff, and instead you’ll hold on to too much of it yourself. The negative impact is multiplied — not only are you overextended, but you’re failing to develop your people and also likely to be harming your clients’ ability to communicate directly and quickly with your firm.

If you are one of the many attorneys who has a love/hate relationship with the notion of delegation — longing for its benefits but stymied by how to realize it for your firm — the TimeSavvy System teaches you how to master the art of delegation to ensure that you and others in your firm are maximizing effectiveness.

6. Optimize procedures and systems
Most attorneys tolerate far too many inefficiencies in how routine work gets done.  If you haven’t nailed down the most efficient production and administrative procedures, you’re bleeding revenue, compromising work product (and/or taking too long to complete it), and contributing to staff and client frustration.

Staff members may not be able to locate a file or document at critical moments — a phone call from a client, opposing counsel, or clerk, for instance. Case notes, client conversations, document drafts, important evidence — all can be scattered among the numerous legal and support staff who participate in a client matter. You’ll also tend to fail to adequately track time schedules, deadlines, delegation and supervision tasks.

Every main category of activity – from client acquisition to servicing matters, from client communication to billing and collecting fees – can be examined from a “project management” perspective.  How is each routine procedure getting done now?  How can it be improved?  How well is your technology deployed?  Where is it helping or hurting?  How can it be made more effective?

The TimeSavvy System provides an organized structure for identifying what to improve, how to improve it, and how to get all stakeholders on board so that the improvements are embraced and consistently employed.

7. Manage expectations and communications
Your overall effectiveness in managing your time is directly proportional to how well you negotiate and manage the expectations that flow between you and those with whom you interact.  Whether clients, lateral colleagues, superiors, or staff, you – and they – have come to live with certain standards and boundaries of communication and performance.  Some of these standards and boundaries serve you well, but many don’t.

Here are just a few questions to consider: How do you express your firm’s performance standards to new clients?  How do you handle it when staff, colleagues, or clients are late for a meeting?  Are you regularly on time for your commitments? Do you take on more than you should? Do you have clear protocols for when a staff member can enter – and cannot — an event on your calendar?  What do you do to help others work with you more effectively?

The TimeSavvy System identifies the ways you’re not proactively managing expectations and guides you in successfully re-framing these expectations.

8. Understand and grow yourself
It turns out that “emotional intelligence” and natural “work style” are as important to long-term business success as intellectual capacity. Learning how to identify your blind spots and adjust your thinking and behavior accordingly is one of those “soft” skills that often makes or breaks the complex work of becoming more productive.

There’s no doubt about it, changing one’s self isn’t easy.  Learning how to stretch into new ways of working takes focus and effort.  Whether it’s choosing to delegate tasks you previously held on to, or accepting greater structure in your schedule, or allowing yourself to truly embrace a vision of extraordinary success, you’ll benefit from the exercises and routines you’ll learn through the TimeSavvy System.