Our brains and bodies work in rhythms. We are physically designed to work best by cycling between periods of energy spending and renewing.

Fact: “Research in the 1970s showed that 90 to 120 minute ultradian rhythms (ulta dies – many times a day) account for the ebb and flow of our energy throughout the day. Physiological measures such as heart rate, hormonal levels, muscle tension and brain-wave activity all increase during the first part of the cycle. After an hour or so, these measures start to decline and the body begins to crave a period of rest and recovery. Signals include a desire to yawn and stretch, hunger pangs, increased tension, an inclination to procrastinate.” – The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Fact: Your brain can only operate at peak capacity for periods of up to 90 minutes.
“Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.” – TheEnergyProject.com, Tony Schwartz

Work intensively for up to 90 minutes at a time with brief ten minute periods of recuperation to walk around the office, stretch, or fill a glass of water. Notice the impact of this practice on the quality and effectiveness of your output.

Mary is unhappy. While she enjoys commercial litigation files she is stressed all the time. The partners provide her with positive feedback as do her clients but every time she makes any kind of error she takes it as a sign of failure.

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Some might say the answer is simple. Sandra just needs to take a different approach. Sandra needs to do fewer revisions, record all her time and let the partners decide what needs to be written off.

As for Mary, shouldn’t she just pay attention to the positive feedback from the partners and her peers and realise that she is good at her work?

If only it were so simple.

Sandra and Mary are each in the grip of their inner critic and it is obscuring their judgment.

To learn more about dealing with your inner critic please visit my article on the Canadian legal weblog Slaw.ca.

The next things we will look at is knowing and understanding when perfection is not required, or sometimes attainable, and how time management is important to stay on track.

Practice Three: Good Enough

Not every piece of work requires the same painstaking care and attention. Mastering the ability to recognize when the job is good enough is a vital way to gain back portions of your work day. 

Sandra was a perfectionist who was doing multiple drafts of simple letters and memos. The time she was investing in these was taking away from the time she had to spend on more complex work. As a result she was not recording chunks of time and was always fighting deadlines. Since she began integrating a Good Enough strategy into her practice she has caught up on her backlog of files. Now she will do a quick first draft of her letters and her veteran legal secretary polishes the draft and sends it to her for her signature. Her clients appreciate the shorter memos that get straight to the point.  And she has more time for the complex legal work she excels at.

The principle of Good Enough is especially valuable for you perfectionists out there – save your painstaking eye for detail for the projects that most deserve it.

Practice Four: Beat The Clock

Related to the principle of Good Enough, rationing time is a strategy for maximizing the ability to plough through a to-do-list in less time. For the smaller and simpler tasks such as reporting letters and memos, assess how much time each project is worth then work to complete the task within the allotted time.

I have been using this strategy to manage the amount of time I spend preparing for presentations. I used to endlessly revise my presentation slides and speaking notes. The time that went into each presentation was excessive. Now I manage my time carefully and give myself a time budget for investing in the preparation of each presentation. The result is that my work is focused and I often finish ahead of schedule. The overall quality of my presentations has improved.

Jeremy felt like it had been a long time since he had a life. Days and weekends were spent at the office, he’d gained 20 pounds in a year, and his wife had gone on vacation to Mexico with her best friend Gary the hairdresser – again.

Sandra and Jeremy are not alone. These days it seems like the standard answer to “Hi, how are you?“ has become “Busy, and you?” Having a successful professional life and keeping the plants alive and your partner speaking to you requires a whole new set of disciplines.

The higher we climb in our careers the more projects we juggle. Our work becomes increasingly complex. The deadlines are just as short as ever. To survive and thrive under these conditions it is critical to develop new skills and strategies for mastering the demands. In my work as a professional coach I have come across ten simple practices that have made a significant difference for me and for my clients.

They are called practices – because they are simply routines and approaches for you to try out in your work day. Implement them one at a time and observe the effect each one has on your performance. I shared these last week with the attendees at the CBA Women Lawyer’s Forum Annual Conference in Vancouver and was delighted to discover this approach to work is catching on and some of the senior women lawyers were applying practices like these successfully in their work.

Over the next month I will be posting the series. Let me know how they work for you.

Practice One:  Morning Ritual

Open the day with a planning session. Review priorities and upcoming deadlines. Plan the work schedule for the day. Take a short break followed by focused work on the top priority for the day. Try not to spend any time on your email until later in the morning. If necessary have an assistant review the morning email for any urgent messages requiring attention.

Practice Two: One Thing at a Time

I remember back in the 90’s when I had “skilled multi-tasker” proudly highlighted in my resume. Now I would have to say that I am a multi-tasker in recovery. I guarantee this post was written without stopping to check email.

Multi-tasking is over-rated. Once paraded as a virtue, it is now getting known for what it truly is – a time-waster and productivity killer. The human brain can’t multi-task attention. In Brain Rules neurologist John Medina clearly indicates why multi-tasking doesn’t work: “Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more mistakes.”

Create zones for intense and focused work during the day. Turn off the email. Close the door. Focus on just one project for up to ninety minutes. Observe how this time for uninterrupted concentration impacts the quality of your work.

This summer why not engage in some quality lawn chair thinking?  Sit back, enjoy some sunshine and with a cold drink in hand allow yourself to contemplate. Start by exploring your strengths.  What have you got going for you? How are you making the most of your strengths in your professional life? Here are some of my favourite strength questions:

• What do you consider to be your greatest abilities and talents?
• How are you employing these gifts at this time?  How could you make the most of them?
• Where do you find yourself most often wanting to help or be of assistance to others?  What are the things that you are most motivated to do?
• What would your closest friends say are your top ten strengths?
• How are you/could you put those strengths to work in your practice?

Next, move on to some goal setting.  What is it you want to make happen in your legal practice?  Do you want to grow your practice?  Bring in new clients?  Move your practice to another firm or in-house?  Here are some questions to lead you in your lawn chair pondering:

• What would count as a really big professional win for you?  This question is a way to explore some of what motivates you at the office.  One client once told me “having a patent client make a huge amount of money from their invention”.  Another client told me “winning the lottery and never having to come back here” which just said loud and clear that a career transition was called for!
• Looking forward five years what do you want to be doing?  This question gives you a chance to think beyond the next twelve months.
• Who are your preferred clients? It’s always good to explore who are the clients you most enjoy working with.  What is it about them?  How can you get more clients like them?
• What are the opportunities right now you are not taking advantage of?  This question is a helpful reminder about the opportunities around you.

And the best questions are quite simply:

• What do you enjoy most about your legal practice?  And the converse, what do you least enjoy? What percentage of your time at work is spent, on a weekly basis, doing what you most enjoy and conversely least enjoy?

These get to the heart of what lightens your life and what weighs you down.  Ultimately whether you are on a job hunt or in a secure position in a law firm, the question always comes down to: “how can you get more of the good stuff on your plate and the bad stuff off?”  When you move out of your comfortable summer seat and into action what can you do to make your work life more enjoyable?

I was just speaking to a lawyer friend I worked with a few years back. I asked him the usual “how are you doing?” and he replied with a great “happily ever after” success story.

He works in a particular niche area of litigation and because of the seeds he planted over several years he is now the recognized expert in the niche and getting the biggest and best files. He absolutely loves his legal practice.

Here’s what made it happen: 

We met when he was a senior associate who had just joined the firm as a lateral hire. He had a goal to build up his practice in a particular niche litigation area. He’d been junior counsel on a number of important cases and it was time for him to take the lead.

At that time there were not many files in the area. But the prospects for the future were good. We developed his personal marketing plan. The emphasis of the plan was on building relationships with referral sources and potential clients and raising his profile.

He invested a great deal of time and effort in developing and expanding his network of contacts. He used his lunch hours for meeting people and developing existing relationships. He wrote articles and presented at conferences.  Always with a focus on the niche area of law.

Then he took the initiative and pitched the idea of a book on the subject to a legal publisher who agreed.  Of course not everyone at the firm supported the project.  Some wondered if the time might be better spent on further relationship building.  It was a gamble. Nonetheless he persisted and the first edition was published, followed by a second edition the following year.

Still the files were not coming in.  Had all that effort been for nothing?

All this marketing and business development and still only a small trickle of files. What was crucial is that he did not give up. Nor did his firm.

He began speaking at the law school. Kept writing. Kept presenting. Kept relationship building. And he stayed the course.

The word spread and finally after four years the files began to flow in. My friend is now the lawyer “who wrote the book” on this area of law. He has a completely full plate of his favorite type of legal work and is having the time of his life.

It’s a real success story.

And the firm?  The firm supported his investments of non-billable time, partners gave him work to keep his plate full and he was made partner even before the tides had turned in his favor.

What did he do right? He knew what he wanted. He completely focused his marketing and business development efforts on the goal. He invested a lot of time and effort. He took the initiative and created opportunities for raising his profile. He was not dissuaded by the naysayers.

And he just didn’t give up.

The first chapter of my guide starts with Mission, Vision, and Values - three simple concepts that are easy to get mixed up. 

Your Mission Statement describes what your firm does and who your clients are.  It captures the very essence of your practice, the relationship with the client.  A Mission Statement is focused on what you do in the present.

A Vision Statement describes how the future will look if the firm achieves its mission. A Mission Statement gives the overall purpose of an organization, while a Vision Statement describes a picture of the preferred future result your firm is after.  Your Vision Statement will tell a compelling story about the future you are going to create. 

Once you have your Mission and Vision figured out, it is important to take some time to think about values.  Values are the core beliefs at the heart of your firm’s culture, and are the foundation of all the actions you will take, and investments you will make. 

Here is a list of questions to guide you through the process of determining your firm’s Mission, Vision, and Values.  You can also use these questions for developing your own personal plan.

Mission questions:

What do we do?
Who do we do it for?
What is the benefit to the clients?

Vision questions:

What do we ultimately want to achieve with our practice, in terms of service to others?
What do we want the firm to be known for? 
What reputation do we wish the firm to have in the business, legal, or other communities?

Value questions:

What professional and personal attributes do we value most?
What professional and personal qualities do we wish to be known for in the legal community and by our clients?
What qualities and attributes do we wish to characterize our firm?

The answers to these questions form the foundation of your plan.  The next step is strategy.  Stay tuned for that next week!

If you have your own questions and ideas on this topic, I would really enjoy hearing from you.  I am always interested in learning powerful new questions for exploring Missing, Vision, and Values.   If you have some you’d like to share, or other suggestions, please add them in a comment below or send me an email.