• He picked up the phone and made a call.
• He spoke slowly and told a story about how the gift basket was received and how everyone on the team appreciated it.
• He expressed sincere thanks.

The lawyer was delighted by the message.

In these pre-Christmas days many of us working in the legal sector are sending and receiving gifts.  Often times in the interest of expediency we will send a quick email of thanks and certainly that is sufficient to check the proper etiquette box.  I encourage you though to take just an extra moment and make a phone call instead.  Happiness is contagious.

In their blog post for the Harvard Business Review,  Four Ways Women Stunt Their Careers Unintentionally, Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt discuss the small shifts in thinking and perspective that can help women professionals:

“What we’ve found in our work is that career momentum for women is not about adding job skills but about changing everyday thinking and behaviors. We don’t think the majority of high-performing women need to make major changes. Small adjustments in how they think and act can improve not only how confident they seem, but how confident they feel.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Coaching is an effective tool for surfacing confidence challenges and addressing them.  Lack of confidence is not something women just have to “live with”.  If you lack confidence then I urge you to work with a coach or other related professional to help you grow your appreciation for your strengths and attributes.

Schedule a meeting with yourself.

Go somewhere where you can be undisturbed.  If you stay in your office turn of your email and blackberry.  Work on your project-list, to-do list, and calendar, and spend time reviewing what you finished in the past week.  Treat this meeting with the respect you would give to a client meeting.  Put it in your calendar and don’t book over it.  This ritual is very effective for being mindful of how you are spending your time.

Here’s a Harvard Business Review blog post with great additional information:
How to Stay Focused on What’s Important by Gina Trapani

Best wishes for a productive September!

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.

The author introduces the C.R.A.P method of filing.  C.R.A.P stands for chronological, random ascending pile. This method of document storage can be effective for those with a highly accurate memory for linking documents to moments in time.  For example, say I have a pile in my office that I started in November last year. (And please know I have no such pile as I completed a thorough reorganisation of my office in early January!) I need to pull out the invitation to a charity event that was mailed to me in early December.  Using the C.R.A.P filing system I can move through the strata, and given the pile has risen to about a foot high in 3 months, the December document is likely to be found in the bottom half.  In about 5 minutes I will have found the document in question.

Problems with the C.R.A.P. system?  Pets.  Children. Other people.  It is all too easy for innocent furry creatures to knock over a pile; a child to enjoy playing in the piles like leaves in the fall; or a well-meaning partner who puts the chronology into disarray.

Another problem with the system? The aging brain.  As people age all of a sudden they find they cannot remember which pile is which, and when did that letter arrive anyway?

The truth is, at some point most of us most migrate to a better system.  There are numerous options.  My preferred method is the simplest.

Filing A to Z.  Get yourself boxes of hanging file folders and plain manila envelopes, a labeller, and a shredder.  (The David Allen approach.  For more on this read Getting Things Done.  His system is complex, but if you choose not to adopt it in its entirety there are many chunks that can be scavenged into your own personal system.)

Assure yourself that Rome was not built in a day and allot yourself a scant 5 minutes at a time for filing. (While I advocate the five-minutes at a time approach to catching up on filing, I never practice it.  I am an all at once, spend the afternoon up to my elbows in paper, and wrestle it to the ground kind of person. If that is what works best for you, go for it!)

Slowly but surely work your way through the pile.  Either keep it and file or throw it away. And if you can’t decide, put it aside and keep filing.  Read Julie Morgenstern‘s post Weed Out Papers  and then get started.  If you are hunting for an organization road map to follow try her book Organizing from the Inside Out .

Allocate one manila folder to one hanging file folder.  Use the labeller to make nice neat labels.

When in a year or more time the file cabinets are full – purge to make room.

For the digitally-advanced get one of the latest scanners and quickly scan rather than file your documents and store on your hard-drive.  I am a big fan of this idea but this would require purchasing a more state-of-the-art scanner than my current version.  Also, I know that I cannot divest myself entirely of paper files so this would be half-way measure.

To tackle collections of business cards the simple answer is get on Linked-In.  Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started.  First step is to set up a simple profile.  This takes between 5 minutes to an hour depending on how detailed you want to get.  Next, using the handy application on Linked In, connect it to your Outlook contact list and select those people you wish to connect with and send them invitations.   This takes about 5 minutes.  Now it’s time to turn to the pile of business cards.  Sort through the pile and pull out those people you actually want to be connected with.  Throw out the rest.  Then look the people up on Linked In and invite them to connect with you.  The beauty of Linked In is that each individual keeps their own profile updated and you receive alerts when they have a new job, address, or other related news.

Bottom-line, getting organized is worth the time spent for the energy it frees up and mental clarity it brings.

1. Update your contact list. This contact list will include your clients, past-clients, contacts and referral sources. Once you’ve updated it, review the list and develop your “A” list of contacts. This is a short list of the most important people in terms of new business opportunities.  While there are many people we care about and we would like to invest time in, the “A” list simply helps us to prioritise.  In many cases people on the “A” list will be clients and past clients.  In some areas of practice such as commercial litigation they may be referral sources.

2. Make yourself a weekly connect with list.  Many of my clients develop the habit of setting aside some time on a Sunday afternoon or evening to think about who they want to take action to connect with in the coming week.  It helps to have at your fingertips your short list of priority contacts. Action for a local contact may be to set up a face-to-face coffee or lunch meeting.  Or it may be to connect with them in some other valuable way.  Is there a legal update you can send them? The guiding question to consider is “how can I add value?”

3.  What gets scheduled gets done.  This past year has been about schedule mastery both for my coaching clients and for my own practice.  Get your commitments into your calendar.  Block off time for them.  AND respect the time you have blocked off for these commitments by not scheduling over it.  Schedule time for connecting with people.

4. Focus on listening.  This is one skill that seems easy and yet is surprisingly difficult.  The more our minds are filled with deadlines, the more our blackberry buzzes, the harder it gets to listen.  In your business development meetings put the emphasis on listening and learning about what’s going on for your contact personally and professionally.  What challenges are they facing?  What are they most excited about?  What’s most important to them?  Seek out opportunities to help and to add value. 
Put your blackberry away so that you can turn your full attention to the conversation.  A key step in business development is “discovery”.  That means asking open ended questions and learning all that you can over the course of one meeting or many about your contact and his/her business.  This is how you discover where the opportunities lie.

5.  Track your actions and your time.  Make a commitment to invest a set number of hours weekly on business development.  If you want to dabble then give it 2 hours a week.  If you want to make a serious effort then set aside 4 or more hours.  (This includes time spent planning, emailing, lunching, attending networking events – everything!) Keep a running list of who you are connecting with and what you are learning.   Review your notes to ensure you are following up when and where you need to, and to evaluate what’s working and what is not.

And here are some other great resources to explore:

When you have listened and uncovered opportunities it is time to talk about the benefits of you or your firm’s services.  Here’s a helpful post from Theda C. Snyder that explains features and benefits.

Check out Susan Van Dyke’s post on 10 tips to revitalize your practice with healthy legal marketing habits.

And finally, don’t miss Paula Black’s recent post tip Be yourself.

BEFORE (1)

Acted for a clean energy company in multiple rounds of venture capital led financing.

AFTER (1)

A clean energy firm engaged [FIRM’S NAME] to help the start-up through multiple rounds of venture capital-led financing.

BEFORE (2)

Representing a health sciences company and its European subsidiary in an action for infringement of two European patents for evacuated, plastic blood collection tubes brought against members of a competing health sciences group in the Patents County Court.

AFTER (2)

A health sciences company and its European subsidiary engaged our firm to assist them in an action for infringement of two European patents for evacuated, plastic blood collection tubes brought against members of a competing health sciences group in the Patents County Court. 

By shifting the primary focus to the client and away from the law firm the experience bullets are more interesting to read and less repetitive.  Next time you revise your practice group or personal profile on the web I recommend you read Doug Stern’s post on and try out his recommendation.