Ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day? You’re definitely not alone. But with one single mindset shift, you can free yourself up to do what you love to do, what you’re most effective at, and how you make the biggest impact on your law firm.
Here’s what I mean: Stop trying to manage your time, and instead manage your priorities.
Your time goes where you decide to focus it. When you get clear on your priorities and then focus exclusively on those priorities, you’ll start to feel less overwhelmed.
As a business owner, your role is all about moving resources from a lower level of output to a higher level of output. If you are capped out every single day on what you can do, then consider how you can free yourself up so that you can gain back additional hours and apply them towards activities that yield a higher output for your law firm.
If you’re spending a lot of time managing your calendar, checking emails, assigning out tasks to people, and following up manually, you’re not making the best use of your time and expertise. If you were freed up from those tasks, you could focus on working on the business, developing your team, meeting with clients, litigating cases, spending time in the courtroom — whatever it is that you love to do, are most effective at, and are most uniquely equipped to do.
Find the opposite of yourself so you can focus on the things you enjoy, the things that bring the most value to the business, to your clients, to your team, and so on. Bring in someone to do the things you don’t want to do — someone who does love to do those things and gets to leverage their unique strengths to do.
How do you know what you’re wasting your time on? How do you know what you should delegate?
Identify first where your time is going. If you start logging it, you might find that you spend a lot of time refreshing emails, data entry, and all sorts of administrative tasks that actually prevent you from focusing on the key things that may move your business forward.
Here’s a great book on this very topic: The One Thing.
Reading this book and implementing the strategies within it will also help you prioritize. If you come into work every single day knowing in advance the top three focuses for the day, you will eliminate overwhelm and indecision from your life. The reality of it is this: those top three are the 80% that moves the business forward. Everything else is just noise.
When you prioritize the right things, you will make incredible progress.
Look at time management as priority management, and start by being clear on your priorities.
Until you value your time, you’re not going to do anything with it.
If you agree or disagree with anything Michael said here, he wants to know about it. Text him at 404-531-7691 to share your thoughts.
