“It’s out of my control due to unexpected client demand, team interruptions…” or, “I’m fine until someone is away,” or the classic, “Once I finish this matter or hire that person it will be better next month,” …until it isn’t.
These are dangerous beliefs which hit driven people especially. At worst it will leave you close to burnout. At best you become the biggest block to the growth of your business.
Ask yourself what is the root cause of working longer hours? Whatever it is, it’s lazy to throw hours at it. It takes skill, new habits, planning and focus to achieve more while working fewer, more productive hours. It took me several months to build the habits, clients are often quicker.
How do you create more time?
You can’t of course, we all have the same amount. What we can do is develop the skills and habits to enable us to focus on the most important things. They are usually not the most urgent or demanding and get pushed back when we are ‘too busy.’
These key areas will make a difference to your working life, your business, productivity and profitability:
1. Have clear goals
There’s ALWAYS TOO MUCH TO DO – accept it and stop endeavouring to do too much. A common trait of successful people is writing down their goals, giving clarity on where they are headed. Once you have clear goals the skill and habits to ensure you focus on high value work are crucial.
2. Planning
Planning is critical to ensure the proactive growth of your business.
Failure to plan is a plan to fail and for many law firm owners, who are caught up in the day to day running of their organisation, finding time to plan for their business can seem impossible.
Plan systematically – big picture, yearly, quarterly, weekly, daily. It’s one of the highest value habits you can build.
Master this essential skill, and it will give you the personal clarity to avoid overwhelm or deviate off course, to foresee challenges and reflect.
3. Create the good habit of a time audit
Since your time is of greater value than money and you can’t run a business without tracking money, why not track your time too?
Alongside a quick weekly plan, it’s useful to tally up where your time was spent the previous week. This can be achieved by habitually noting how your day is spent on a simple time audit sheet (or App). It holds you accountable, avoids ‘drifting’ and, like all key performance indicators, enables reflection and to adapt monthly.
Consider if the work is leveraged, i.e., you do it once and benefit from it repeatedly, versus time spent on something that will need doing again. Learning and taking action, systemising, training your team (and recording it!), planning…are highly leveraged versus another client call only you can do.
4. The 4Ds of delegation
For clients who want to work fewer hours and scale their businesses faster, I take them through the process of the 4D’s of delegation.
You may be familiar with the 3D rule: do it, ditch it, or delegate it. However, the fourth, defer, is crucial once you have clarity on your priority goals.
It doesn’t mean you’re not going to do it. Park it on a list for next quarter, or to delegate when you have resources. You achieve increasingly more by focusing on the really important things – developing your skills in leadership and delegation.
Beware of micro managing delegated tasks or at the other end of the scale, management by abdication – handing over a task and running. Proper delegation takes time, training, support, and empowerment.
Coach, incentivise and support, advise on what hasn’t worked to avoid wasted time and agree check-in times and support, but leave them knowing you have faith.
5. Breaks
It’s essential to schedule breaks. Proper breaks have proven critical to high productivity and to avoiding eventual burnout and ultimately giving up – a huge killer of businesses, especially the 20% that make it past 5 years.
The most successful, enlightened, business owners and managers allot time for each aspect of their life. They know to limit the hours of work and to have quality time. They are not afraid to work long hours, but only when necessary. Their thinking time is when the magic happens.
Finally, here’s an exercise to focus the mind on how much working time you have ahead of you. It’s something I ask my new clients to do.
Start at years you expect to be working, take away weekends, time you want to spend with family, holidays, sleeping and you’re left with a finite number of hours.
Time is precious! How are you spending yours? Now is the time to put your systems and planning in place and experience the benefits of a proper break.
