More is better, unless it isn’t

May 11, 2021 by
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The more books you read, the more likely you are to find the information you seek. The more people you know, the more likely you are to develop valuable relationships. The more marketing strategies you try, the more likely you are to find the one that works best for you.

All true. Unless they aren’t.

Because there’s a lot that can get in the way.

Reading a lot of books is a waste of time if they’re not the right books. The more people you engage with, the more opportunities there are for arguments and bad decisions. The more marketing strategies you use, the more opportunities there are to become distracted or spend time or money best spent on something else.

So, it depends.

Successful people get a lot done because they don’t try to do everything.

They reject most projects. Avoid most tasks. Take on fewer commitments.

Fewer projects started means less time spent on research, less money spent on failed ventures, and fewer projects abandoned. Fewer unfinished projects leads to more clarity and better results.

Fewer books read means fewer hours wasted reading things you already know or don’t need, and fewer opportunities to follow bad advice.

Fewer marketing strategies means less time spent learning and doing and supervising, and less time wasted trying to improve things that provide too little return.

The lesson?

Be selective, not exhaustive. Focus on high-value activities and high-potential projects. Take on fewer relationships, read fewer books, do fewer activities that don’t align with your most important values and goals.

Do less so you can accomplish more.

If you find yourself trying to do too much, working too hard and making too little progress, don’t increase your workload, reduce it.

Take a page from the most successful people in the world and regularly ask yourself, “What can I stop doing?” and “What or who can I avoid?”

Develop the habit of saying no to most things.

Because when you use the right strategies, cultivate the right relationships, and do the right things with your time and money, the results you achieve can be so much more.

Leverage is the key to bigger and better results.

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Filed Under: Productivity, success

Want to increase your income? Take more showers

May 4, 2021 by
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73 percent of people surveyed say they get their best ideas in the shower. If you want more ideas for marketing your practice, ideas for your blog or newsletter, or ideas for ways to provide more value to your clients, you might want to strip off and get your bum wet more often.

Why do we get more ideas in the shower? Is it the same if we take a bath? Or go swimming?

I do think water is part of the answer. Something about the feeling of being back in the womb that relaxes us, perhaps, and allows our subconscious mind to bring us ideas.

I get a lot of ideas when I’m out walking, especially when I’m near a park or other greenery, or the ocean. Something about nature seems to turn on the creativity machine.

I also get ideas while driving, when I’m on autopilot and can let my subconscious mind do it’s thing.

Reading fiction and playing games are also conducive to ideation, no doubt because they stimulate our imagination, but also because they distract us from the burdens of the day.

That’s a key to creativity, isn’t it? Distracting yourself from whatever you’ve been doing or you are supposed to be doing? When you turn off your logical left brain, you turn on your creative right brain.

Which means that goofing off when you should be working isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But I also get ideas when I’m working.

I got the idea for this post during my morning browse of articles. When I saw the survey, my creative (and dirty) mind told me to write a post with the words “taking showers” in the headline.

Because I know you have a dirty mind, too.

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Filed Under: success Tagged With:

What could you improve?

April 21, 2021 by
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The other day I stopped at a light. On the corner, a building was under construction and I saw a tradesman poised on a beam, doing something with a piece of lumbar. I couldn’t tell what he was doing but I could tell he was doing it purposefully and carefully.

Like he wanted to do it right.

No doubt he’s proud of his work, I thought, and wants to do a good job so he’ll be hired again.

And because he knows his work will be scrutinized by a building inspector.

That’s when I thought about you.

You do your best work because you are a professional and you’re proud of what you do. Like the contractor, you have a client who expects and deserves your best work.

Your client is interested in the results you obtain for him, and wants to know he got his money’s worth, but he won’t “inspect” your work like a building inspector.

So it comes down to you.

From time to time, you might ask yourself a question: “If my work was inspected by the bar, by my insurance carrier, or by another attorney my client hired to get a second opinion, what would they conclude?”

Did I cut any corners? Omit steps? Make mistakes?

A little introspection is good for the soul, and the pocketbook.

But don’t stop there. Don’t focus solely on avoiding mistakes, consider ways to improve what you do well.

At the end of each case or engagement, examine the steps you took and the order in which you took them. Do you see a way to improve your process? To do a better job or get the work done more quickly? To make it easier for you to do that work for the next client?

While you’re at it, examine how you treated the client. Did you make them feel appreciated? Did you make them feel like you gave them their money’s worth?

Ask yourself questions like these and take notes. Write down what you did well and what you could improve.

Because you are your own building inspector. And you don’t want to merely be up to code, you want to be the best you can be.

Ready to take a Quantum Leap in the growth of your practice? This will show you how

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Filed Under: Client relations, Law office management, success

Daily notes: a journal by a different name

March 18, 2021 by
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I’ve tried keeping a journal and find it useful (and fun) to record my thoughts but the habit hasn’t stuck.

I’d like to try again and may have found a way to do that.

There’s a new breed of note taking apps (Roam, Obsidian, and others) and I’m trying out one of them.

One feature is a “daily notes” page that automatically appears (unless you turn off that feature), with the date and plenty of room to write. You can also set up templates to prompt you to record whatever is important to you.

Yes, it’s really a journal with a different name. But it might work because the daily notes feature is built into the app. I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to go write in my journal, I can simply add some thoughts or notes on my daily notes page when they occur to me throughout the day.

In that sense, the daily notes page work like an inbox—a place to deposit ideas and notes to be sorted, filed and worked on later.

A daily notes page also works like an “outbox”.

At the end of the day, you can record notes on what you did, what you thought, and what you plan to do later. Because it’s built into the app, it’s easy to drag or copy/paste notes written elsewhere onto the page.

What can you record in your daily notes? Anything you want:

  • What you did today, what you learned today, what you want to remember
  • Goals, plans, ideas
  • Quotes from books you read, a list of books you want to read
  • Websites and apps you want to check out
  • Questions you have about something you’re working on
  • Habits you want to track
  • New clients, new prospects, new marketing campaigns
  • Earnings, expenses, debts you need to pay, money you need to collect
  • Ideas for new projects, notes about improving your workflow, your attitude, your skills, or your well-being

Anything you did or want to do, anything you want to remember, in as little or as much detail as you want.

Some days, you’ll write hundred of words. Other days, you might write a single sentence, or nothing at all.

This morning, I wrote a few questions about the notes app I’m trying, and a few thoughts about the concept of daily notes.

At the end of the day, you can add comments and additional thoughts, and tags or labels or links to related notes. You will no doubt want to move some of those notes to other folders or pages or other apps.

Daily notes allow you to memorialize your journey and build a repository of information you can go back to help you manage your work or personal life.

Daily notes also help you hold yourself accountable to doing what you said you would do, and what you need to do to achieve your goals.

When I look at what I did and didn’t do last week, I see what I’m doing right and what I need to improve.

Yeah, I’m not sure I like that part.

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Filed Under: Law office management, Personal development, Productivity, success

I’m a professional quitter

March 5, 2021 by
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In eighth grade, I joined the wrestling team. I gave it a semester and quit when I realized I wasn’t good enough and didn’t like it.

But isn’t quitting for losers?

Everyone says

  • Work harder
  • Give it time
  • You’ll get better with practice
  • You’ll learn to like it
  • If you quit, you’ll never know how good you could be
  • Do it anyway, it’s good for you

Well-intentioned advice, I’m sure, but is it right?

Ozan Varol says that sometimes quitting might be the best thing we can do:

I’m a professional quitter. After serving on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, I quit rocket science and went to law school. After practicing law for a few years, I left to join academia. Most recently, I decided to quit that as well and give up the security of tenure to double down on popular writing and speaking.

I quit things I don’t enjoy. I give up on ideas that fail to live up to expectations. I jettison projects that no longer serve me or my mission in the world.

He acknowledges that many people quit too soon and never find out what they might have accomplished. “Yet many people persist when they should quit,” he says.

If you continually fail at something, or resist doing it, it might be a sign that you should stop doing it.

Varol notes that when we continue doing things that aren’t working for us, aside from being unhappy, we pass up the opportunity to do something else, something we might be great at and love.

Those of us who have changed careers and found success doing something else know this is true.

And what’s true for careers can also be true for work projects, marketing methods, and marriages. Quitting may not only be a viable option, it might be the best one.

So, what would you like to quit today?

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Filed Under: Personal development, success

Two clarifying questions from David Allen

February 23, 2021 by
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I spoke to a lawyer yesterday who told me he wants to continue building his practice (which is doing well) and find something he can do on the side that might one day lead to bigger and better things.

He has an itch and wanted me to help him scratch it.

Most of our time was spent talking about ways to find ideas. For now, that’s what he’s going to focus on.

At some point, after he does a lot of exploring and researching and thinking, if and when he finds an idea he wants to pursue, he’ll need to decide what to do about it.

When that time comes, I’d tell him to do what David Allen suggests in Getting Things Done:

“Ask yourself two questions: What’s the successful outcome? And, What’s the next action (logical next step) to make it happen?” Allen says, “These provide fundamental clarity for Getting Things Done, and they lie at the core of most everything I teach.”

These questions are equally valuable for parsing a task or project list as they are for choosing your future.

Whether you’re starting a new chapter in your legal career, a new work project, or a new business, ask yourself what “done” looks like for you.

As Stephen Covey said, “start with the end in mind”.

In my work, especially when I’m struggling to start a project, or complete it, asking myself, “What’s the next action?” has been a game changer.

I ask that question and it helps me figure out the best (or easiest) place to start. I come back and ask that question again and again, and it helps me figure out what to do “next”.

Go ahead, think about something you need to do that you’ve been avoiding. Look at the list of all of the tasks you need to do and ask yourself, “What’s the next action?”

Start there.

How I use GTD in Evernote

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Filed Under: Productivity, success Tagged With: ,

Easy is as easy does

February 17, 2021 by
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You’re a professional. You done this many times before. You know what to look for, what to ask, and what to do.

Let’s face it, most of the work you do is easy for you.

And you want it to be that way.

When your work is easy, you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.

You do it quickly, without second guessing yourself, making errors, or eating yourself up with stress. You get better results and happier clients, and you make a good living.

And that’s a good thing.

But you don’t want all of your work to be easy.

If things are too easy for you, you’ll get bored. You want at least some of your work to be moderately challenging, because that’s what keeps things interesting and allows you to grow.

Cases of first impression, opening new markets, new marketing initiatives, writing a book, hiring new staff, starting a new business or investment, things that take you out of your comfort zone–this is how you take your practice to a higher level.

And some of your time should be dedicated to that.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do one thing every day that scares you”.

If you’re fresh out of ideas, write and publish something. Put yourself out there for the world to see.

It will get your juices flowing and could be your ticket to the next level.

How to grow your practice with a simple email newsletter

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Filed Under: Career satisfaction, success

Practice makes pregnant

January 27, 2021 by
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In college, I lived in a dorm. If the nickname “El Konk” sounds familiar to you, you know the place.

Like most dorms, we had a rec room where we played cards, read, talked about life, and occasionally do homework.

Just outside the rec room was a hallway. The walls of that hallway were about 6 feet apart.

No, I didn’t measure them. I know how far apart they were because I’m a little over 6 feet tall and I was able to “walk” up those walls.

By putting me feet on one wall and my hands on the opposite wall, I was able to push my way up the walls, all the way to the ceiling.

Some people thought it was funny and called their friends to come look. Some thought it was cool and wanted to try it. Some thought I was nuts.

Why did I do it? Because I was curious and wanted to see if I could.

So, what’s the point of this story?

That I was in better shape when I was in college? That I was an unmitigated clown? That I drank too much?

None of the above.

In fact, there is no point to this story. It’s just something I remembered recently and thought I’d write about.

And that is the point.

Writing down memories, however pointless, is a good way to improve your writing. Any skill gets better with practice, so if writing is important to you, I suggest you write something every day.

Not legal work, something creative or fun.

You might keep a journal and write down your thoughts about the past, what’s going on in your life right now, or your dreams for the future.

Writing regularly will improve your ability to come up with ideas (because there’s no pressure to write something pithy or useful). It will also improve your ability to put your ideas into words.

Writing every day will make you a better writer.

Do it enough and who knows, you might get lucky and write something with a point, something you can use in an article or blog post.

Like I just did in this one.

Ideas you can use in your blog or newsletter

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Filed Under: success, Writing

A simple way to feel better about the future

January 18, 2021 by
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I spent extra time doing my weekly review yesterday. I dusted off some projects I had planned to work on last year and prioritized them to work on this year.

I consolidated blocks of notes I have been accumulating and made new lists about what to do next.

For a couple of hours, I ignored the current state of the world and planned my future. When I was done, I felt good.

I have things to do and I’m looking forward to doing them. No matter what the world delivers to my doorstep, I will adapt and move forward.

Because that’s all anyone can do.

I encourage you to go through your apps and lists and notes and make a new plan or update your old one. Make it simple and focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do.

When you’re done, you’ll have a renewed sense of purpose and a picture of a better future, and you’ll feel good about that future, because you have a plan.

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Filed Under: Inspiration, Productivity, success

Your idea stinks. Congratulations.

January 15, 2021 by
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Your lists are overflowing with ideas. Ideas for growing your practice, managing your investments, raising your kids, places to see and things to do and thousands of other things you saw or heard or thought.

You have pages of notes and “someday/maybe” tasks, deferred projects, techniques for getting more organized, strategies for increasing your productivity, and ways to find inner peace.

You have lists of books to read and videos to watch, ideas for blog posts and articles to write, courses to take, and websites to explore.

Am I right or am I right?

I know I’m right because I have these, too.

Let’s be honest. Let’s admit that most of these ideas aren’t very good and (thankfully) we’ll never do most of them.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop collecting bad ideas because out of that massive list of bad ideas come a few good ones.

And a few good ideas is all we need.

The thing is, if we only pay attention to good ideas, we stifle our ability to find the good ones.

Seth Godin said:

“People who have trouble coming up with good ideas, if they’re telling you the truth, will tell you they don’t have very many bad ideas. But people who have plenty of good ideas, if they’re telling the truth, will say they have even more bad ideas. So the goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”

—Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

The lesson is simple: if you want more good ideas, write down more bad ones.

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Filed Under: Content creation, Productivity, success
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