Legal professionals work hard to get the job done, but they also have to work smart to ensure their time at work is spent efficiently. This means adopting tactics at work to maximize your productivity, as getting work done more quickly without sacrificing quality obviously benefits both you and your law firm immensely. Here are five excellent tips for legal professionals looking to boost their own productivity at work.
Prioritize by Descending Difficulty
If you do the worst, most painful, most difficult thing on your daily agenda, the rest of your day is going to be easy in comparison. It’s a simple fact: tackling your tasks by descending difficulty means that the most energy-consuming tasks get knocked off the list first. It’s also psychologically comforting, as you don’t have a phone call with a problem client or a particularly tedious legal draft hanging over your head all day. Procrastination and productivity are mutually exclusive.
Make Drafting Documents Easier through Templates and Online Tools
When your job involves drafting documents that share a lot of similarities with each other, a lot of needless and time-wasting repetition can be eliminated simply by using interchangeable templates. Likewise, using online tools to organize these documents can also help streamline the document drafting process — whether it’s Google Docs, Microsoft OneNote, or some other service, having templates available in the cloud means you can draft docs wherever you have access to these online resources.
Block Out Time To Work Without Interruptions
Almost everyone works their best when left alone for specific lengths of time. Nothing’s more disruptive to concentration and productivity than a series of small interruptions, especially when they’re low priority ones. If you want to maximize your productivity, block out time that you can work without being interrupted — tell office workers you’ll be unavailable until a specific time or set an autoresponse for your email to carve out some undisturbed work time.
Delegation Isn’t Necessarily the Best Solution
Have you ever delegated a task to an associate attorney or a paralegal, only to be frustrated by a lack of progress? Based on the task, it might be because the decision to delegate might have been the wrong one. Instead of farming out small but tedious tasks, you might want to consider finding a technology-based solution that makes completing these tasks on your own quicker and easier to accomplish than when delegated to another. Whether it’s document management or something else, there are a number of applications or services to that end.
Become Tech-Savvy in Ways that Support Your Productivity
Speaking of technology-based solutions, a broader integration of technological solutions can certainly pave the way for heightened productivity, but only if applied appropriately. While it might be tempting for your law firm to install an automated phone tree to direct calls instead of an administrative assistant, you having someone manually answering and routing calls can help in letting you work undisturbed while engaged in critical tasks by taking messages or sending callers to voicemail.
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