Practice Time Management Tips for the Overworked Attorney
It is odd to think about finding ways to reduce your workload at a time when millions of people are out of work. But, for the businesses that are still in practice, the need to properly allocate time for work and time for everything else is still essential to maximizing your firm’s in-house efficiency. In fact, in the legal field, your ability to juggle these tasks may be even more crucial to your mental and overall health with the added stress of a pandemic than it was even before. As busy and distracted as you may be, there are some practice management tips that can help you achieve optimal productivity: 
1. Stop Multi-tasking
The practice of law obviously requires you wear many hats. The practice of law, indeed, involves more than just the practice of law - managing administrative tasks, marketing, business development and billing and collections are just a few task you will have to manage when running a law practice. Although many of us laud the ability to multi-task, this ability can often make us less efficient instead of more efficient as it causes us to switch our attention and focus between many activities, producing often a “good enough” but less than stellar outcome or product for the client.
In order to function and perform at your highest level, attempt to throw all of your focus and concentration into one task at a time, and leave the other low yield activities to others on your team who are more adept at completing those tasks.
2. Avoid Overwork by Ditching Perfection
Long gone are the days where people defined themselves by their work ethic and the fact that could put in 90+ hours a week. Although a strong work ethic is admirable, overwork only leads to fatigue, stress, anxiety, and many other mental health concerns. When you are involved in a field that is already stressful even in good times, and has a low margin for error, it becomes critical to continue to function and perform at your highest levels. No client was ever best served by a legal representative who was overworked and/or burned out.
Those attorneys that are the most productive and the most efficient typically know how to leverage their time effectively by prioritizing their schedules and then delegating other tasks to a service partner such as a legal outsourcing company – it is a simple and quick solution to many of the problems that keep attorneys consistently working late hours while their productivity remains low. Although many lawyers may feel like they are losing control by outsourcing work, those who are the most successful at leveraging their in-house efficiency have abandoned the philosophy “If I want it done right, I have to do it myself.”
3. Build a Competent Team you Trust
You do not have to do it yourself to have it done right. Many attorneys are allowing their livelihood to overtake their actual life by adopting this philosophy. If there is simply too much to do at work either reduce your caseload or partner with another professional to handle the details.
Building a team you trust can happen in a number of ways: it can happen by you hiring additional staff in-house and investing in their professional development, or you can hire outside professionals who have a specific skill or knowledge that you need to complete a specific project. The key to managing your practice in the most effective way is to attract and retain top talent, and to utilize that talent to help you accomplish the most that you can in the allotted time that you have.
Although Kimberlee Gee Legal may not be able to offer advice for your exercise routines or when to squeeze in some time to binge your favorite show, when it comes to reducing your workload and freeing up time from the office, our legal outsourcing services may be a worthwhile option.