Don't Be a Slave to Your Email

I'll let you in on a secret: the world will not end if you don't check your email. Honestly, if something is THAT important, sending it in an email is not the best option. So why do many of us sacrifice our lawyer productivity by developing email addiction?                                                       

The Internet has become a mainstay in our lives and with it comes the convenience of email. Unfortunately, with this convenience also comes a degree of laziness, and many of us are guilty of relying on email to do almost all our communicating, whether it's important or not.

Analyze Your Daily Email Usage

When trying to increase your lawyer productivity you need to identify what's taking up the most time in your work day. Test your email addiction by recording every time period you spend checking and replying to email. At the end of the day, take this number and multiply by 5. There's the amount of time you're feeding your email addiction in a 40-hour work week.

This is time better spent working on cases or enjoying with your family. Especially if you use a billable hour model, this crack in your lawyer productivity can be costing you money out of your pocket!

Breaking Your Email Addiction

One of the best methods I've found for increasing my lawyer productivity is to employ time management strategies. I love using the time block method to curtail my email addiction, because it sets limits to when I can check my email and for how long.

This method involves 2 parts: setting up a constant time to check email and developing a hierarchy for how to handle those emails. Setting the time is easy. Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to handle your typical volume email. This should be at the start of your day.

Determining how you spend that half-hour or so is the really important part to increase lawyer productivity. Obviously, an email regarding client records needed for your upcoming trial date takes precedence over a link to a YouTube video of kittens.

If you're getting too many fun emails from co-workers and friends on your work account, politely tell them to stop. You have a work email and a personal email for this very reason. Once you eliminate funny news stories and chain letters from your work email you'll find it less necessary to check it every 20 minutes.

While you probably can't stop using email completely, just like kicking any addiction, it's easier to do when you have friends doing the same. Try to create good lawyer productivity habits in your office by getting everyone on an email addiction reform schedule. Ask that everyone cut down on unnecessary messages, talk in person when appropriate, and soon your whole office will be email lightweights!

At Great Legal Marketing, we focus on saying NO to ineffective traditional lawyer marketing. We seek out new strategies to market to our ideal clients in ways they'll actually respond to. So how do you get started? Get a FREE report and CD from legal marketing guru, Ben Glass. http://www.greatlegalmarketing.com/

Ben will teach you how to: stop marketing like every other lawyer on the block; grow the kind of practice you can be proud of; and still get home in time for dinner. Contact us today - (703) 591-9829.