How to Stay Productive While Working From Home
This article originally appeared on Law.com
Staying productive is critical to a lawyer’s success. After all, a lawyer’s time is, quite literally, money. The ability to manage one’s time, and more importantly, one’s attention, is the key to becoming not only efficient but effective.
Being productive in the office is hard enough, given the distractions of incoming emails and chatty colleagues. The challenges of working from home, however, can be far more vexing—especially if you’re trying to teach your fourth grader how to divide fractions. Most of us went to law school to avoid math, but here we are.
Despite all the challenges, most lawyers seem to be managing the shift to remote work fairly well. But there’s always room for more and better productivity. In my new book, The Productivity Pivot, I detail a methodology that will help lawyers operate at optimal levels of productivity, with an emphasis on linking productivity to a higher purpose, such as gaining more autonomy by building a practice. Some of the tactics that are most relevant to remaining effective while working from home include the following:
Make a Better To-Do List
In 1918, one of the wealthiest and most powerful businessmen in the world went looking for help to improve the efficiency of his managers at Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Charles M. Schwab sought out the assistance of a productivity consultant named Ivy Lee. Schwab invited Lee into his office and, as the story goes, said, “Show me a way to get more things done.” Lee responded that all he needed to succeed was to be given 15 minutes with each of Schwab’s executives.
Lee spent 15 minutes with each member of Schwab’s executive team and handed each a small piece of paper. He then instructed them to do the following:
At the end of each day, write down no more than six important tasks that you must accomplish tomorrow.
Prioritize those tasks by importance.
Upon showing up for work the next day, focus only on the first task. Do not move on to the next task until finishing the first.
Proceed through your day in the same manner, one task at a time. At the end of the day, move any tasks that were not completed to a new list of no more than six tasks for the next day.
Repeat this process daily.
After three months of implementing these practices, Schwab was so thrilled with the results that he wrote Lee a check in the amount of $25,000—a massive amount in today’s dollars. Schwab called Lee’s productivity system, which has come to be known as the “Ivy Lee Method,” the most profitable business advice he ever received.
Making a to-do list may seem like a simple process. It’s something you may already do in the course of your day. But not all lists are created equal. Many lawyers’ lists resemble something one would use at the grocery store, consisting of 20 or 30 items with no regard to priority. Occasionally, a lawyer will reshuffle and recompose their running list, and also add to it. Their list doesn’t reflect what they will get done on a particular day. Instead, it consists of everything—big, small, important, trivial—that is on their plate.
The Ivy Lee Method works because it is a structured system, yet simple. It promotes planning, prioritization, and forced discipline, which are all hallmarks of effective productivity. Because it requires that you finish one task before moving on to the next, it also helps cut down on multitasking, which is a productivity killer.
Creating a to-do list based on the Ivy Lee Method will allow you to stay focused on the most important work that will have the biggest positive impact on your career and enable you to do your best work on behalf of your clients. It will empower you to move through your days with purpose. It’s a system for daily action that will steadily move you closer to achieving your goals—even amid the distractions of home.
Sell Yourself an Hour Every Day
In The Productivity Pivot, I discuss the importance of spending one hour every day focused on business development. It’s a strategy adopted from the experience of Charlie Munger, who co-founded law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, and later became a billionaire businessman as Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Charlie Munger moved to California with his family and began practicing law as an associate at a law firm. Early in his legal career, Charlie came to an important realization that would help set him on a path toward massive success—as a lawyer and then as an investor. He recognized that he was spending all of his time working on behalf of his clients. As a result, he was doing little to serve the person he came to realize was his most important client: himself.
For Munger, the realization that he was his own most important client led him to adopt a daily practice as a young lawyer that became critical to his long-term success. He began “selling” himself the most important hour of his day—every day, first thing in the morning—and he used the time to work on personal and professional development. He wasn’t satisfied with his circumstances, so he decided to work for himself—one hour every day—to improve them.
In an interview he gave for his authorized biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Buffett recounts Munger’s approach: “Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, ‘Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.”
Most lawyers think the path to success lies in devoting as much time as possible to working for paying clients. However, as Munger learned and Buffett observed, the best investment you’ll ever make is selling yourself one hour of your time every day.
It’s hard enough to focus on client work while working for home, let alone engage in business development. By carving out an hour every day to work on the important priority of building a practice, you’ll honor and serve your most important client: yourself.
Work in Sprints
The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity system developed by Francesco Cirillo. It’s a technique based on the “sprint/recover” work philosophy. Cirillo’s big insight is that we can be more effective, often in far less time, if we work like sprinters, rather than marathoners.
It’s important to be patient and circumspect over the long term of your career, while at the same time moving fast during the day-to-day. That’s where the Pomodoro Technique comes in. Its basic premise is that, when confronting a large task, you should break the work down into brief, timed intervals (called “Pomodoros”), with short periods for recovery in between.
Here’s how it works:
Pick a task.
Set a timer for 25 to 40 minutes.
Work intensely on the task during the interval.
If a distraction pops into your head, write it down, but immediately get back on task.
At the end of an interval, get up and take a short break (5 to 10 minutes).
After four intervals, take a longer break (15 to 30 minutes).
Sprint and then recover to stay focused on the task at hand and sidestep the distractions that lead to a more scattered approach to your work.
While 25 minutes of work may not seem like much, keep in mind that during these intervals you’re supposed to be working intensely. No checking emails. No Internet surfing. No chit-chatting. No distractions. By focusing intensely on the task at hand, and shutting out all else, both the quantity and quality of your production during these short intervals will be high.
Working from home, particularly if kids are present, doesn’t lend itself to long, uninterrupted periods to work. You need to make the most of the short periods of time you have available, and the best way to do so is to sprint then recover.
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