Enjoyed listening to this podcast. I couldn’t agree more with David about his feedback for Amanda. Focus on things we can change rather than worry about things we can’t. The problem is never “out there”, so to speak. I shared my thoughts at https://dazne.net/self/. About working with others, we cannot change them (nor do we want to), but we can teach them how to “behave” with us.
I’ve been working in 25-minute intervals for years due to its health benefits mostly. I do a minimum of 90-minute sprint, but no more than a couple of hours; I use FlexTime Routines to manage that. You can read about them at https://dazne.net/25-minutes/ and https://dazne.net/90-minutes/.
Thanks for this Mike, I got a copy of Davids via the show notes and have been using it for 7 days straight now. Love it.
Can I ask what tool you use to create these (I think you might have mentioned it on the show)?
While both David’s and yours are excellent, I have some changes that I would like to make that would work better for me 
I used Illustrator for mine because I want to eventually create fillable PDF versions for my course.
Hi Everyone! I’m Amanda, the young attorney who sent the email covered in this episode (reviving the topic from the grave), I just wanted to give some updates:
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I think exercising control in my work has been very helpful. I’m solely responsible for keeping up with the cases I work on - meaning I get to calendar the deadlines, set schedules on when I plan on accomplishing what, and as long as I meet my deadlines and keep the clients happy my bosses don’t bother me about the timing and process in which I’m doing things. If they do ask questions (i.e., when can we close this) I’ve kept good enough notes to be able to answer them quickly regarding their concern.
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I do my best to set clear expectations regarding both the work I receive and when I can I get it done, as well as expectations regarding the paralegals I work with. I try not to give out any work that is too urgent or too vague (a thing I, as a former paralegal and law clerk, am all too familiar with attorneys doing). You’d have to ask the staff if I’m successful at this but I try to be cognizant of both meeting and setting good deadlines.
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Setting meeting agendas is a thing I forget about a lot, but I never regret it when I do it. I think I need to start implementing a calendar event to go off a day before a scheduled meeting with a task reminding me to prepare for said meeting. What I really need to implement is a weekly review a-la Getting Things Done, but it’s so hard to find a consistent time to do so. I need to just start calendaring it as a weekly event and force myself to do it consistently.
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Unfortunately, while one of my bosses completely respects my inbox and requests to tackle multiple issues at once instead of randomly popping into my office with any question they have, the other two have not.
I once had an important litigation file covering my desk and Boss A just sat a random sheet of paper pertaining to a different case in the middle of it and didn’t tell me, despite me begging him to use my inbox to avoid paper file confusion. Every time I bring it up with Boss A, he just jokes that I’m “too smart for that” and would discover the incorrect papers and put them where they’re supposed to go. It’s very frustrating.
With Boss B, when I asked him to wait a moment while I finished typing a sentence, he snapped about whether he needed to schedule an appointment just to talk to me.
With the two of them I constantly feel like I’m having a pop-quiz about my 100 different files. They’ll just come to me to ask a question instead of looking in the file/ their email archives at all, and Boss A jokes I’m his “millennial dictionary.” It’s frustrating, but thankfully the more I learn how to do my job, the more cases that are solely mine, so I’m hoping this problem will lessen as time goes on and more work is passed to my sole management instead of under a partner.
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I need to be better at time blocking and more importantly, not switching tasks constantly. I have a bad habit of deciding “meh, I’ll do that later” when looking at my to do list, and therefore spending a lot of time between tasks just deciding what to do next. I need to work on improving the task management system (i.e., more alarms, more consistent naming nomenclature, start times, not allowing myself to dance around the task list instead of going in order, etc) to improve. Unfortunately, my task management must live inside our Case Manager, meaning I’m giving up features I truly miss from services like Todoist (natural language, repeating tasks, having the completion of one task trigger an event for another ((a thing our task management system can do but I don’t have manager level access and they won’t give it to me -.- ))), but between text expander, reminders and nomenclature I should be able to get more out of it than I currently do.
So that’s it mostly. Thanks again for all the advice! I continue to love the show and do my best to work more intentionally and be better focused!
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