There are two essential steps to any effective productivity system: (1) collecting everything you have to do; and (2) making sure you do it.

The first requires good, easy-to-use tools. If it takes work to collect tasks, you won’t do it. Tim Ferriss, author of the four-hour workweek, recently talked about how he does it.

Here are the tools he uses:

1. Evernote
2. Gmail
3. Google Calendar (Gcal)
4. Anxiety
5. Jott

Visit his article to see how he uses them to never forget anything again.

How to Never Forget Anything Again | Tim Ferriss (via Zen Habits)

According to a British study, it takes us over a minute to recover our focus after checking email. That means if you check your email every five minutes or so, you are spending over eight hours a week trying to recover your focus.

That’s one more good reason to stay on task! To get back some of that time, turn off the auto-check feature on your email software. If you use webmail, don’t leave it open in a browser tab all day.

Instead, wait until your attention is already diverted to hit “send/receive.” Do it after you finish a task and your focus is already in limbo. Or before and after lunch when you have a few moments. You will spend less time in transition and more time getting things done in your day.

Email becomes a dangerous distraction | Sidney Morning Herald (via Lifehacker)

A few years back, everyone got really excited about “multitasking,” the idea that people could work on more than one task at a time. That was a big fat lie. People can’t really do two (or more) things at once; the best we can do is switch between two tasks really quickly, and all that does is make us inefficient and sloppy at both tasks.

Lawyers know this. Many lawyers justify a .2hr minimum billing increment, in part, because of the time it takes to switch between tasks. The more interruptions we allow in our day, the more time we waste switching gears. And yet, we allow so many interruptions.

So stop trying to multitask, and eliminate as many interruptions as you can. Think of your work day in chunks of time. I try to sit down in the morning and schedule my day. I rarely answer email immediately or pick up the phone when it rings; instead, I try to check and respond to email in between tasks, and I set aside a chunk of time in the afternoon to return phone calls.

Mostly, I just try not to think in terms of multitasking. Instead, I try to work on one task until I finish it, and then I move on to the next one. Sure, I don’t multitask, but in the end, I get more done, and do a better job on the tasks I complete.

Annoying, isn’t it? And yet, if you are an attorney, there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people who can make your phone ring any time they want to.

This is my favorite part of my answering machine message:

I return phone calls at 10 and 4 if I am in the office. If you need to reach me more quickly, please send me an e-mail.

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I am teaching six continuing legal education seminars in the next three months, with a couple more under discussion. My presentations tend to be engaging (I don’t have the patience for boring presentations even when I am giving them), informative, and well-attended. Register early!

• June 6th at noon. The Paperless Office, 1 hour webcast, $75. Register with MCLE.
• June 10th at 9 a.m. Offensive Defense: An Introduction to Protecting Consumers from Unscrupulous Debt Collectors, 1 hour webcast. Register with MCLE.
• June 12th at noon. Motions to Vacate Default Judgments: When and How You Should Do It, 1 hour live seminar. Register with VLN.
• July 18th at 1 p.m. How to Get Things Done (with Merlin Mann), 2 hour webcast. (MCLE has not yet posted this seminar.)
• July 22nd at 9 a.m. New Lawyer Experience - Starting a Law Firm, 2 hour webcast. Register with MCLE.
• August 8th at noon. Social Networking for Lawyers, 1 hour webcast. (MCLE has not yet posted this seminer.)

Beer companies sell illusions, not beer. They convince us that we will be smarter, more attractive, suave, etc., if we drink the beer. It rarely works. A screen-tanned blogger chugging Coors Light is no more attractive than a screen-tanned blogger without the beer. More tipsy, though.

Similarly, office supply companies sell us on the illusion that if we just had their neat product, we would be organized! Take the Chronotebook, one of the winners of last year’s Muji Awards.

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From Unclutterer comes a great post by Zen Habits author Leo Babauta on creating a minimalist workspace. Most of the attorneys I know life among piles of paper. While some defend their “system” of “organization,” most just don’t seem to know how to escape from the paper jungle they created for themselves.

So the first step is for you to consider your requirements for working, and what’s essential to your workflow. If possible, streamline and simplify that workflow and those requirements. Then, once you’ve got that down to a minimum, see what the minimum setup would be for those essentials and your workflow. Eliminate everything unnecessary.

. . .

It’s interesting to note that what you think your requirements are might not be the minimum. They might just be what you’re used to doing.

[photo: Zen Habits]

After trying out numerous methods of tracking my cases and related tasks, I have finally found what seems to work best. I love GTD, but the system does not necessarily translate smoothly to a law practice. I have tried using Outlook, but my productivity suffered from not being able to look at the “big picture” at a glance. So I went back to paper. I tried numerous things, and eventually settled on a hybrid of GTD and the weekly work plan my wife uses.

My work plan is a weekly affair. I take Sunday night or Monday morning to sit down and type up my weekly work plan. My template has five days up top for Most Important Tasks (MITs) for each day, and below are a row for each case, broken up into columns for “case,” “upcoming dates,” “do now,” “do later,” and “waiting for.” The basic GTD action categories.

My work plan serves as a “tickler” as well as a catalog of important due dates (I put all my scheduling order dates on it) and a holding cell for every task on every open file.

You can download my work plan template in Open Document Format (ODF) or Word format (DOC).