Posts tagged as:

productivity

Seth Godin on broken stuff

May 13, 2009

Seth Godin talks about all the broken bits of life. Well worth spending twenty minutes to watch.
 
Some things that are broken in the legal world:

Disclaimers
Practice management software
Procedural rules
Online marketing firms

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Getting Things Done: the best parts

May 7, 2009

I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity about two years ago. Yes, it is a guru-ish productivity system, but it also helped me, a fundamentally lazy and disorganized person, to become extremely organized and productive.
Lawyers are at their best when they are free to think, and GTD is all about [...]

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Review: ScanSnap S1500 document scanner

March 29, 2009

Fujitsu just sent me the brand-new ScanSnap S1500, a major revision to the popular ScanSnap line. I bought my ScanSnap S500 in early 2006, when I made the switch to a paperless law office. Since then, I have been recommending the ScanSnap S500/S510 to everyone.
The new S1500 is better-looking, faster, comes with updated software, and [...]

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Stop wasting time sorting email

January 25, 2009

Many lawyers have one email folder or label for each case or client, and sort every email into the appropriate folder. Others print out every email and file it. Both are unnecessary and, collectively, a colossal waste of time.
Every major operating system today has built-in indexed search. This means your computer crawls the data on [...]

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Never forget anything again

October 22, 2008

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 [...]

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You probably waste eight hours a week checking your email

September 15, 2008

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 [...]

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Stop trying to multitask (it isn’t working)

September 3, 2008

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 [...]

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Social networking: how much time should it take?

August 27, 2008

Time seems to be one of the most-common reasons why attorneys who do not use social networks do not start. In the world of hourly billing, all time has a value, and many attorneys seem to believe that (1) networking online will take a lot of time and (2) may not be worthwhile in the [...]

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Be more productive by turning off the phone

August 17, 2008

Ringing phone from Sam Glover on Vimeo.

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 [...]

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Use EOM to save your addressees’ time, but don’t expect instant results

August 9, 2008

Lifehacker’s Brad Isaac suggests using “EOM”, a quick way to indicate the end of a message, to save your addressees’ time. How? Put the whole message in the subject, and end with “EOM” (example: “Will be in the office @ 3:30 EOM”), which indicates the reader need not waste time opening your email.
Even used in [...]

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