Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / Episode 241 3 Action Steps to Reclaim 10 Hours This Week (For Women Law Firm Owners Only)

Transcript

Episode 241 3 Action Steps to Reclaim 10 Hours This Week (For Women Law Firm Owners Only) · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:01
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What
• 0:05
  Davina: if
• 0:05
  Intro: you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve, and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Devina.
• 0:51
  Davina: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And today, I wanna share with you three action steps to help you reclaim ten hours of your time this week. Because if there is one thing I know, it is that women law firm owners never feel like they have enough time to get everything done that needs to be done. Before I share with you these three time creating hacks, let me be clear.
• 1:16
  I do not believe in time management. In fact, I think the biggest issue we have as busy high achieving women is we are always trying to manage overstuffed calendars. Rather than managing time, I recommend we prioritize our time. So what is the difference? When we are managing time, our mindset is that of a victim who is forced to manage what has been thrust upon us.
• 1:42
  In other words, we have an attitude that is, what we have to do, not we're not what we're choosing to do. Whereas when we prioritize our time, we are picking and choosing what is important to us. So we are being intentional, and we have agency and control over our choices, and we're acknowledging that when we are prioritizing our time. When we prioritize our time, we start by asking ourself, what are our top priorities? Right?
• 2:11
  It's a logical place to start. What are our top priorities? So for example, many women law firm owners I've met tell me their top priorities are being there for their children. Number two is self care, and number three is traveling more, usually internationally is what I hear. Your priorities may be the same or they may be different.
• 2:32
  For instance, my top priorities are, number one, my physical health and my mental and emotional well-being. That is my number one priority. So I'm always looking to make sure that I am taking care of my physical health and my mental and emotional well-being. Number two, my relationship with people I love or care about deeply is my number two priority after my own health and well-being. Number three is my family's financial well-being and security.
• 3:00
  I want us to be able to have the resources we desire to live our best lives. And number four is meaningful work and contribution to the world. That is my fourth priority. Meaningful work and contribution to the world, something that is purpose driven and fills me up. Take a minute now to write down your top priorities.
• 3:19
  You cannot get this right or wrong. This is simply what is most important to you. And if you're where you can write them down, then do write them down. Obvi obviously, if you're driving or something, then write them down later, but think about them right now. Be honest.
• 3:33
  Write your top priorities, not the priorities that you think that you should have or that others think you should have. Okay? Now I want you to take a look at your calendar. Or if you're driving or walking while you're listening to this, think about your calendar. Does your calendar reflect these priorities?
• 3:52
  I always tell people, and you've probably heard me say this before. I'll say it again. If you show me your, bank book and your calendar, I can tell you what your priorities are. So let's take my number one priority as an example. If I say my physical, mental, and emotional well-being are my top priorities, then when you look at my calendar, you're gonna expect to see that I have scheduled time for exercise, for meditation, for therapy, for time out in nature, for social activities, or something akin to that.
• 4:27
  Right? If you don't see those on my calendar, you don't see something, not all of these, but some things, then you can correctly surmise that my physical, mental, and emotional well-being are not a real priority for me. They're not real priorities. Right? So that is what I mean by are your priorities reflected on your calendar?
• 4:49
  If you say your top priorities are your children, but you don't have a balance of activities in your day to both provide financially for them as well as spend time with them, then are you functioning as though they are your top priority, or are you letting other things creep in and kind of steal that time away from you and your kids? If you say your top priority is traveling and seeing the world, but you don't have any dates blocked out on your calendar or trips plan, is that really a top priority? If you keep putting it off, we're too busy now. Now is not a good time. We can't afford this, whatever.
• 5:27
  And, certainly, those things matter. But if you say that's your top priority, there may be some other things that you're doing that are preventing you from doing the thing that you say is really your top priority. If you say your top priority is self care, but you work all day. And then for hours after you put the kids to bed, are you really taking care of your own needs? It can be challenging.
• 5:51
  I mean, I get it. I know. To focus on your top priorities when there are always so much that sort of needs to be done. The biggest issue facing most high achieving women is that we think we must be the doers, that no one else can possibly do whatever it is better than we can. And the second biggest issue we face is that we let other people hijack our priorities.
• 6:16
  Example, we may put it down on the calendar that we're going to work out three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday from, you know, seven, eight, or whatever. But when something comes up at work, we do not schedule around these workouts. We instead let our assistant book something during that time. Have you done this? Or worse, we book over that time ourselves.
• 6:40
  I've seen this happen so many times. We completely sabotage our own priorities by booking over time that we had reserved for something that's a high priority. This comes up a lot in the coaching world when people say their top priority is to scale their law firm business, but then they don't book coaching appointments and schedule around them. Instead, when something comes up, they cancel the coaching appointment, which is what they need to continue to advance the growth of their firm. So instead of holding firm to our boundaries, we think to ourselves, well, it's not really a firm commitment because I didn't make it to somebody else.
• 7:19
  It's just a commitment I made to myself, But I can work out another time, or I can do my coaching call another time, or I can, go get a pedicure another time, whatever it is, or or I can see the kids next ballgame. I can't go to this ballgame. And, of course, that time never comes because that time has passed, and there's no other spot blocked out for it usually in the week. So then the week goes by, another week of not prioritizing our time. It's the same with time we've set aside for working on a project, for example.
• 7:54
  So perhaps you scheduled time on your calendar to work on a petition, but then a client calls your office and your receptionist interrupts you, breaking your concentration to ask if you wanna talk with the client instead of respecting your wishes not to be interrupted, instead of reinforcing your boundary and telling her and the client, no, you take the call. Now you've just trained your receptionist and your client that it's okay to hijack your priorities and your schedule instead of telling your receptionist, you know, I have time set aside on my schedule that I return client calls. So book that client during that time. I am not to be interrupted during this time. Right?
• 8:33
  Or maybe you check your email. This is a big, big one right here, and this is what gets us off track. Maybe you check your email right when you get up in the morning before you even had a chance to wash your face, or you check it as soon as you get into the office. Now instead of tackling those tasks that you prioritize the night before or the week before for the month or whatever, you start jumping to the demands of others as you're going through your emails regardless of whether those, emails represent a legitimate emergency. They're just somebody else's high priority, not necessarily yours.
• 9:09
  And here's a hard truth for you. There are very few legal emergencies. And if there are true emergencies, then people will not email you. They will call your office. So I want you to to consider these examples.
• 9:22
  The judge's JA calls you because you're supposed to be in front of the judge at that very moment, and you are not. Okay. That's a legal emergency. But did she email you? No.
• 9:31
  She called your office and said, where are you? The judge is sitting here waiting for you. Right? Your client's soon to be ex spouse is banging down her door and she feels in fear for her life. Will she email you?
• 9:44
  No. No. Hopefully, she'll call she won't call you either. She'll call 911. But let's say it's the next day and she's calling you, then that's something that you can address.
• 9:55
  Right? Your team can help you address without it being an emergency on your part where you have to drop everything. A key employee has quit without notice by email. So a key employee has emailed you and they said, I'm not working here anymore. I'm mad as hell.
• 10:10
  I can't take it anymore. Well, if you didn't check your email first thing in the morning, would you notice that that employee didn't show up at 09:00? Of course, you would notice. And you would probably call her if you had not yet read her email, and you would say, where are you? So you see, we don't have to, dive into our email first thing in the morning.
• 10:32
  Most things are not an emergency. And if they are, people will call us. That's about it. There may be a few more emergencies, but few require us to be chained to our email inbox first thing in the morning. I advise you to really sit down and think about the emails that are in your inbox and ask yourself truthfully if what you're reading in your email can wait till later in the day or till the next day or can be forwarded to people on your team.
• 10:58
  Most likely, if you're spending email hours in your email inbox every morning responding to incoming emails, you are not responding to emergencies, but rather you are letting someone else dictate how you spend your precious time. Because you've already created a list of priorities for the day, and now you're now you're dipping out of those priorities to spend that time responding to other people. So now that we understand prioritizing our time, how to keep from undermining ourselves and our priorities, and how to keep others from hijacking our time, let's discuss three action steps that you can take to reclaim ten hours this week. And I call this the ABC exercise. I did not invent it, but I sure do love it.
• 11:40
  And I share this with overworked women all the time. I probably have shared this here on the podcast before, but I think it is worth repeating based on how many conversations I've had with women law firm owners lately who really need to be reminded of this exercise. So step number one, action step number one, on a legal pad, draw three columns, three vertical columns, and label them a, b, and c respectively. In the a column, write down your highest priority activities and task, all the things you love to do, things in your zone of genius, or things that absolutely no one else in your business can or should be doing. So one example may be creating a vision and growth strategy for your law firm business.
• 12:23
  That's something you need to do, and you may need to do it with a coach or somebody to help you, but it is something that's a high priority for the CEO of a law firm. Another example, maybe spending time at your kid's ballgame or dance recital. That's not something you're gonna want somebody else to do. You're the person. In column b, write down those activities or tasks that you're good at, but either don't like doing or should not be doing because they're really below your pay grade.
• 12:52
  They are not the highest and best use of your time. These tasks could and should be outsourced to others who are competent to handle them. Even though you may be really good at doing them, they are not the highest and best use of your time. So one example may be drafting petitions or emotions. Another may be going to court on routine matters.
• 13:10
  Another example may be housekeeping or laundry. I often use this example from my own life. I do a lot of, marketing for this business, and I am a trained copywriter. I have a degree in writing. I've also been trained in sales copywriting, and I'm a good I'm a good writer, but I have so much writing that must be done in the marketing of this business that I outsource that to writers.
• 13:39
  I get writers to help me do those tasks a lot of times because it is not the highest and best use of my time, even though I'm really good at it. In column c, I want you to write down all the activities and tasks that are below your pay grade. In other words, if you would not pay someone the equivalent of your hourly rate, $3.50 an hour, 500 an hour, $2.50 an hour, whatever it is, then you should not be doing those things yourself. Also write down activities and tasks that you do not like doing, but that are not the best use, that you're not the best at doing, or that someone else could do better, faster, and cheaper. So I'll give you some examples of, again, from my own life of business.
• 14:24
  I can create graphics, but somebody can do it better, faster, and cheaper than me because I'm not the best graphic designer in the world. I can kind of do the basics. I understand the principles, but somebody else is gonna be better at that than me. So why would I do that? So managing my social media, same thing.
• 14:41
  I don't have time to spend on social media, and I'm really not the best at it. I I prefer to turn to a professional who's really good at it and strategic, about my social media. Bookkeeping is another thing. I I literally was a bookkeeper when I took a year off of college to make some money before I could go back to school. And I worked as a bookkeeper, and I was not the best bookkeeper in the world.
• 15:06
  I tell you, I probably wasn't the best employee in the world. But I know that for my business, I love to look at the numbers and analyze reports and use my financials as a GPS for growing my business, but I am not the one who puts all that data in and gets it organized in the right place. I have a bookkeeper who does that for me. So an example for you may be scanning or organizing files or maybe even running errands. Maybe somebody needs to go pick up your dry cleaning or drive your kids back and forth to activities or get groceries or whatever it is.
• 15:40
  Right? In column c, think about the things in your business and outside of your business that need that that are activities that somebody else could do for a lot less money. Now step two, action step number two, once you have completed this chart, and this may be something that you add to over time. But in this moment in time, do the best you can fill those out. And then step number two is immediately delegate everything in column c to either a virtual assistant, a personal assistant assistant, or someone on your team.
• 16:15
  So if there's stuff you're doing in column c, these are activities that are below your pay grade. There are some there are also activities that you do not like doing, or that you're not the best at doing. Yeah. You can do them, but you really don't like it. So I'll give you an example.
• 16:31
  A billing clerk might be somebody that you need because maybe billing is the thing that you just hate every month doing. And there's a couple reasons why you may hate it. One may be you're not doing contemporaneous billing, so you're not active. You're not accurately tracking your time. So it always takes you a very long time to recreate what you did on your bills.
• 16:52
  There's other solutions for that. But one of the things you could do if you have several people on your team and somebody needs to look over the bills before they go out, you might hire a billing clerk and delegate that, right, if it's taking a lot of your time. That's one example. Step number three, within the week, begin to delegate activities and tasks in column b. Column c should be things that you can delegate pretty quickly to a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, or somebody on your team who could easily take over those things.
• 17:23
  Step three is something that may take you a little bit of time to do. It may take you a week or two, but begin to delegate within a week the activities and task in column b. For example, assign paralegals to draft petitions and motions and associate attorneys to take over routine court proceedings. Sign up for a laundry service and hire a housekeeper to come once a week to clean your house. If you implement this one idea alone, this one ABC exercise alone, you could easily free up ten hours or more a week for higher priority activities and tasks that you really want to make time for in your life and on your schedule.
• 18:02
  I do do hope you've enjoyed today's episode and that you found it helpful. If so, please leave us a five or star review on Wealthy Woman Lawyer on Apple Podcast. Every review tells Apple that people are listening and wanting to hear more of this type of content. So we so appreciate it because it gets the word out, and we can help more women law firm owners. Also, if you are an overworked woman law firm owner who would like help scaling your law firm business without working yourself in the ground in the process, please check out the links in the show notes for ways that you could work with Wealthy Woman Lawyer.
• 18:36
  We would love to work with you and help you. I'll be back next week with more content to help women law firm owners create wealth generating, profitable, sustainable law firm businesses that run themselves and not you. I'll see you then.
• 18:51
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.