By Michael Hernandez
Too many tasks – too little time! Managing both can be daunting. We asked SDCBA member Michael Hernandez for his favorite tips. He’s put them to the test and tells us they lighten his work – and – stress load. Try them, and take a deep breath.
We are all looking for ways to be more efficient and productive in our work, so here are a few tips – all tried and true – to help you get the most from your 9-to-5. While a few of these recommendations are geared toward attorneys just starting their practice, the rest are easily implementable suggestions for all.
1. Start by parking your car.
When I opened my practice and had taken my first real office downtown I was parking on the street at the meters. Unfortunately, this meant getting up every two hours to move my car – three or four times a day, and five days a week! It didn’t take me long to realize I was wasting time. Even if it only took me 10 minutes to move my car each time, I was still spending 10 hours a month just looking for parking.
So go ahead, spend $200 a month for parking. Having a designated parking space will save you time and the headache of looking for parking in a crunch.
2. Consume caffeine.
Nothing will spur you into action like a cup of high octane – just pick it up on the way to the office.
3. Get some workspace.
Working from home sounds like fun, but the truth is it is too easy to lounge around in your pajamas all day binge-watching Netflix.
Workspace – even just a desk in an office – gives you purpose. If you are a new attorney and not ready to commit to a long-term lease, there are shared work-space or collaborative work environments around – CoMerge on A Street, Regus at Emerald Plaza, and our own Bar Center to name a few – where you can get good work done in a professional environment.
4. Create lists.
Itemize your projects – or even the individual steps in each project – and check them off as you go. This will help to keep you on track, will help you avoid procrastination, and will provide you with good affirmation as you progress towards your goal.
5. Prioritize and work on one project at a time.
A student recently asked me whether it was more important to be detail oriented or a multi-tasker. Be detail oriented – hands down, every time – because multi-tasking is a myth. While you can certainly have 100 open cases, you can only work on one at a time. Triage your cases: find that project that absolutely, positively, must be done today, and do it. Then move on to the next.
6. While you’re at it, stop checking your email (so often).
This is difficult to do, I know. But most emails can wait an hour (or four) to be read. So set a time – perhaps the first 15 minutes of each hour, or the last hour of the day – to read and respond to emails. And if you feel you’ve become Pavlov’s dog, jumping to check your inbox with every chime and beep, turn off those annoying notifications.
7. Get an assistant.
Face it, you can’t do it all – you just can’t – and you need help in the office. Whether it is answering phones, creating new files, updating clients, or even performing more sophisticated tasks, having an assistant will allow you to focus your attention on more important matters.
The nice thing is you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get good help: the local law schools have students interested in internships and clerking positions, the local paralegal programs do, too, and the local universities have tons of recent graduates yearning for law office experience before heading off to law school. Do yourself a favor and tap this pool of talent.
8. Clean your desk.
I have only known one attorney able to leave his desk perfectly clean at the end of each day. He’s on the bench now, so he may have been on to something.
Get the clutter off your desk. But keep the photos of your loved ones as a positive reminder of why you’re working so hard.
Get an in-box and an out-box, and use them. Feel free to have a queue of casefiles on your desk, but have only one file open at a time since this will prevent misplacing documents in the wrong file.
9. In the same vein, minimize your other distractions.
There is nothing wrong with setting your phone to Do Not Disturb or telling your assistant to hold all calls while you get work done. Then close your office door, turn off the music playing on your computer, shoo away your colleagues and their “quick questions,” and get down to business.
10. Implement technology.
Call me old-fashioned, but I genuinely enjoy having a paper casefile. While I don’t anticipate ever going fully paperless, I have incorporated scanning as part of my case (and casefile) management system. I utilize Adobe Acrobat Professional in conjunction with a document scanner. My scanner is very small and fast, so scanning a typical file takes just a few minutes. Keeping a PDF copy of the file on my laptop and tablet allows me to get work done even when I’m away from my desk, and using Acrobat’s built-in optical character recognition (OCR) feature makes reviewing and searching a snap. Acrobat also has a feature for collecting signatures on documents and contracts quickly and easily. The document is sent securely through Adobe, and the recipient can review and sign the PDF on his smartphone or tablet. Adobe then provides both parties a copy of the signed document.
Michael Hernandez is a solo practitioner.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of San Diego Lawyer.