#331: 6 Sneaky Time-Wasters (and How to Fix Them)

6 Sneaky Time-Wasters (and How to Fix Them)

Here's a transcription of this episode:

Time management is 25% planning and 75% mind management.

In this episode of Be a Better Lawyer, I'm sharing six sneaky time wasters preventing you from taking control of your practice and your life.

Hello my friend.

I hope you are having a fabulous week. Before we dive into today's episode, I thought I'd give you a little bit of an update on what's going on with me. And also I want to invite you to my brand new masterclass that's coming up.

So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about that too.

So this morning I was going on a walk and I was really just enjoying myself and I realized that I have not been giving myself the space that I need to do the work that I want to do.

And this happens periodically. I look at the work that we do, the personal development, the mind management. I look at this as an ongoing process. We are never done.

This is something that we are continually cleaning up. I was talking to a client recently and we were talking about this subject and I said, think of yourself as a diamond.

You have so many different facets, and every time you clean up one facet, it doesn't mean all of the facets get cleaned up at once. You just kind of take it one bit at a time, and you always need to clean a diamond, right? It just because it has facets, just because it's beautiful doesn't mean that you don't need to polish it up sometimes.

So that's something that I really took to heart, just saying that out loud in my coaching session, because what I am doing is that same work. It's continually polishing the facets. And right now what I'm noticing is that I've put a lot on my plate.

So last week, I, you know, on on top of all of my one-on-one coaching calls, my group calls my, you know, planning for my yard sale, my actual yard sale.

Because if you have been listening to this podcast, you know, I'm moving to Sedona in the near future.

So I'm trying to get rid of things in my house, big things in my house to make the move as smooth as possible. I have painting I'm doing in the house, I have planning for painting the exterior. I've been doing home improvement things over the last year, and it is something that I hadn't really thought about how I am scheduling it, how I am thinking about how I'm scheduling it. So instead of giving myself that space, that grace to say, Hey, I am going to have a full day off. What I've been doing is thinking that, oh, painting doesn't count as a full day's work. So I won't count that. Or doing a yard sale doesn't count as a full day's work, so I won't count that. So right now, my plate, I have been putting a lot on my plate, way too much food.

I've gone to the buffet and picked out way too much food, and now what I need to do is I need to pair it down. And maybe you find yourself in this situation too. You maybe aren't giving yourself the space that you need, and that's okay. But it's important to notice those things. I need to watch my brain like a hawk because my brain wants to say, oh, there's room for that. I have room for that. I can do that. And yes, that's a beautiful quality to have. I think it's beautiful to continually challenge the capacity that you have to get things done, and that needs to be balanced, harmonized with the time you give to the human. And if we are thinking that we are supposed to be working all the time, we're actually missing out on the point of being a human, which is enjoying and appreciating the world as it is.

Not that we need to be doing anything, just being is enough. So today I noticed, ah, yes, I, I want more time to do nothing, and I am going to be giving myself more of that time, and I'll go through this periodically.

So I don't want you to feel like if you do, if you do it one week and you give yourself space and the next week you say, ah, it just doesn't work. I didn't give myself space this week.

I just am so bad at it.

No, it has nothing to do with that.

It has to do with continually polishing the facet it, it has to do with continually managing your mind around time.

And speaking of time, we're gonna be talking about a couple things.

First, we're gonna be talking about the masterclass, and then we are gonna be talking about the six sneaky thoughts, the six sneaky things that I have seen really waste lawyers' time.

So let's talk about the masterclass first because if you're listening to this episode in real time, I have a brand new masterclass called Kick Procrastination to the Curb. Get the follow through formula to keep you motivated and taking action in your law practice.

When I was a criminal prosecutor, I was a master procrastinator.

And you may not believe this now because you hear all of this knowledge that I give you on this podcast, and maybe you're working with me and you're hearing this podcast and you know that I know how to get things done. But I used to procrastinate quite a bit. I would procrastinate on everything from writing a brief to getting out of bed in the morning. I was working 50 to 70 hours a week, but it felt like so much more. It was draining even worse. My self-esteem really started taking a hit because I knew what I needed to do, I just wasn't doing it.

And that felt demoralizing.

And when I finally kicked procrastination to the curb, it freed up so much of my time, so much of my mind space, so much of my energy that it transformed my life.

That's why I wanted to create a masterclass to share my secrets to overcoming procrastination.

 It allowed me to really do things like become so good at my job that I was going above and beyond what was expected.

I started a business on top of my legal practice without it feeling draining.

I took action on growing my coaching business so I could create the income I needed to leave my legal practice and do so many more things.

Like right now I am moving out of state.

So all of these things may were made possible because I freed up the space in my life by kicking procrastination to the curb.

So there are two ways you can sign up for this masterclass.

One is to go to dina cataldo.com/september, that's dina cataldo.com/september.

Or you can go to the show notes where you're listening to this episode and you can find the link to sign up there.

So what would you do?

I am really curious to know what would you do with all of that additional time?

Because I guarantee you, you are going to have time to do things like go to birthday parties, create systems in your practice to streamline your practice even more and let you work four days a week instead of six. You can start a new practice area. You've been itching to start for years. You could take a trip that you've been promising your spouse that you would be going on, but you still haven't done it. Or maybe there's something else. Maybe there's something that you have really desired doing, but you've been putting it off because you just don't have the time and you've been putting off all of the things that you know you need to do in your practice.

So you can join me at dinacataldo.com/september to help you create a life that you love. Alright, let's jump into this episode and help you get some time. Back when I started this episode, I told you that really most of what time management is, is mind management. And what we don't do as lawyers is really have an understanding, really think about how the thoughts we have in our head influence how we take action, how we don't take action.

Every thought that we have is going to have a reverberation in our lives. And I wanna really talk to you about this because every time I talk to a lawyer, it's almost like it's a brand new concept, <laugh>.

And I get it because I often see a thought in my head, and I think it's true that I don't have enough time, that things are really hard, right?

And now I catch them immediately and I say, no, that's not true. Let's turn that around. Like I can turn it around at the snap of my fingers because I have practiced the skill so often. So if I see my brain wandering, if I see my brain telling me lies, or I don't even like the thought that I'm having, the thought could even be true. I can choose not to keep thinking it. And that is a skill. It is a skill to tell your brain what to do. And so in this episode, I wanna talk to you about six of these things that I see lawyers believing and lawyers not taking control over that are wasting their time, that's really putting them in spinning instead of making decisions or moving the needle in their practice. So let's start with number one. Number one is, you know, this document, this brief, this argument, it has to be perfect.

Or you might tell yourself, I'm just a perfectionist.

I want you to see these for what they are, which are thoughts.

The thoughts are quote, it has to be perfect, or quote, I'm just a perfectionist.

These are thoughts about what you believe your work product should look like.

They're judgements of it.

And when we have this thought and believe it and hold onto it, we become over thorough.

I had a client who would write a contract, she would review it 10 times.

It had been reviewed by other people in her office.

She had reviewed it multiple times and she would spend so much time on this project that it was stealing time away from her.

She wasn't doing things that she wanted to do, she wasn't spending as much time with her family because she had this fear that things were gonna go wrong, that there could be something wrong with this document.

And I understand that because as lawyers, we wanna impress the client, we wanna impress the judge. We want to make sure that opposing counsel doesn't have anything over us. And so we want everything to be perfect. But the problem with that is, is that we can be over thorough and overwork and spin on a single task versus moving on to something else. So when this happens, I want you to notice that it's happening and then ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen? If fill in the blank, there's a typo, I made a argument that didn't quite make sense. And then your brain can go to the place of, well, there's no way that I made an argument that didn't make sense during my fifth review. I would've caught it <laugh>, right during my third review. I would've caught it versus over reviewing and spending hours and hours spinning on a project that is done and needs to get off your desk and needs to be moved forward.

I have a coach who likes to talk about B minus work. I don't know if I could get my brain on board with B minus work, but definitely B plus work to try to get it and move it forward, get it off your desk because if you are spending too much time on that project, you are stealing from your other clients, you are stealing from your other projects and you are definitely stealing from your life. And I also want you to think about how you're likely under billing because you already know you're being over thorough on this work. So you're likely not billing all of the time that you are reviewing this document. And if you're not billing it, you shouldn't be doing it.

The second sneaky time-waster I wanna share with you is not setting target dates for your projects. If you're a litigator, it may be very clear when your due dates are, you need to have an evidence list by such and such date.

You need to have discovery in by such and such date. But if you're doing contracts, if you're doing anything where you are having communication with a client, and it's up to you to set the cadence for the work that you do, oftentimes the lawyers I talk to are fearful to set target dates because they're afraid that they're not going to hit those target dates.

And it comes down to a couple things. One, they're afraid of what the client is going to think of them, and two, they're going to dump a lot of shame on themselves and tell themselves they should have worked harder and they should have been better. When in reality all that's happened is that they're learning the skill of estimating time. And if you don't start setting target dates for your projects by communicating those target dates with your clients, you will never learn the skill of setting a target date and following through on it.

And it is a learnable skill. Another problem with this is that if you don't set a target date, it can go on forever.

The project can go, can go on in interminably.

So what you want to do is you want to understand on average how long it takes you to complete a project and that is the date that you want to set.

I give the example oftentimes here about estate planners and how apparently there's some universal belief that you should have an estate plan done within two weeks.

I swear I talk to so many estate planners and they all tell me, I tell my client it'll be done in two weeks as if two weeks is the number that you're supposed to tell your clients.

Turns out that is entirely not true.

My clients have turned their thoughts around about this and now they set due dates, target dates for much further out based on the demand that they have in their practice.

Because if you have a practice that's full, a practice that has tons of clients coming in, telling someone two weeks doesn't make sense. You're going to have to tell the client, you'll want to tell the client you can do whatever you want. But if you wanna have a <laugh>, more easeful practice, you're gonna wanna tell your client, alright, I'll have your your project due by four weeks out.

And at that time, when you communicate with your client about the date that you have in mind, they'll have the opportunity to say, Hey lawyer, that actually isn't gonna work for me. Is there any way we could do it sooner?

Or they might say, perfect, we're gonna go on vacation in a couple weeks so by the time we get back it should be done. And we put so much unnecessary pressure on ourselves, assuming that we know what the client thinks that we are gonna be saying.

We think that the client needs things by a certain date when we actually don't know what the client needs until we ask them.

So if you're concerned that clients need a faster turnaround, this is a beautiful opportunity for you to begin communicating with them and saying, and asking them, Hey, what I'm looking at here looks like a four week turnaround.

How does that work for you? And they might say, perfect. Or they might say, you know, there's this special circumstance happening, is there any way we could do it sooner? And you get to decide whether or not that's going to work for you. So that is something that is an extreme time waster. If you're not paying attention to this, if you're not setting target dates for yourself and taking responsibility of your planning, then you might have files sitting on your desk for a crazy amount of time.

And we don't want that because they just end up on your mind constantly. We wanna clean that up.

We wanna make sure that you have more space in your day to do other work in your practice and start moving the needle in your practice.

The third sneaky time waster I see is lawyers telling themselves that a project is so hard or that they have so much to do in this project.

And when we start talking to ourselves like that, we automatically begin deflating ourselves.

I even feel it when I say those words, it's so hard.

You just feel your whole chest just cave in as if you're like giving up. I can't do it. It's so hard. And when we do that, it might just be reflexive, we might also just believe it's the truth. But what I wanna share with you is that as long as you tell yourself these things, it will make it very difficult for you to gain traction on any project.

Whenever I see my brain telling me this lie, and I know it's a lie because I can make anything easy, that's a belief that I have. And I encourage you to take that belief on for yourself. I can make anything easy. I can simplify anything. I think about the project and I just start writing down all of the parts of the project. And I do it step by step by step, so my brain can see that this is a step by step by step process. It's not actually hard.

And then as I write out those steps, I have the opportunity to see things that I can delegate. Maybe there's things that I don't need to do that I can cross out, but my brain was telling me I needed to do it.

This is going to make your life so much simpler and it is going to save you so much time because you won't be spinning your wheels, skipping out on the project, putting it off because your brain is saying it's so hard.

There's just so much to do.

You'll actually have taken a concrete step to break down the project and see for yourself what you can do to simplify it and then take on that belief. I can simplify anything. And that belief will allow you to see ways to simplify that project. The fourth time-waster that I see is the belief, I don't know where to start. I remember having this thought, oh my gosh, it felt like all the time when I was a prosecutor, especially like the first couple years of being a prosecutor, I think that this was a thought that was just on repeat all the time and it felt really horrible. I would sit at my desk, I would look at my files, which just seemed to cover the whole desk, and I would stare at the whole desk <laugh> and think, oh my gosh, I don't know where to start.

And I would freeze up.

I would feel overwhelmed, and it did not encourage me to do the needle moving work in my practice. Instead, all I did was try to move something off my desk, anything off my desk, maybe that was an email I had printed out, or maybe it was just this random file that was next to me just so I could clear some space off my desk. It was a very reactionary way of being because my nervous system wasn't calmed down, I was in overwhelm. What I needed to do was to take a breath and in and notice that my brain was saying I don't know where to start, and that that thought was actually what was creating the overwhelm. And then pause. And this is what I did later in my practice. And and this can help you too. Instead of saying this to yourself, I don't know where to start.

Ask yourself, well, what might be a good place to start? Just what might be a good place to start. So for example, when I ask myself that question as a lawyer, I would look at my desk and I could say, okay, well why don't I start with the inbox and let's just put those in order of importance and I can, I can just get those in order of importance and then I can start working on the top file and then move forward. Or maybe my brain would say, alright, let's take all the paper that's on my desk and let's put it in one stack and then let's take out my file folders and let's just put the items into the file folders. It just depends on what's going on in your practice. But I it, it starts with you noticing the thought that you don't know where to start.

And recognizing that's a lie because as soon as you start asking your brain better questions, you can redirect it. So the better question is, again, what might be a good place to start?

Because it's probably not going to be to just pick up a random piece of paper <laugh>. It's probably going to be, alright, well I know that there are three things that I need to get done right now.

Let me do those three things and then I am going to put all of these papers in a pile and I'm going to put them in the order of importance. You can do that if you don't have a calendar, if that's not where you are right now, I help my clients with the planning part and the mindset part.

But if you're not at the planning stage yet, if that's not where you are, if you're not, you know, getting coached on it or you're not, you know, doing that, there are other avenues for you.

What I do, if you're a planner, right, if you've, you've started the planning process.

If you have really gotten into the work that I've done around planning, and you have a calendar that you use every week, then if you start your week and you notice your brain saying, I don't know where to start, it becomes so much simpler because you now have a plan, right?

You've started your week and you've made decisions ahead of time about what is important. Yes, new things come in, that's okay.

But you have your calendar.

So it's very easy to prioritize.

You're not jumping from thing to thing, you have a plan.

So just recognizing the thought, I don't know where to start, and recognizing that it's a lie can help you get so much more of your time back and help you become so much more focused.

When you combine this mindset that you're hearing about in this episode with a calendar and planning, it is magical.

You will get, oh my gosh, you'll get at least 10 hours a week back.

It's ridiculous.

So when you, when you start this, if you're just starting this, you're new to the podcast, even implement this mindset and start doing some of these smaller things, and then the calendar can come later, but just start somewhere. Okay? The next sneaky time waster is the belief that I should be further along, or I should have started this project sooner, or I should have fill in the blank. Anytime we're judging ourselves about how we should have done things in the past, we are spinning our wheels, we are wasting time, we are hurting ourselves, we're hurting the future of our practice because we are taking away from the time and the energy in building our practice, in focusing on the most important tasks, which are taking care of our clients.

And when we're focused on ourselves and judging ourselves for what we didn't do or what we did do, we're not focused on the client, we're focused on ourselves.

Whenever you focus your brain on your client and how you can help your client and help them move forward, you're gonna automatically feel less overwhelmed. You're gonna feel so much better about yourself, and you won't have this voice in your head about how you should have done things better.

Now, if you want to constructively ask yourself, how can you improve in the future, that's different.

But when you're shoulding yourself and you're telling yourself, you should be a better lawyer, you should be further along, you should have started this project sooner, you're not giving yourself any benefits, right? You're not going to actually learn anything from that. You're just gonna feel a lot of shame. And that shame is gonna block you from the learnings that you could have.

So I'm gonna give you three questions you can ask yourself if you want to improve, but do it without the shame and just make this a very objective process.

The first thing, let's say you've got a project and you didn't start it when you wanted to.

Well, what are the questions you ask yourself?

One is, okay, well what worked in terms of planning this project?

You can say and come up with at least one thing.

Okay?

At least one thing. For instance, I called the client last week so I could get the information that I needed to fill in the blanks for the contract. I made a call to opposing counsel last week, which got the ball rolling on the project. I made sure that I got the subpoenas for the hearing right when I got the file. Write down some of the things that did work.

It's very important that you acknowledge those things.

The second question you ask yourself is what didn't go the way you wanted it to? I didn't block the time that I wanted on a calendar to ensure that I had time to write the brief.

I didn't have the documents that I needed from the client because I didn't call the client early enough to obtain those clients.

The, the client documents, those kinds of things.

And then the third question you're going to ask yourself is, what will I do differently next time?

Okay, next time I get a file like this, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a notation on my calendar, when to call the client, when to call opposing counsel, when to ensure I have the documents that I need before I write the brief. I'm gonna make sure that the brief date is on the calendar.

You know, do those kinds of things. Put this into action and you're going to start accumulating knowledge and improving your ability to manage your time. You don't have to be perfect at this, you don't have to use your calendar for every minute of your day, but if you start to deconstruct what is working, what is not working, and what you will do differently next time, you are going to magnify your improvements by doing this practice instead of beating yourself up. The six sneaky thought that I see really wasting the time of lawyers who have it is the belief that they have to get all of their work done at once. This thought can create so much overwhelm that it basically paralyzes you and you cannot do other work. If you are believing that you've gotta get all of your work done at once, you are going to freeze.

You are not going to be able to get out of that until you change the mindset and say something to the effect of, it doesn't have to be done all at once. What's one thing I can do right now? So this is related to the thought that I had just given you earlier, which is I don't know where to to start. And so instead of believing the brain saying, I thought, I think it all has to be done at once, it all has to be done at once, and that's the only way I'm gonna feel better, or it all has to get done at once. I have 50 cases in my caseload and they just have to be done. I gotta get them off my desk. Now, that is very reactionary, just like we had talked about earlier. And that reaction is very natural because it's a survival instinct.

It feels bad thinking about the files. So therefore, if the files are gone logically, then we'll feel better, right? I wanna share this with you. If all of those files are gone, that means you have nothing to do, you have nothing to bill for, and you don't have a business. And when the lawyers I talked to realize this, they, it doesn't compute. It's like, wait a minute. It would feel horrible if I, I didn't have any files. But it also feels horrible if I do have files and they start to recognize that it's the brain that's creating this catch 22 situation where they can't be happy no matter what. What we wanna do is we want to learn how to accept where we are right now and recognize that we cannot do it all at once. Not only would it be impossible, but it would feel horrible.

It doesn't matter if you have files or don't have files, it's gonna feel horrible one way or the other. I kind of liken this to that scarcity mentality that I talk about when we talk about money in the, in the podcast where you could have all the money in the world, or at least a million. Let's say you have a million dollars in the bank and you might still want more. Let's say you have $5 million in the bank, you could still want more. Like it's just not enough. This is kind of the flip side of that, where you have the work, but your brain is telling you that doing a little bit just isn't enough. It's gotta be all or nothing. Gotta get rid of this all or nothing mentality. We've gotta recognize that we are humans and we need to treat ourselves like humans.

We aren't treating ourselves like humans in the legal profession. We are telling ourselves we need to work harder, we need to work longer. You know, the client needs this, the client needs that. My boss needs this, my boss needs that. But when are we stopping and asking ourselves what we need? Rarely, if ever. So part of the work here is beginning to ask yourself, what do I need? Well, what I need right now is to make sure that I get 40 hours of work done this week. Or what I need to do right now is I need to calculate how many hours I need to bill every single week so I can hit my target amount by the end of the year. What do you need right now? So you can begin focusing your brain on the targets versus thinking everything needs to be done.

Create smaller targets for yourself. Maybe you say, my target is to get this one project off my desk this week. My target is to get these three projects off my desk this week. Create smaller targets so that you can take bite-sized chunks out of what your brain is telling you you need to do. It is not all gonna get done at once. It's an impossibility. And you wouldn't want that anyway because then you wouldn't have any work. So the work is what's paying the bills. You want to keep a steady flow. How do you create a steady flow? You start to spread it out. And that gets back to some of the other time wasters. I was talking about, setting target dates, beginning to stretch out the work, beginning to have communications with your clients and letting them know, these are gonna be my due dates.

I'm gonna have that to you six weeks from now, so that you can give yourself the space that you need to handle your caseload in a way that feels good to you in a way that's not killing you. This is a lot of what we're gonna be talking about when we do the masterclass, and I'm gonna help you create some mindset shifts. You need to take control of your practice to do things like take things in your practice and spread them out. Do things, give you some skills to help you really stop procrastinating, stop putting things off so that you are able to create a practice and a life that you love and stop feeling overwhelmed. I want you to have your time back. I want you to be able to do all those things that you really want to do. And if you want that, which I'm sure if you're listening to the end, you do want that, join me for the masterclass, go to dina cataldo.com/september. That's dina cataldo.com/september and sign up there. And if you're ready to work one-on-one with me, it's time for you to book a strategy session with me. We will create a step-by-step plan to help you achieve the results that you want in your life and your law practice. And it all starts by booking a strategy session with me. You can go to dina cataldo.com/strategy session. That's dina cataldo.com/strategy session. Alright my friend, I hope you have a fabulous week. I will talk to you next week.