Distractions are an enemy to the progress of your law firm.
Sadly, in a world where the average attention span on a computer screen is 40 seconds and distractions are everywhere. Even worse, a single moment of distraction could stall the completion of a task by hours. Profitability of your practice can see strong increases if you reduce the number of daily distractions.
As for time-sensitive cases, minor distractions can reduce the chances that you will win a case or find compelling evidence. Attention spans aside, some distractions could even result in your business wasting resources on unworthy tasks. So here are some ways you can remove distractions from your day:
Centralise your information
Searching for documents, contacts and information relating to a matter across different platforms can greatly impact your productivity. This is not simply because searching across multiple areas for the required information is inefficient, but also because it can branch off and open the door to other distractions. It's not uncommon to go searching for a document and find yourself distracted by another piece of information you find. You then go off on a tangent for anywhere between five minutes and an hour before you've realised you haven't found what you were originally searching for. By having all of your matter-related information accessible from one central platform you can easily locate what you need and get on with your job.
Organise your space
Getting distracted is pretty easy if your desk space and office are untidy or improperly arranged. You and your team may be working on a matter and end up spending hours looking for specific documents rather than actually working on them. Make sure key items are easily accessible but at the same time are not too in the way. Alternatively you could go paperless and store all of your matter-related info digitally.
You can also paint your office in attention-friendly colours, and brush up on the best ways to keep your space in the office organised. Doing so can lead to you and your team being more focused for greater amounts of time while combating times of day where productivity is low, for example straight after lunch.
Plan Your Time
Create a well-outlined schedule and do the most important tasks first. Take a look at your day and honestly prioritise tasks depending on their importance, then put them into a schedule. These schedules should include details on the deadlines of the different tasks, the requirements as well as the priority.
If there are other members of your team, make sure they're doing the same and share these schedules with each other. As a result, everyone will be on the same page on what needs to be done, and at what time. Lastly, fight the urge to procrastinate as this can steal time from other tasks in the future, especially once the procrastinated tasks approach their deadline. Everyone has been their before, sometimes the thought of finalising a task can seem too much, or you just feel confident that you'll be able to get to it later, it's overcoming situations like these that can help your legal practice thrive. You might find it useful to break complex tasks into small and easily-achievable milestones instead of procrastinating them. If you feel that you can't overcome the procrastination, go for a 10 minute walk to resent your brain, you'll come back more productive than ever.
Stay within your specialty
In the early days of your legal practice, you might still be trying to find your feet in the industry. The best way to optimise your resources is to not let yourself get distracted by matters that sit outside your area of expertise. Qualify new clients and ensure that they sit within your areas of practice. Once they have passed this base level of qualification listen to potential clients, if they are a good fit for your firm, take on their matter, if they don't then refer them on to someone who can better help them, chances are they will refer you business in return in the future. You set yourself up with much greater odds to succeed by knowing what you're best at and working that area.
Stick with Quality Leads
Not every job is worth your time. Some jobs might call for you to utilise too much time and resources, which results in the outcome being quite low in exchange for what was required to finish the job. The trick is to assess the quality of your leads. Ideally, no job should cost you more to handle than what it results in, both in terms of time and cash spent. It will only act as a distraction, taking the time you would have used working on other quality jobs. Remember, legal software can help you to better identify if a matter has been successful with its intuitive Dashboards that help you to track your performance.
Time is an invaluable asset for your law firm. The faster you can deal with quality jobs, the faster it will be to cater to more clients and increase the profitability of your business.