Month: September 2023

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 76. Today, we’re talking all about dealing with procrastinators. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Well, hello there. How are you? I am so excited to talk about today’s topic. So much of the time management content that I produce is geared towards helping people who struggle with time management; whether it’s reshuffling your schedule, planning your schedule inaccurately, not making a plan at all, or not honoring the plan that you make.

Those are typically the things that I touch on when I talk about time management. I help people who are in firefighting mode, constantly triaging emergencies, and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Or I help people who are really frozen and paralyzed, procrastinating and getting in their own way, and sort of self-sabotaging in the process.

That’s a lot of what comes up when I talk about time management. But one of the things that I see with a ton of my coaching clients, especially some of my more senior clients who are at the partner level, they deal with other people’s procrastination.

Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re listening to this, and you’re like, “Olivia, I love you. But your time management content really doesn’t resonate with me because I don’t struggle with this.” Okay, if that’s you, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for. Because chances are, if you don’t struggle with time management, you’re dealing with people that do struggle with it, and it is a major pain point for you.

It is a massive source of frustration, annoyance, resentment, and discouragement. It’s probably one of the least enjoyable parts of your job, having to interact with someone who procrastinates. So, I want to address this today so that you can really dial down your frustration and all the negative feelings that come up for you when you’re dealing with members of your team.

Maybe it’s even clients that you’re dealing with who procrastinate. But there are people in your life who are procrastinators and you’ve got all this negativity around their bad time management habits.

I want to walk you through really understanding what your judgments are about them, how you’re feeling as a result of having those judgments, how you show up as a result, and the result that ultimately produces in your relationship with procrastinator.

Then, I want to switch that and really figure out what do you need to be thinking instead. How do you want to feel instead? What do you want to do instead, to produce a different result, a result that serves you more? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

I really want to give you a framework for how to navigate dealing with someone else’s procrastination. Right now, if you’re anything like most of my clients who are on the receiving end of someone else’s procrastination, it’s not going very well. You’re frustrated, the person who procrastinate is struggling, and you really don’t know how to work through this with one another.

I want to give you a framework for what to do, instead of whatever you’ve been trying. Because what you’ve been trying, if it’s like what my clients try, it’s not working. So, we’ve got to come up with a different approach, a different plan of attack, in order to hopefully get you different results.

Now, we can’t control another person’s behavior, you can only control your own. So, we can’t force someone to manage their time well. But if you show up, really with curiosity, and with an open, understanding mind, you can help someone problem solve what is ultimately driving their procrastination habit. We’re going to talk about that today.

First things first, though. I want to talk about the judgments that you have about the procrastinators that you deal with. I think now is as good a time as any to remind you that circumstances are neutral. So, someone getting something to you after it was promised, after the deadline, that is a neutral circumstance; it is not positive, it is not negative. It is neutral until you think a thought about it.

It’s your thoughts about that circumstance that determine how you feel. I promise you, this other person’s procrastinating, them turning in something late after a deadline, is not causing your emotional experience. So, let’s find the thoughts that you’re having, about the people that you work with, that are causing you to feel negative emotions.

A huge thought that people on the receiving end of procrastination have, a very common thought, is they tend to assume that the people who are procrastinating don’t care about the work. That they don’t care about turning it in on time. That they don’t care about their job. They just don’t care.

If you’re thinking that, you’re going to feel maybe offended or disrespected or frustrated. You’re going to feel some negative emotion if you’re thinking that the person doesn’t care. Now, I just have this core belief that people inherently do care. I believe that people inherently want to do good work.

So, if that’s not it, what else might be the reason that the person’s procrastinating? Let’s assume that they care. I’ve talked about this on the podcast a lot. I used to struggle with procrastination very severely. People who were on the receiving end of my procrastination, they were not happy about it. They had plenty of negative thoughts about my time management habits. And frankly, I don’t blame them. It made things more inconvenient for them.

Now, is that a thought? Yes, they chose to think it. I’m also going to choose to agree with it, it did make things more inconvenient. They didn’t get to review my documents when they wanted to review the documents. Based on their schedules, it really threw a wrench in things. It left people with less time to review my work than what they had wanted. It also made them look bad in front of clients.

Again, these are all thoughts, but they’re thoughts that the partners I used to work for would think, and I am not going to disagree with them. If I was in their position, I would probably choose to think the same thoughts. All right.

Now, that being said, if you’re going to choose to think negative thoughts, you’re going to choose to feel negative feelings. I believe a lot of people I used to work with, who were on the receiving end of my bad time management, believed that I didn’t care. I promise you; it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The reason I procrastinated was because I cared so, so much. It was crippling how much I cared about doing a perfect job, about over promising and under delivering to everyone that I was working with, oftentimes with competing deadlines. I wanted to get everyone everything they wanted, at the time that they wanted it.

A lot of times that was in direct conflict with getting someone else something else that they wanted. I cared about doing a good job, and I would avoid getting started because I would be worried. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to approach the project. I deeply cared. I cared so much that it held me back and hung me up.

So, if you’re thinking the thought, about the people that you work with who are procrastinating, that they don’t care, I really want to offer you that that is likely not it. It’s very, very rare that someone’s procrastinating because they just don’t care.

You might be thinking that they should know how to manage their time. That’s another thought that’s very prevalent for people. If you don’t struggle with time management, you have a really hard time empathizing or sympathizing with someone who does. It just doesn’t make sense to you.

Just like my clients who don’t struggle with time entry, it breaks their brain when they hear that other people don’t enter their time until the end of the month. They just don’t understand how their brain is so different from another person’s brain, how their thought process is so different.

But I really want to offer you, just because you don’t struggle with this, if you don’t struggle with it, that doesn’t mean that no one should struggle with it. In fairness, no one ever teaches people how to manage their time. Okay? This is not a skill that we learned in school, at any point in school, all the way through law school. Nor is it something that law firms teach.

Now, I speak to a lot of law firms that come in, and do presentations on time management because no one else is teaching this stuff. Law firms recognize that there is a gap in the training, that there is a void that needs to be filled. I get to come in and speak at law firms all the time on this topic, in an attempt to fill this void.

Frankly, though, to be really honest, I’m getting ready to teach an hour-long masterclass on time management. It’s going to be incredibly comprehensive. But one hour is not enough to change the way that you manage your time. It’s an amazing starting point, and it helps us create a lot of awareness and learn some foundational tools and tricks in order to be better with managing time.

But I work with people on time management for weeks, and for months, until they finally get to the place where they’re really able to have a handle on managing their time. They know how to do it, and they’re implementing the tools that they’ve learned, that I’ve taught them.

It takes a lot of practice, and it’s a very messy process. They need to learn, then attempt, then fail, then tweak, then try some more, then learn some more, and adapt and keep going until they continue to get better and better and better at this. That process just takes time.

So, if you’re thinking that they should know how to manage their time, you’re going to feel kind of righteous, and again, frustrated. Maybe confused as to why they don’t know how to manage their time, like it doesn’t make sense to you. “I don’t know why this is a problem for them,” that might be a thought that you’re thinking.

If those thoughts come up for you, you’re going to be unnecessarily frustrated. So, I just want to offer you an alternate thought, that it makes sense that they’re not good at this, no one’s ever taught them how to do it. Okay?

You might also be thinking that people should get you work on time. Now, I’m not suggesting you give this thought up. If you are in a supervisory position, you might want to hold onto this thought. I just want to assure you, so long as you hold onto it and continue to think it and have this expectation that people get you things on time, and then they don’t get you things on time, you’re going to feel frustrated.

You’re going to feel offended. You’re going to feel angry, or resentful. You’re going to feel inconvenienced. So, you want to be really careful. Is this a thought that you actively want to choose to think, that people should get you work on time? Or do you want to replace it with a thought that maybe makes you feel curious? “I wonder why they didn’t get this to me on time?”

Tapping into that curiosity allows you to really explore what might have gotten in their way, and to help them problem solve and work through it so it doesn’t happen again.

I know another common thought that a lot of the partners that I work with have is, that they shouldn’t have to deal with this. If this is a thought that is coming up for you, you’re going to feel so righteous, and so annoyed, and really sort of exasperated throughout your day to day when you’re dealing with someone’s procrastination.

I just want to offer to you, if you’re in a supervisory position, if you’re in management, if you oversee other attorneys or other support staff, frankly, you should have to deal with this because you’re in the people management business. That is part of your job, managing people. That includes managing people’s flaws, okay? So, their bad time management actually is your business, and you’ve got to help them work through it.

Now, again, you, as they say, can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You can’t force someone to manage their time better than they do. But you can help them understand why they’re struggling and find ways to support them in order to make improvements. Okay?

So, you want to do that. You really want to drop the entitlement that you have coming from the thought, “I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” If you are in management, this is literally part of your job to deal with this. Supervising other people, dealing with the things that they struggle with, and helping shepherd them through so they can stop struggling.

Those are some of the most common thoughts that I see on a very consistent basis. When people are dealing with procrastinators, they’re on the receiving end of someone’s bad time management habits. They think these thoughts and then they feel frustrated, resentful, confused, righteous, offended, disrespected, exasperated, annoyed, inconvenienced, bothered, angry, discouraged; all these different emotions.

If this is you, I want you to check in with yourself for a second. Think about the person whose procrastination you’re currently dealing with. What are your thoughts about them? What are your thoughts about them getting something to you after they promised it, after you asked them for it? What are all of the judgments you have about them?

Start to identify those thoughts. You can pause this episode and write them down, if you want to. Then ask yourself, how does that thought make you feel? How does thinking it make you feel? You’re going to start to see the direct connection between what you’re thinking about the person and how you end up feeling.

Now, what’s really important here, I want you to think to yourself, how do I show up when I’m feeling that way? How do I interact with this person? How do I manage this person? How do I deal with them? How do I act when I feel frustrated and resentful? How do I act when I feel confused?

How do I act when I feel righteous or offended or disrespected? How do I act when I feel discouraged and doubtful that they’re not going to be able to figure this out? When I’m feeling entitled that I shouldn’t have to deal with this? How do you show up? What do you do?

A lot of times, attorneys who are managing people, they will withdraw because they’re frustrated, they don’t want to interact with the person. So, they spend less time interacting with them, which is really the opposite of what’s needed in this situation.

People need more supervision. People need more mentorship and guidance. People need more support. They need your help to problem solve. Most people don’t know how to fix this problem themselves, that’s why they still struggle with it. That’s why it hasn’t gotten better.

If they knew what they needed to do in order to get better at managing their time, I assure you, they would do it. They really don’t understand what needs to change. So, they’re confused too. If you’re confused, and you’re avoiding dealing with them, and they’re confused, this isn’t going to get any better.

You also might talk down to them, be chastising or belittling. I’ve even seen situations where people will yell at someone when they’re turning in something late, when they’re missing deadlines. Remember, shaming someone does not lead to self-improvement, ever. So, that is not a strategy that’s going to work.

You might scare someone into a temporary, short-term blip on the screen, improvement. But it’s going to be temporary, it will not last because ultimately, when people are feeling badly about themselves, they begin to shut down. They show up in a negative way, not a positive way. Negative emotions don’t create positive actions. That’s not how it works.

Another massive mistake that I see people make when they’re dealing with procrastinators, is they simply tell them that they need to do a better job. This happened to me all the time. People would tell me, “Hey, Olivia, you just need to get better at managing your time.” I’m not disagreeing with them, they were right. I did need to get better at managing my time.

The problem is that it’s “good advice, poorly given,” as one of my former clients says all the time. I did need to do better, but I didn’t know what that meant. That was still very confusing for me. What does “do better” mean? I didn’t actually have the skills to manage my time well, so it was basically, not necessarily falling on deaf ears, but just falling on ears of someone who didn’t have the capabilities to really make an improvement, because they didn’t know the proper process for managing my time.

So it’s like, “Do better.” I’m like, “Yes, I will.” Then I go back to my office and I’m like, “I don’t know how to do better. What do I do?” Trust me, I had tried. I had bought every planner on the face of the earth; that’s not going to solve a time management problem. I had watched the YouTube videos, I had listened to the podcast episodes, I had read the books, I had followed accounts on social media, none of that was working.

It wasn’t until I really applied myself in a coaching capacity, and learned different coaching concepts, started practicing them in my own life, and then, through a lot of trial and error, that I finally got better at this. I feel like I learned some from my coaches.

But I taught myself so much of what I now teach my clients, and I really came up with a process that is foolproof, that works, when I teach people how to manage their time. It covers all the bases, and it really contemplates and addresses the discomfort avoidance that is a massive component of procrastination and time management problems.

You feel entitled to feel uncomfortable, and then you don’t take action because you’re not willing to feel that discomfort. I really have mastered the art of not just helping people plan their schedules, but teaching people how to feel their negative feelings. So, they’re able to move forward and take intentional action in spite of and despite them, which is the secret to managing your time.

So if you’re consistently having broken record conversations with the people that work for you, when it comes to their poor time management, you’ve got to check in with yourself.

Is what you’re saying to them actually helpful? What is it that they’re supposed to do with what you’re saying? Would they have any idea the first thing that they need to do, based on the instruction or guidance that you’ve given them? Telling someone to do better doesn’t create any clarity, and confused minds don’t improve. Okay?

Confused minds don’t move forward, they just spin and indulge in “I don’t know.” So, you’ve got to help people get out of that confusion, and get out of indulging in “I don’t know” by helping them problem solve.

You also might be complaining about the person to other colleagues or really dwelling on their “bad” behavior. This isn’t a morally bad thing, right? It’s just a judgment that it’s a negative thing that we’re dealing with, that we encounter in our work lives. Or in our personal lives, if you’re on the receiving end of anyone’s procrastination in your personal life, as well.

But, are you complaining? Are you dwelling? Are you spinning? Are you really stewing in the fact that you have to deal with this? That’s going to come from that thought of, “I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” Then, you keep dreading and dwelling on the fact that you do have to deal with this.

So, is that one of the actions that you take? What don’t you do when you’re feeling these negative emotions? I always love to flush that out, as well. You probably aren’t asking a lot of questions. You probably aren’t getting to the bottom of this. You probably aren’t seeing where people’s analysis is going awry. You’re probably not brainstorming different solutions with the person that works for you.

You’re probably not consistently communicating with them, coming up with different solutions, and troubleshooting what might work. What might help them make different decisions when it comes to how they manage their time, so they can start to improve.

So, check in with yourself. What do you do when you feel these negative feelings? What don’t you do? Start to compile that list. Then, let’s be really honest. Does it create a result that you want? If the result you want is best supporting the employee that’s doing work for you, who’s struggling with time management, if you want that, if you want to best support them, you probably aren’t going to do that by being dismissive.

By belittling them, by telling people to just “do better,” by yelling at them, by talking down to them, by judging them, by complaining about them, by withdrawing, by hiding from them, by avoiding negative conversations about their time management, by acting like it’s not that big of a deal and then silently cursing them, right?

None of that is going to lead to them getting better at their time management skills. So, even though we can’t control other people, you can control yourself. Really ask yourself, how would I want to show up? What would I want to be doing? What result would I want to create? I want to be the best support system possible, so they have the highest likelihood of overcoming their procrastination problem.

If that’s what you want to do, then we’ve got to make a change. We’ve got to change the way you think. We’ve got to change how you feel. And, we’ve got to change the way that you show up when you’re dealing with these employees.

Now, before we go into really examining those three things; the thoughts you need to be thinking, the feelings you want to be cultivating, and the actions you need to be taking; I want to do a check in here. Okay?

Because I consistently see this be a pain point between supervising attorneys, attorneys answering to supervising attorneys, direct reports, is that there are mismatched expectations. I always want you to take radical ownership and check in: Are you being unclear? Have you given someone a direct, very clear, very finite deadline or have you left it open ended?

If you’re leaving it open ended, we’ve got to fix that. We have to have clear, definitive cut offs for when work needs to be turned into us. What is the expectation? I used to struggle with this.

I joke with attorneys, when I come into law firms and speak to them, I always do a show of hands. Like, who here uses the terms “end of day” or “close of business.” Then we go through and we figure out what everyone means when they say that. Those mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So, it might mean, to you, 5pm. It might mean 6pm, if you think the business day doesn’t end at 5pm. Maybe it runs a little bit later. Maybe you think it’s like 8pm, later on in the evening. Or you might think it means midnight, or 6:03am the following day, before the partner wakes up. Okay? We’ve got to be really clear on what you mean by that.

Because if you mean 5pm, someone else thinks that it means midnight. You’re going to spend that time, between 5pm and midnight, fuming because someone didn’t get you something on time. Then, the person who’s working for you thinks they haven’t even done anything wrong.

Same thing with responsiveness. Define responsiveness for your team. What does it mean to you? Tell them what you expect. Because if you expect someone to respond to emails the same day, or within eight hours or within an hour… You get to pick what responsive means to you.

Then, communicate that expectation. Versus your wanting a response in an hour, and the person who’s working for you thinks 24 hours is fine. You’re going to have so much unnecessary frustration simply because you have mismatched expectations, and you haven’t addressed them.

You haven’t been clear about what they are. We always want to create more clarity. A client of mine says this, I love this phrase, “Clarity is kindness.”

The other thing that I really want you to do, is check in with yourself about your expectation for the direct reports, the improvement process. What are you expecting? Let me promise you, this is not going to improve overnight. You are not going to have a conversation about this one time and then it immediately gets better, that is not going to happen.

People who struggle with time management struggle with time management. It’s not just a flip of the switch where they can just consciously make a decision and decide not to struggle with this anymore. There’s so much that goes into managing your time.

Learning how to accurately plan. Learning how to stop under estimating how long stuff takes. Setting boundaries. Saying no. Resisting the urge to people please. Controlling your calendar. Not allowing yourself to be interrupted. Not distracting yourself with other forms of entertainment.

Not procrastinating. Starting on time. Working without interruptions. Ending on time. Being disciplined to follow through. Allowing yourself to feel the discomfort that comes from working on stuff when you don’t feel like working on it.

This is a masterclass in life skills, in building discipline, in developing it, and then implementing it. Practicing this over and over and over again. It takes time to build the skill set. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to develop it overnight. It’s going to take a lot of practice. It’s going to require a lot of learning, a lot of consistent work, to make continuous and constant progress in this department.

If you want to help someone; I think here, you should be really honest. Do you want to help them get better at this? Do you want to help them problem solve? Is this something that you want to work on with them?

I know, you might be thinking you shouldn’t have to deal with this. But we’ve already established you do have to deal with this. If they’re on your team, and you want to continue to employ them, you want to continue working with them. So, you’ve got to decide, am I willing to commit to this, knowing it’s not going to be an overnight improvement? Knowing that it’s going to take more time than that?

If your answer is no, you’re allowed to have that be your answer. You’re allowed to say, “Nope, I don’t want to work with this person,” and then take the actions that you need to take in order to create that result.

Do you need to fire them? Do you need to ask to work with someone else instead? Do you need to bring different people into your matters, instead of just relying on the person who struggles with time management? You get to make up your mind. But I do want you to make up your mind.

And, I want you to make up your mind from a really realistic place. That this isn’t going to get better overnight. People who struggle with this, struggle with it. It’s going to take time for them to learn how to properly manage their time. Are you up for that?

If you decide you’re up for it, I want you to think about how long you’re willing to devote helping someone improve with this. Are you willing to give it six months? Are you willing to give it a year? I’d love to tell you that it’s going to happen faster than that, but in my experience it’s probably not going to happen faster than that.

There’s going to be a lot of trial and error, so are you up for putting in the time to help someone work through this? Decide on the amount of time you’re willing to give it, and then put your head down and go to work helping them.

Rather than every single day, day in and day out, being like, “They haven’t gotten it, yet. They haven’t gotten it, yet. They haven’t gotten it yet.” That is such a terrible way to support someone through learning how to not procrastinate. Because you’re going to constantly be frustrated that they haven’t caught on, yet.

Versus continuing to be supportive patient, calm, and really curious about what they’re struggling with now. Then, tweaking and iterating and constantly helping them get better. So, decide how long are you willing to work with them on this.

Then ask yourself, what is your process that you’ll follow for helping them improve with this? Now, the first step, is that you have to get yourself to a clean place. You can’t be interacting with the person who’s procrastinating from those negative emotions that I listed earlier.

If you do, it’s going to come across in the way that you communicate with them. So, we’ve got to get you to a cleaner place. The way that we do that is we change your thinking. First step is going to be to address your mindset. I want you thinking thoughts other than the ones we listed earlier.

Thoughts like, “We can solve this,” those going to make you feel really determined. Or the thought, “I wonder what’s causing this problem?” That’s going to make you feel really curious. Maybe you will be thinking, “They’ve never learned to do this,” so you’re going to feel compassionate or understanding.

You might need to think, “Shaming doesn’t lead to self-improvement,” and that might make you feel calm and patience. You might need to think the thought, “I’m in this for the long haul,” and then you’ll feel committed to helping them improve. Or you need to think, “We’re a team here, we’re on the same team.” That might help you feel really devoted or connected to the person. Okay?

Take a second and think about how you want to feel going into a conversation with the person. Do you want to be understanding? Do you want to feel accepting? Do you want to be calm? Do you want to be confident that you can overcome this, or at the very least optimistic that you can overcome this issue together by working with them?

Do you want to feel determined, motivated, connected, capable? Really think about how you want to feel. Then just simply ask yourself, what do you want to think in order to feel that way? What do you need to think in order to feel that way?

Start to identify your own new positive thoughts that you’re going to think, instead of the ones that you probably have been thinking. That’s going to help you get to that grounded place. That place where you can really be curious.

Then approach this with an open mind. From a place where you’re able to really assist and help them and support the person, rather than judge them, and give them a hard time and not be helpful. Okay? So, we’ve got you to a grounded place, that step one.

Step two, is we need to create an opportunity to have a conversation with the procrastinator. The first thing that I want you to establish in this conversation, is whether or not there is a problem. The obvious answer here, is that there is a problem. But we really need the procrastinator to also admit and be brought in on the idea that there’s a problem.

What I’ll see, a lot of times, is people want to dismiss that there is a problem to be solved. They want to pass it off like a fluke, like it won’t happen again. But that’s not really what’s happening here. If this has happened more than once, with the person that you’re working with, you know it’s not a fluke.

They’re going to potentially have a hard time fessing up that this isn’t just an accident and that it’s not going to happen again. People like to be overly ambitious and optimistic, and think that they’re just going to do better next time. Right?

You might also be hoping and wanting the person to just do better next time. So, it’s really easy to dismiss this, brush it off, cross your fingers and hope things just improve. But that doesn’t actually happen in practice. I want you to start the conversation by establishing that there’s a problem. Like, the deadline was missed, the person got something to you late. We need to establish that there’s a problem to solve.

From there, you need to ask questions. You need to gather a lot of information to figure out what the actual problem is. I want you asking questions because I need you to understand how they approach the work, what went wrong.

When you are just making assumptions about how they approached the work, you’re not gathering enough information to actually be able to spot where they went wrong in their approach. I promise you; you’ll be able to spot it if you don’t struggle with time management, and you’re far enough along in your career.

You’re going to be able to spot and see where they went wrong. You’re going to see that they waited too late to get started and didn’t give themselves enough time. Maybe they prioritized other work over yours, because they were people pleasing someone else or they over committed to you. They weren’t honest with you, because they didn’t want to “disappoint” you, even though they ended up disappointing you.

Maybe they underestimated how long it would take. Maybe they avoided getting started on it because they were confused, didn’t know how to get started, and spent a lot of time spinning their wheels. They didn’t come ask you for more direction because they felt embarrassed, especially because they probably should have started on the project sooner and didn’t.

So, you’ve got to ask questions. When did they start working on it? How long did they think it was going to take? What was their approach as they worked on it? Where did they get stuck? Did they come and ask questions? Did they not? Why did they assume it was going to take as long as they thought it would? Was their assumption incorrect?

You’re starting to flesh out where their analysis went wrong. You’re going to see if they needed to start a lot sooner. You’re going to see if they needed to tell you no, and be more honest with you. Or if they needed to come talk to you, ask questions, instead of struggle to figure something out on their own.

Once you’ve asked these questions, you’re going to clearly define the problem. What’s the problem that you both together need to solve? There are only four reasons people don’t get you work on time. They either didn’t make a plan to begin with.

They planned inaccurately and underestimated how long the task was going to take them.

Or they had a plan, but then they reshuffled their schedule to tend to another “urgent” matter. Maybe people-pleasing someone, or operating out of fear or guilt.

Or they just procrastinated. Why did they procrastinate? Were they confused about where to get started? Were they overwhelmed? Were they afraid they were going to do a bad job? What were their thoughts about the project? How were they feeling about approaching the project? What emotions were coming up for them?

So, those are the four: Not making a plan, planning inaccurately, reshuffling their schedule, and procrastinating. I want you to help them identify what went wrong. It might be a combination of those four different issues. Okay? You’ve got to identify what the problem is.

There also might be other problems. This doesn’t lead to why they didn’t turn it in on time, but other problems that make matters worse. So, not communicating with you. Not asking questions. Not communicating with someone else. They didn’t have capacity to do a different project when they were working on something for you.

So, do we need to work on communication here, as well? I really want you to clearly articulate the problem. Talk it through with them. You can explain the problem as you see it.

And I want you, the next step is, to figure out if they agree with that being the problem. Do they agree with your assessment of it? You can even have them articulate the problem. You can ask them, “What do you think the problem is?”

Now, a lot of people will want to answer that question with, “I don’t know.” That’s going to be the easiest escape route here. So, if someone says that to you, “Oh, I don’t know why I didn’t start on that earlier. Oh, I don’t know why I procrastinated. Oh, I don’t know why I didn’t come and ask you questions.”

I don’t want you to let their answer “I don’t know” stand. You’ve got to hold space for them to work through these questions and come up with better answers than “I don’t know.” So, you can say, “If you had to guess, what do you think it would be? If you did know, though, what might you say?”

Are those super coachy questions? Yes, they are. I use them with my clients all the time. But you can use them to work with people who you’re trying to help get better with time management.

You’ve established there’s a problem. You’ve asked questions. Now, you figured out what the problem is. You’ve agreed on it together, that that is the problem. Now, I want you to get their buy in? Do they want to solve the problem? You have to get their buy in. If they are not committed to solving this, it’s not going to work.

They’ve got to commit. They’ve got to step up to the plate. From there, you’ve got to come up with an approach for how are you going to solve this problem. Now, one thing I suggest, is that you meet with the people that are working for you, who struggle with time management, you’ve got to meet with them way more frequently than you do with people who don’t struggle with time management.

Would it be amazing if you didn’t have to do that? Yes, it’d be great. But doing what you’re doing isn’t working. So, we’ve got to change our approach. You need more interaction with those people. I highly encourage that you have standing meetings with them. Check ins where you force them to come with questions they have about the assignment.

I suggest that you have check ins on progress on the task, so you don’t create a situation where it’s possible for them to wait to the last minute to get started. You can also track someone’s time on a project, if you have access to their billable time. Have they started on it, yet? A lot of people will people-please you and say they’ve started on it. But if they haven’t billed the time yet, they haven’t.

Now, if people procrastinate with projects, they probably also procrastinate with billing their time. But stay on people about this, and ask them. You can actually go through this process with them, on their procrastination for entering their time.

Establish, is there a problem? Ask them how do they think about time entry? What emotions come up for them around a time entry, that leads to them delaying entering their time?

Their thoughts are going to be something along the lines of, “My other work is more important. I hate doing this. This sucks. I shouldn’t have to do this. It’s tedious. It’s time consuming. I don’t have time for this right now.” It’s going to be thoughts like that, and then they’re going to feel the negative emotions that are caused by those thoughts.

Then you can work through what exactly is the problem. Is it just that they need to feel dread and put the time in, anyways? Is it that they don’t have an approach for when they should enter it, and they need to make some decisions around entering their time?

Are they confused? Are they being perfectionistic? Do they think they need to enter all of the month’s time before they can start entering today’s time? Which is a terrible idea. You can just start entering today’s time instead of being perfectionistic about it, and worry about the backlog later. You want to ask questions to help discern these problems.

Once you’ve got a clear understanding of what the problem is, get their buy in so they want to solve it. Then agree on a process to solve the problem. What are you going to do with them, in order to see some improvement? I also want you to include the timeline for them.

Talk them through. “This is going to take a while. We’re going to consistently work on it for month after month after month,” And get them to buy into that, as well. It might mean heightened supervision. It might mean more frequent check ins. It might mean having to have uncomfortable conversations around their approach to projects and tasks.

But you’re doing it because you’re on their team, and you’re committed to helping them solve this problem, that they have now agreed that they face, that they have. They’ve also agreed to wanting to work on this with you, to help solve this problem, to address it.

I really want you to spend a second and think about, if you didn’t believe that it was shameful and bad to be bad at time management, how would you approach helping someone tackle this and improve?

If you didn’t think it was this moral failing, which so many people treat it as a moral failing, if you didn’t think of it that way, what would you do differently? You would diagnose and treat the problem instead of judging and ignoring it. Judging and ignoring it is what we do when we think something is shameful, okay?

So, check in with yourself. Are you guilty of being judgmental, but then also burying your head in the sand and not getting your hands dirty helping your team members work through their time management struggles, and working to help them solve these problems? If you drop your judgment, you can tap into being willing to help them diagnose the problem and to treat it.

You do that, again, by grounding yourself. Getting grounded first, then establishing there is a problem, asking questions so we can understand what’s causing the problem. We need to understand how they approach their work so you can issue spot.

Then we’re going to get really clear after asking those questions. What is the specific problem we need to solve and address? Get their buy in. Do they want to solve the problem? Then come up with an agreed upon plan for solving it.

Of course, last but not least, you evaluate, gather some data, implement the plan, and see what’s working, what’s not working, what do you need to do differently, and continue to iterate. Keep working this process. This is how you help someone work through their time management struggles.

Just like I’ve talked about in the past couple episodes, it is going to be messy. I highly recommend, too, if you’re dealing with someone who procrastinates, direct them to my podcast episodes. I have a very comprehensive time management series on how to manage your time.

I walk them through all the steps. I teach them the mindset. I teach them the strategy. I would highly recommend you listen to it, as well, so you can have conversations where you’re well versed in the strategy that I’m teaching. And, you have a framework that you can teach them, help them understand, troubleshoot, and talk through.

Definitely do that yourself, but also direct and have them listen to it as well. Have them partake in the process. You can ask them, “How do you think we should approach this? What do you think might work for you?” Let them buy in, let them participate in the solution process.

But if you see them doing something that you know doesn’t make sense, that you know is kind of the wheels going off the tracks, course correct. Bring them back to what you know to be true. Help them see where they’re thinking about it the wrong way, and then make your recommendation. You can explain to them why you are recommending what you are recommending. It’s coming from your experience, okay?

One of the things that I see people struggle with the most, is that they don’t plan backwards from the deadline. They underestimate how long something takes. So, I want you to teach them how you think about estimating how long a task takes. How you get clear on what something’s going to require from you. How you decide when to start working on something, so you ensure that you have enough time to complete it in a timely fashion. Think about how you approach your work.

As you ask them questions and learn more about the way that they approach their work, you’re going to see where their analysis leads them down the wrong path, where it causes the problem. Then, you can teach how they need to look at it instead. How to think like you so they manage their time better.

I hope this helps you dial down your frustration, because you’re causing your own frustration. I hate to break it to you. So, we’ve got to get you thinking differently about dealing with procrastinators. Then, we also have to get you dealing with procrastinators differently than you have been.

I want you to try this approach. Have much more open, honest, calm, curious conversations with the people that you’re working with. Help them problem solve, help them troubleshoot, get to the bottom of what’s not working. Establish that there’s a problem and then help them solve it.

They’re going to be so grateful to you, and you’re going to be so grateful to yourself because you’re not going to have to deal with this problem, if you put in the work to help people overcome it. Okay, I hope this helps you.

Also, don’t forget, I’m teaching a masterclass at the end of the month, September 29th, at 12pm Eastern, if you want to register for it. You can come learn what I teach, or you want your procrastinators that you’re dealing with to watch it as well. You can make it a whole, firm-wide event.

You can register for it at LessStressedSessions.com/signup. Or you can go to my Instagram, there’s a link there. We’ll also link it in the show notes to this podcast episode. Copy and paste it, and send it out to your whole team. That way, anyone who struggles with time management and procrastination can come and learn the proper process that I teach for how to properly manage their time.

Okay, that’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. I hope this was helpful. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you in the next episode. Oh, one more thing. I almost forgot. Remember, I am doing a giveaway. If you would do me the kindness of reading and reviewing the podcast. If you’re just absolutely loving my content, it would mean the world to me.

As a thank you for leaving me a rating and review, I’m going to pick five people over the course of the month of September and October. At the end of October, I’ll pick five winners, and I will give away five distinct prizes. I hope you are one of the lucky winners.

If you haven’t left a review yet, go do that now. Thank you. It means the world to me. I can’t wait to pick names, and hopefully I pick yours.

All right, have a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 75. Today, we’re talking all about chronic consumption, and the proper process of learning. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Hello, hello, how are you? I hope all is well in your neck of the woods. My September is going pretty okay. I’ve got some changes on the horizon. I’m getting ready to move to Charleston. I’m so excited about that. If you’ve been following along on social media, mainly on Instagram, you might know a little bit about that already. But I’m looking forward to doing that.

I’m in Michigan right now. So, I’m enjoying the change of the seasons. I hope that you’re enjoying whatever season you’re in. Whether it’s geographically where you’re located, or the season of work that you’re in, or the season of life that you’re in. I hope you’re enjoying it.

If you’re not, there’s no need to fret. You are in the right place, listening to this podcast, learning how to work through it, so you feel better, so you get into a better season.

Now, one of the things that I see people do, it’s one of the mistakes that they make that actually keeps them stuck in a season that doesn’t serve them, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I talked a little bit in the last episode about the messiness of learning new things. I really wanted to dive in today, again, a really specific issue that I see people with.

I’ve devoted this entire month on social media to talking about time management. I’ve already done a really comprehensive time management series on the podcast, which I’ll link for you in the show notes. Go back and binge that if you haven’t.

But I want to talk about some of the problems that I see people encounter. One of them was what I talked about in the last episode, which is that people want to avoid the messiness of learning new things. Because they want to avoid that messy process, that clunky process, they don’t embark on learning new things.

They just stay stuck in this season of struggle, and they don’t work through it; they don’t improve, they don’t figure it out, they don’t learn, they don’t keep implementing and making changes and learning more and making more progress and just constantly improving.

Another thing that I see people do all the time, and I am calling myself out here because I used to be so guilty of this, and this is how I know how to spot it in other people. But people will chronically consume. They just stay in consumption mode.

This definitely comes from those perfectionistic tendencies, where we keep telling ourselves we don’t have enough information to get started yet. We need to keep learning more. There’s one more thing that we haven’t read, yet. There’s one more thing that we haven’t heard, yet. There’s a tip out there that’s really going to unlock everything for us, and we’ve got to go out there and find it.

We can’t get started implementing yet, until we’ve exhausted basically every resource imaginable, everything that’s available to us. We have to leave no stone unturned. We keep binging content; we just keep listening, keep reading, we keep consuming, we keep watching.

We keep taking in information, but we don’t ever actually get to the part where we implement what we’ve taken in to actually begin the full learning process and to complete the learning process.

So, today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about a process that I created. I recently spoke, I gave a keynote presentation at a marketing conference hosted by Roman Zelichenko, who is a good friend of mine. His marketing conference is specifically tailored towards immigration attorneys and people in the immigration industry, outside of legal professionals or outside of attorneys, specifically.

When I was brainstorming my keynote speech for GMI CON, which is what the name of the conference is, I was thinking to myself, “How do I make sure people get the most out of this conference? What holds people back from implementing what they learn? From actually taking advantage of all of the information that gets presented to them?

What do I see from my clients, time and time again, that holds them back? That keeps them stuck. That keeps them struggling and suffering in that season of confusion of not knowing how to do something? Of continuing to tolerate a problem because they haven’t completed the learning process to reach the solution?

So, I started to make a list of all of the things that I see people do, that really gets in their way of making progress, of solving problems, of learning new things. As I started to make that list of problems, I was able to put together a learning process that I have been giving to my clients. I taught this when I was in Montana, and I taught it to Roman’s conference attendees as well. It’s just a really good framework for learning anything new.

So, the first mistake that I see people make is what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode, it’s that chronic consumption. People just consume, consume, consume, and they never get out of consumption. They never feel satiated. They never feel full. The learning process never feels complete. They keep wanting more because they haven’t ever defined what enough is to begin with, so they just keep consuming.

Another thing that I see people do is they keep remaking the same decisions, right? So, they’ll decide to work on something, and then they’ll change their mind. Then they redecide it. They keep staying in that decision making process, questioning themselves, second guessing themselves, changing their mind, hemming, and hawing wavering.

That slows you down, and really stops you altogether from making any progress. Because how can you move forward if you keep moving backwards and remaking the decision you already made? Right? If you’re thinking about the conference that I spoke at, it was a marketing conference, so just redeciding, am I going to do social media marketing?

People will decide that, and then they’ll redecide it. Deciding, when do I enter my time during the day? Do I do it contemporaneously? Do I do it at the end of the day? Do I do it at the end of the week? Do I do it at the end of the month? Do I do it first thing in the morning?

If you keep redeciding that it’s going to keep you in confusion. You’re not going to follow through with the decision that you already decided upon if you give yourself permission to keep reopening that discussion and to decide anew. Alright? This is totally a defense mechanism. It keeps you safe. It feels really productive to continue to remake the same decision.

But it doesn’t actually work. I actually used an analogy at the conference… and this totally applies to time management too; think about deciding what you’re going to do for the day and then you remake that decision. You scratch your original plan and then you’re like, “Okay, what am I going to do today, now?” Then an hour goes by, and you’re like, “Okay, really, what am I going to do today?” You keep remaking the same decision.

It’s sort of like when you make a list of what to pack for a trip, and instead of then moving on to actually packing your suitcase, you tear the list up, and you remake the list of what you should pack for the trip. You’ll never end up with anything in your suitcase because you keep remaking a decision that you’ve already made.

Now, deciding things feels like you’re moving the ball forward, but you’re really not. You need to make the decision and then take action in accordance with that decision. You need to put that decision into practice, into play.

Another thing that I see people do is that they don’t make a plan. They’ll decide, but then they don’t make any plan to actually implement the decision that they just made. So, they have really no clarity on how to progress, on how to proceed.

Then they just stay in a place of confusion, thinking, “Well, I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how to figure this out. I don’t know how to get to the result I ultimately want to create.” It’s very hard to implement when you haven’t come up with a plan for what implementation is going to look like. Okay?

The other thing that I see people do, if they’ve actually overcome any of the things that I just mentioned, and they get to doing the stuff that they need to do in order to solve the problem that they’re facing, they won’t evaluate. So, they won’t gain information from what they’ve tried already, and they won’t glean learning from it. They won’t find the wisdom that’s come from the tries that they’ve done.

Now, if you were a person who struggles with any of the things that I just mentioned, I want you to check in with yourself. Pause the episode for a second if you have to. Just get clear, where are you doing some of these things? Are you doing all of these things? You want to be able to spot your pain points because that’s how you’re going to get better over time.

You’ve got to be able to catch yourself in the middle of working on this process that I’m going to teach you to know where you’re likely to get stuck, so you can catch yourself and work through it. You can course correct, you can interrupt yourself, get out of your normal habit to freeze, to spin, to indulge in inaction. You want to be on to yourself ahead of time so you can spot it as soon as you see it. Okay?

Here’s something else I want you to be on the lookout for, while we’re speaking of things to be on the lookout for. I also want you to pay attention, if when you’re working on solving a problem, or you’re telling yourself you’re going to learn something new, are you lying to yourself? Are you telling yourself you’re “working on it?” Are you telling yourself that you’re trying to learn something?

If you’re telling yourself these things, I want you to tap in and be really honest with yourself. Get super candid, radically candid, and be honest with yourself right now? How exactly are you trying to learn this new skill? How are you trying to improve? How are you working on it? Walk me through the process that you’re implementing.

Typically, when people tell me that they’re trying to get better at something, like, “I’m trying to get better at time management. I’m trying to learn how to manage my time. I’m working on getting better at time management. I’m working on my time management,” and I ask them, “How? Please regale me with all the ways that you’re trying. Describe to me exactly what your process of ‘trying’ looks like. What is ‘working on it’ look like for you on a day-to-day basis?” They’re going to struggle to articulate it.

Because they’re stuck at step one, typically. They’re still in that consumption mode. They haven’t moved out of it. They haven’t come up with a plan. They haven’t formulated what exactly they’re going to do to create clarity so they can actually move into the implementation process, and move forward and just follow the yellow brick road.

They haven’t done any of that stuff. They’re telling themselves, “I’m working on it. I’m trying,” but in reality, they really aren’t. They’re not doing anything to move the ball.

So, I came up with a process that you can follow to learn any new thing, any new skill, or to solve any problem, any problem that you’re facing. Okay? First and foremost, you’ve got to identify what it is that you’re going to learn or what problem that you’re going to solve. You’ve got to get clear on that.

I want you to make sure that you can articulate it very simply. Can you put it into one sentence? “This is what I want to learn how to do. This is the problem that I want to solve.” It should be very specific. I should be able to come in to your life with my little clipboard, and make sure that you’ve learned the skill or solved the problem. All right? We want to make sure that it’s specific.

From there, there’s a five-step process that you’re going to follow. The first one is to consume information. You might need to go out and gather information. If you’re learning how to manage your time, I highly recommend you go listen to the very comprehensive series of episodes that I did on time management.

Now, when it comes to consumption, you’re going to have to constrain. So, I want you to limit the experts you follow, the amount of information you’re going to consume, how long you’re going to spend learning. Because you can just spend all of your time learning and learning and learning.

There are enough books on time management for you to keep yourself busy for probably the next 10 years, if we’re being really honest. Maybe even longer than that. You could listen to YouTube videos or podcast episodes every night for the next year, and you would be in no better position when it comes to managing your time because you’re stuck in that chronic consumption mode.

You won’t move forward into that messy part, where you actually start to make decisions, you start to make plans, you implement them, you do it messily, then you learn and evaluate, and then adapt your action plan based on the evaluation. So, we’re going to consume, but we’re going to do it in a really constrained and restrained manner. All right?

If you try and listen to everything, you’re never going to be able to move forward. So, you have to decide how long am I going to consume information for? What content specifically am I going to consume? Who am I going to consume content from?

You want to make these decisions, and you want to limit it, so you actually are very clear on when you will move forward into the next phase. So, step one is consume in a constrained manner.

Step two is you’ve got to decide. Decide exactly what you’re going to do moving forward. So, if you’ve listened to some podcast episodes, if you’ve watched some YouTube videos, if you’ve talked to experts or colleagues and learned how to do some things from them, that’s all that consumption, right?

Now, you have to decide what you’re going to do moving forward. Whose methodology are you going to use? What’s your approach going to be? What are you going to try and do? What are you going to not do?

If you’re thinking about marketing on social media for your practice, are you going to be on all of the social media platforms? Or are you going to consume content to figure out which platforms might be the best platforms for you?

Then you’re going to step two; decide how you’re going to proceed. Once you make your decisions, now you’ve got some clarity. What’s it going to start to look like to move forward? Now remember, when it comes to deciding, you’re going to decide one time, and you’re going to honor that decision moving forward.

You’re not going to remake that decision unless you come up with information, through your evaluation process, after implementing your original plan, for a long enough period of time to gather reliable data. I suggest six months. If you want to do three, do three, but for a while. To gather enough information, to where you can really rely on it and start to see trends.

You’re going to decide, and not remake that decision until you’ve gone through the rest of the process, evaluated, and you have a really good reason, a reason supported with facts and data, to make a change. Alright? So, step one, consume with constraint. Step two, decide. How are you proceeding? What are you going to do? Whose process are you going to follow? What information are you going to take? Then leverage and apply.

Step three, with that clarity that you have gained from making that decision, you need to make your plan, your action plan, that you’re going to use to implement. Now, you may be able to map out a complete plan start to finish. But sometimes you don’t know all the steps yet.

Especially when you’re learning new things, you only know the next few steps, or maybe you only know the first next step that you need to take. If that’s the case, then your plan is going to be short and sweet. Okay? More information is going to be revealed to you at a later point, after you’ve begun to implement, and then you’ll be able to make more of your plan. You’ll be able to flesh it out further.

If you’re someone who really loves to know all the steps, A-Z, at the start, check in with yourself. Recognize that that is your perfectionism trying to drive the bus and control what you do. It’s okay to give yourself permission to only know the first couple of steps, or just the first step, and get started.

You want to gain a lot of clarity here, though. You want to make sure that you don’t have confusion about what your next step is. Even if it’s only that first step, I want it to be clear in your mind so you can begin to implement.

So many people don’t begin to implement because they’re still confused. They don’t really know what they need to be doing in order to move forward. So, ask yourself, as you make your plan for step three, is there anything I’m confused about? Is there anything that I think I don’t know yet? That’s preventing me from moving forward with my best educated guess on how to proceed?

If the answer is no, then your plan is complete. If the answer is yes, go get that question answered. Go find the answer to that, and then make that part of your plan. Fold it into the plan that you’ve created.

Now, step four, you’ve got to implement your plan. It’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re not going to want to implement, you’re going to want to stay in the safe zone of making decisions and remaking decisions, and making plans and remaking plans, and chronic consumption, and all of that.

But we’ve got to get you to the doing because that is where learning really happens. You have to take an educated guess, work your plan, and see what happens. Gather data, conduct an experiment, learn what works and learn what doesn’t work. You’ve got to see how it all plays out.

You’re going to figure out what are your preferences? What’s effective, what’s not? What were you assuming was going to go one way that actually went a different way? What were you wrong about? What were you right about? What do you want to do more of? What do you want to tweak a little bit?

You’ve got to do all of that, and the only way that you’re going to learn and gather all of that amazing information that’s going to help you learn new skills and solve problems, is by actually getting to work implementing your plan and doing each one of the steps necessary to create your desired result.

Now, think about this. Think about trying to learn a new language. You can research all of the different apps or tools or programs that you could use in order to learn a new language. You could listen to podcast episodes about which ones are the best ones. Then you could pick one. Then you could redecide and keep redeciding. Maybe you’re not going to take a course, you’re going to hire a private tutor. You just stay in that indecision.

Then you make a plan. “I’m going to do it every day. I’m going to practice learning this new language every single day. I’m going to do it in the morning, and then for 30 minutes at night.” You make the plan, but if you never implement you will never learn the language, right?

Same thing, if you say, “Alright, I’m going to listen, every day for an hour; 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at night. I’m going to listen to Italian being spoken.” But you never actually practice speaking words in Italian, yourself. You never try to have a conversation with someone. You’re not going to, ultimately, learn the language.

You might learn a couple things, but you’re not going to learn it completely, right? You’re not going to get to the end result that you ultimately want, if you don’t engage in the full implementation process, get your hands dirty, get in there, let it be messy, let it be clunky.

You’ve got to actually implement your plan, otherwise you’re not going to learn the new skill you want to learn. You’re not going to solve the problem that you’re facing.

Think about this when it comes to time management. You’ve got to work the process. You can listen to me talk all day long about managing your time, but until you decide to use my process, that I teach, rather than anyone else’s process… and I’m recommending that because it’s really easy to get confused. I teach time management differently than someone else.

So, if you’re half pregnant between my way and someone else’s way, and you don’t decide to just follow me, you’re going to stay so confused trying to mix different methodologies together, and not being sure how that works. You’re just going to continue to spin and not move forward.

You’ve got to consume my content, and then decide to follow me, constrain to me, and then make the plan. I give you the plan that you need to follow. I tell you the step-by-step process. And, if you want to hear it from me all over again, come to the webinar I’m teaching this month. It’s September 29, at 12pm. Eastern; How to Manage Your Time. I’m going to walk you through the step-by-step process for managing your time.

But there is a specific process to follow, and you have to implement that process in order to actually learn how to master time management. You can’t just hear me talk about it; you have to do it. You have to practice it yourself. It’s the practice that’s going to make the progress.

It’s the practice that’s going to take you out of being stuck in that place where you’re like, “I know what I need to do, but I’m just not doing it.” Respectfully, you don’t know what you need to do. If you did, you’d be doing it. You think you know what it takes, but you actually don’t know what it takes.

The way to figure out what it takes is to implement your plan, to follow my process, to do it in a really messy manner, and then learn what it actually takes from you. Learn what feelings you have to feel as you implement the process. Learn the tricks and tools that I teach and why I teach them, the reasoning behind them.

Why I recommend that you should have an electronic to-do list and not a handwritten to-do list. Why I tell you to pick ‘start and stop times’ for when you’re going to start work and end work. Why I tell you to do a time audit, so you learn how long things take you. Why I tell you to double the estimate, when you’re estimating how long a task is going to take.

You’re going to learn my reasonings behind all of these rules when you actually get into the messy implementation of the process that I teach you. Okay? That is how you’re going to learn.

Then, of course, you go to step five, evaluate. Evaluate the action that you took. We always want to be acting and then auditing and adapting; act, audit, adapt. That’s how we learn. That’s how we make more and more progress. We don’t just stagnate and stay stuck with the same problems that we continued to have.

Through evaluating, and then adapting what you have been doing, tweaking it with your newfound theory, your new experiment, “Hey, this didn’t work, I’m going to guess that this might work instead,” you go out there and you adapt.

You change it up a little bit, and then you implement some more. You see if that worked and you evaluate again, and you’re just going to get closer and closer and closer to the finish line. Okay?

This is the process that I want you to follow. You’re going to consume with constraint. You’re going to decide how to proceed. You’re going to make a plan, a specific plan for how you’re going to proceed. You’re going to implement the plan. You’re going to evaluate. And then get back at it, take more action.

That’s the five-step process for learning new things and for solving problems. That’s what I want you to do. Pick something that you want to learn, pick a problem that you want to solve, and work these five steps. Watch how it gives you clarity of how to proceed, of how to progress. It’s going to make it so much easier for you to move through the different phases of the learning process.

You can work this with intentionality, and you’re going to get so much further faster if you do. All right? That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. Again, if you want to come and hear me teach you all the things you need to know about how to manage your time, the link to register for How to Manage Your Time, on September 29, at 12pm Eastern, is going to be linked in the show notes.

You can also go to any of my social media platforms… LinkedIn, Instagram… and get access to it there. Or you can go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup, and register for How to Manage Your Time there, as well.

All right, that’s the first reminder. Second reminder, remember, I am doing a giveaway. So, if you are loving the podcast, please do me a favor and leave a rating and a review. It helps me get my podcast in front of more people, into the ears of more listeners who struggle with the things that you struggle with, which is why you’re listening to this podcast.

So, we want to get it in front of them as well, so they get the help they need also. Alright, so go leave me a rating and review. If you do it now, between now and the end of October, I’m going to pick five reviewers and I’m going to give away five prizes: one for each review.

Because it means so much to me that you take your valuable time, and you do me the honor of that rating and review. So, go do that.

Then, just a little teaser for next week’s episode. I’m so excited to record this podcast topic. I’m going to teach you how to deal with procrastinators. A lot of my time management content is about people who struggle with time management. It’s about the people who want to get better at managing their time.

But a lot of my clients are actually really good at time management, and they’re on the receiving end of other people’s bad time management habits. So, if that’s you, and you’re up to your eyeballs in frustration with other people’s over promising and under delivering, other people’s procrastination, other people’s unrealistic timelines, and under estimating how long tasks are going to take them.

If you’ve had it up to here with being on the receiving end of that behavior, I want you to tune in for next week’s episode. I’m going to teach you how to handle these people, how to work with them, how to manage them, how to help them navigate this problem.

It’s going to save you a ton of frustration, really reduce the headaches that you have when it comes to this issue. I can’t wait to dive into it.

Until then, I hope you have a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 74. Today, we’re talking all about the messiness of learning something new. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Hey there, how are you? I hope your week is off to a good start. We are kicking into fall gear over here. I just got back from Dallas. I was there for a Life Coach School event, which is my coaching school. It didn’t feel like fall down there. It was 107⁰ while I was down there. But I’m back in Detroit, not for very much longer. I’m getting ready to move south. I cannot wait to get out of here, just in time to escape the winter. But it’s a fall around here.

One of the topics that I love to cover every fall is time management. So, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I’ve already talked about what I call “the three P’s” on the podcast. I did a whole series about people pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination. And then, I went and got very specific on the process that I teach my clients for mastering time management.

So, I will link those episodes in the show notes. If you haven’t listened to them, you want to make sure that you go check all of them out. It’s such a comprehensive time management series. But today, I want to get really specific on one issue that I see come up all the time for people, especially for my perfectionists.

While this relates to a lot of things, not just time management, I definitely see people struggle with this when it comes to managing their time. Quick segue here, or tangent, I want you to make sure that you don’t miss this, so mark your calendars.

By the way, speaking of time management, I’m going to host a masterclass at the end of the month on How to Manage Your Time. It’s going to be on September 29th, which is a Friday, at 12pm Eastern. In order to register for that, you can go to the show notes of this episode, it’s going to be hyperlinked there for you, and you can go and just register for the Zoom event.

If you want to type in the URL yourself, you can go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup and you’ll have a hyperlink there as well, to register for my How to Manage Your Time masterclass at the end of the month. Okay, so what are we talking about today? How does it relate to time management? You’ve got all the questions. Well, let me answer them.

I’m going to tell you the thing that my clients hate hearing from me, but this is why we have coaches. Coaches just don’t tell us what we want to hear, they tell us the truth. They give it to us the brass tacks version, whether we want to hear it or not, and that’s what helps us grow. That’s what helps us transform that. It’s what helps us learn and develop.

So, I’m going to share this unfortunate truth with you. If you struggle with time management and you want to work on it, I need you to prepare yourself, it’s going to be messy. The process of learning how to manage your time is going to be messy.

Now, if you’re a perfectionist, a part of you just absolutely cringed and recoiled when I said the word “messy.” For so many people, that’s the thing that they’re most afraid of being. Perfectionists crave order and control, and they don’t like engaging in any activities that run contrary to those preferences. Which is why so often perfectionists describe themselves as someone who hates doing things that they aren’t good at. Who doesn’t like trying things that are new.

Why? Why don’t they like those things? It’s because of how it feels. Learning something new feels really messy and disorderly to them. For perfectionists especially, messy is very embarrassing. It’s the thing that they want to be seen by other people as being the least of, not the most of.

When you’re learning how to do something new, you’re going to feel a little chaotic, a little messy, a little clunky. So, today, I specifically want to talk to you about managing the mess when it comes to learning something new.

Because if you keep having this strong aversion to being messy and embracing the mess, if you’re reluctant to embrace it, you’re not going to achieve the goals that you want to set for yourself, that you want to achieve. If you aren’t willing to make peace with the journey that you’re going to have to take to get there.

I’m going to tell you again, I really want to drive this home for you, the journey will not be pristine. I’m sorry, it just won’t be. It’s going to be clunky and paved with failures. I don’t even like to think of it as failing, I just like to think of it as learning.

So, it’s going to be clunky and paved with learning, paved with nuggets of insight and wisdom that come from engaging in the very messy process of doing something new. You have to be okay with that. You have to uncouple the messiness of it all, from your self-worth, from your sense of adequacy and capability. You can’t make the clunkiness mean anything about you.

Truly, it doesn’t mean anything about you other than the fact that you’re simply learning how to do something new. Okay? So, take a second and think. Think about what you’re working on right now in your life. What goal are you wanting to set that you maybe are avoiding because you don’t want to get started on it? Because it’s probably going to be a messy process. That it’s going to be imperfect. That your pursuit of it isn’t going to go as smoothly as you might want it to.

Do you keep avoiding getting started on something? If so, what? What are you avoiding getting started on? Is there something that you’re working on getting better at, that you’re working on improving? What skill are you trying to develop? What habit are you trying to build?

I’ll give you an example of this; I talk about it a lot. I have a rule in my business, I don’t add any new content creation until all of my current content creation that I’ve agreed to do is “dialed in.” That means I consistently hit the deadlines that I set for myself. I follow the timeline that allows me to get that content out when I promise it.

Ever since I added the podcast to my content rotation, I have been working on figuring out the schedule that works for me. So, it’s been clunky over here, it’s been messy. I typically send out a Friday email, and since I added the podcast in, the availability of content creation space I have in my calendar, it wasn’t enough to accommodate the podcast.

So, I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how do I eliminate other things from my schedule, in order to make room for all of the content creation that I want to do, in order to market my business? So, it’s been clunky over here.

And I’ve allowed it to be clunky. I keep learning and I keep iterating and I keep eliminating things, in order to give myself the space that I need to create all the content that I want to create. Do I wish it was less clunky and less messy? Of course, I do. I’d love it to be pristine. But I’m learning how to make space for all of that.

I’m learning what it requires of me; the time involved, the planning, the recording, the production; with everything else that I have on my plate as I’ve also been launching a group coaching program throughout the past year and a half. That, mixed in with the other content creation that I’ve been doing, is very new to me. So, it’s been messy over here.

I’m just allowing myself to sit in the mass as I learn, as I tweak, as I make changes. Okay, so that’s just one example of this.

I want you to think about those questions. What are you working on getting better at? What goal do you have that you might be avoiding? What skill are you trying to develop? What habit are you trying to build?

Think for a second, and I want you to think about this specifically, how do you show up when you pursue this goal, work to make progress, and it doesn’t go as planned? How do you show up when it doesn’t go as planned? What do you do? Do you beat yourself up? Do you quit? Do you “quietly quit?” Man, that was a very trending term for a while. But I haven’t heard it in a while.

But do you quietly quit, just get more and more inconsistent as time goes on? Or do you set a different goal, so you can cycle back to the more exciting, non-messy part of goal setting, the planning part, the intention setting part? That’s where everything is still pristine and very perfect. You haven’t actually embarked on the progress making portion of pursuing the goal; that’s the messy part.

So, are these the things that you do when your pursuit doesn’t go as planned? Or do you stay the course, evaluate the action that you took, learn from that evaluation, and then get back to work and improve? Do you do that instead?

Now, if that’s not what you do, if you do the other things that I mentioned; the beating yourself up, the quitting, the quietly quitting, the being inconsistent, the replacing the one goal with a new goal; in order to distract yourself from the imperfect mess of what you’re currently doing.

If you do those things instead, I want you to ask yourself: Why? Why do you do that? More specifically, what is your expectation that you have for yourself that drives you to do those things? What do you expect your learning process to look like? I find this to be such a fascinating question. I bet most people haven’t asked themselves that question, and they haven’t taken the time to answer it.

So, what do you expect your learning process to look like? If you do those things that I just mentioned, you’re expecting yourself to be perfect, much more perfect than the process actually is. So, be honest here. How do you expect your learning process to go? You wouldn’t quit or get more inconsistent if you were expecting it to be clunky and messy. You wouldn’t.

You’d stay the course, you’d evaluate, you’d learn and improve, if you expected it to be clunky and messy and imperfect. But you don’t expect it to be messy, imperfect, and clunky. Instead, you make the clunk and the mess of it a problem.

Now we’ve got a disconnect between your expectation and reality. We’ve got a mismatched expectation. So the disconnect between what you expect the process to be like, versus what the process is actually like, creates this negative emotional experience for you.

Of course, this is just coming from your thoughts, right? Your thoughts cause your feelings. So, if you’re experiencing a negative emotion as you’re learning something new, building a habit, developing a skill, working towards, and pursuing a goal… If you feel a negative emotion, and are having that negative experience, it’s coming from your thinking.

What you’re thinking is what I mean by this expectation. Your expectations are just a thought that you have about what the process and experience should be like, what you expect yourself to do, how you expect yourself to perform in this pursuit.

So, if you feel frustrated and discouraged, or embarrassed and inadequate, or incapable, number one, that’s coming from your thoughts. And we get to change those thoughts by changing the expectations that you have for yourself. But typically, if that’s how you’re feeling, then what you’re typically going to do from those emotions is withdraw from your pursuit of the goal.

But doing that only ensures that you never make consistent progress. So, if you want to make consistent progress, if you want to reach the finish line with these habits, with these skills, with the goals that you’re setting for yourself, we need to change this. Okay?

In order to make consistent progress, we first have to start with changing the expectation that you have for yourself. So, take a second, what do you want to choose to expect of yourself when you’re learning something new?

What if, I know this is a wild and radical idea, but what if you expected it to be imperfect and clunky and messy? What if you expected yourself to stumble and fall? What if you expected yourself to fail your way forward and learn with each fail, to leverage each fail?

What if none of this; the imperfection, the clunkiness, the messiness, the stumbling, the falling, the failing; what if none of it was a problem? How would it change the way that you pursue your goals? That you develop skills? That you build habits? How would it change the way that you will learn and improve? What would be different?

Let me walk you through some examples, because I want you to see how it would be different in practice. So, let’s start with, because September is time management month, let’s say you’re learning how to manage your time. When you resist the imperfect messiness of learning how to manage your time, what you end up doing is you start and you’re going to struggle immediately.

Because that is just what happens when someone who struggles with time management starts to work on time management and building the skills necessary to properly manage your time; it’s going to be a struggle up front. What happens when you’re resisting the imperfect messiness of learning how to manage your time, when you struggle, you give up almost instantly.

Then you end up beating yourself up in the process, and you double down on the behavior that isn’t serving you. You just default back to that status quo. It’s your expectation that’s a problem here. Your expectation is that you make a schedule day one, stick to it perfectly, and never mismanage your time ever again.

Even if you don’t think that that’s what your expectation is for yourself, if you embark on learning how to manage your time and then you don’t stick with it, I promise you, that is what your subconscious or unconscious expectation is. That’s what you’re expecting of yourself: perfection, right out of the gate.

And then, when reality doesn’t match that, because you’re learning how to do something new, something you’ve never been taught how to do before, you’re going to struggle and stumble. Then, when you encounter that struggle and the stumbling, you quit.

So, when reality doesn’t match that expectation, you allow yourself to get discouraged. What would be different if you expected the process to look like this? First up, you make a to-do list, you estimate how long tasks take, you put all of the appointments that you have on your calendar. So that way, you have an accurate reflection of the time that you have available and the commitments that you have, that you’ve already committed yourself to.

Then, you decide start and stop times for work; when’s your day going to start, when’s it going to end? From there, you see how much available time you have. After you factor in the book ends, with your start and stop time, and you subtract all of the appointments that you put on your calendar, you’re going to come up with a number of the time you have available for work the rest of the day.

Then I want you to look at your to-do list, and plan less than what fits in the time you have available. So, if you have six available hours, I want you to plan five of them, okay? Now, when you make that plan, you’ll implement the plan by starting on time, working without interruptions, and ending on time.

At the end of your day you can evaluate, you’ll take the insights from your evaluation and apply them the following day. So, you consistently get 1% better. That’s the process for how to become someone who manages their time well. That’s the process that you need to improve in this area.

Now, that’s the pristine process, right? The textbook version of what it looks like to manage your time. But in practice, it’s not going to be that pristine; it’s going to be imperfect, clunky, and messy. You’re going to forget to put things on your to-do list.

If you expect perfection there, you’re going to stop managing and keeping your to-do list up to date, and because you didn’t update at once, you’re just going to quit. Or you’re going to fail to break up big projects into small enough tasks. And instead of getting better and better and better at that you’re just going to quit and stop using the to-do list.

You’re going to underestimate how long tasks take you, and when you underestimate it and you’re incorrect with your original guess, instead of continuing to get better at this the perfectionist in you is going to tell you it’s not worth it to estimate the time. That you’re just bad at it. That it can’t be done.

You’re going to plan best-case scenario and then feel behind because your schedule won’t go best-case scenario. Okay? Things won’t go according to plan. You’ll learn that you need to plan for the worst-case scenario. But if you’re being a perfectionist, you’re going to use things not going to plan as a reason to not stick with this. You’re going to fail to start on time by procrastinating or reshuffling your schedule, and putting out fires, tending to “emergencies.”

You’re going to distract yourself. You’re going to let other people interrupt you. You’re going to people please, not set boundaries, and you’ll distract yourself with things that are more exciting than the work in front of you. Maybe Instagram, LinkedIn, games on your phone, TV, snacks, coffee, whatever.

If you let all of this deter you, because it doesn’t match the expectation you have for yourself, you’re never going to get better at managing your time. If you make these mishaps a problem, and a good enough reason not to go on, you won’t be working on time management for very long. You’re going to quit quickly.

Because these mishaps and mistakes are going to happen. You can take that to the bank. You’re not going to master this right out of the gate. This requires practice. It requires being messy because practicing is messy. But if you adjust your expectations and you expect it to be messy, then you’re going to make a to-do list, estimate how long tasks take, put appointments on your calendar, decide your start and stop times, and see how much available time you have in the day.

You’ll go to your to-do list and plan in less than what fits, implement the plan by starting on time, working without interruptions, and ending on time. Then, you’ll evaluate, you’ll apply the insights from that evaluation, and put them into practice the following day.

As you do that, in a very, very messy manner, you’re going to forget to put things on your to-do list, you’re not going to break up project small enough, you’re going to underestimate how long stuff takes, and you’re going to plan best-case scenario.

Then you’ll get behind because it doesn’t go according to plan, you’re going to procrastinate and reshuffle and distract yourself, and you’re still going to get better, because you’re going to evaluate and take those insights from your evaluation and apply them the next day.

It’s going to be clunky as hell. And you’re not going to make the clunky messiness of it all a problem, okay? If you commit to embracing the clunk, embracing the mess, you can solve your time management problems; I promise you.

This is coming firsthand, from someone who used to struggle with every time management problem you can think of; that was me. I committed myself to figuring this out for myself so I could leverage what I learned from doing this work myself, and give my lessons, give my insights, my breakthroughs, to other people. So, they could learn how to overcome their time management struggles, too.

This is just one example of needing to embrace the mess in order to make progress. Maybe you’re working on putting in your time every day. And I swear, I’ve said this already on the podcast, but I swear, I’ve got an episode series coming out on that topic soon. I know, I keep saying that, but I really, really do.

But let’s talk about it briefly here. If you expect perfection of yourself when it comes to entering your time, that’s something you want to work on. You’re going to make one day of missing time entry send you into a complete tailspin. Then you’re going to miss all the other days in the month, and be stuck at the end of the month entering all of your time. Just like you always do. Even though you promise yourself every single month, “This month is going to be different.”

Let’s say it’s September 12th, and you’ve been doing okay on entering your time since the beginning of the month. Then you have one really busy day, and you don’t put in your time. You let that be the reason that you don’t stick to working on this goal, to building this habit.

Instead of quitting and getting more and more inconsistent and letting all of your time, the rest of the month, September 12th through the end of September, accumulate and build up, what if you didn’t expect perfection of yourself and you let it be messy?

What if you aimed for putting in your time after every task that you complete? Once it’s completed, you enter the time. Then sometimes, even though you have the best of intentions, you forget. So, instead of saying screw it, because we’re not being perfectionistic, we’re letting it be messy. You decide to put in the rest of your time at the end of the day.

So, you’ve been doing it contemporaneously throughout the day, but you miss one, or maybe you miss a couple, and instead of saying, “Screw it, I’m not entering any more time that day,” or for the rest of the month, you just decide to put it in at the end of the day. And if, for whatever reason, you end up falling asleep without putting in the rest of your time, you just start again tomorrow.

Now, the perfectionist in you is going to want to enter yesterday’s time before you give yourself permission to enter the new day’s time. Okay? But if you let it be messy, you don’t have to do that to yourself. I watch people day in day out, month in month out, do this to themselves because they miss a day, or they miss half a day.

Instead of just allowing themselves to start fresh, instead of giving themselves permission to do that, they have to be perfectionistic about it. They make up this arbitrary rule that is written nowhere. It’s not in your law firm’s manual. They don’t teach it to you in law school, that you can’t dare enter today’s time before yesterday’s time, because you absolutely can. It’s just going to feel messy as hell. So, you can just start the new day and worry about yesterday’s time later.

You can just focus on what’s right in front of you by letting your process be messy. But people don’t want to do that. They want it to be perfect. They don’t want it to be clunky. They want it to be pristine. By requiring that it be perfect and pristine, they don’t make the progress they want to make. They self-sabotage, they screw themselves, the rest of the month. Don’t do that. Let your process be messy.

Same thing if you’re working on weight loss or working out. Be honest. Do you expect yourself to stick to your workout routine perfectly? So, that if you choose to miss a day… and I’m picking that word “choose” very intentionally here, because I do want you to recognize that you’re always making a choice, all right?

But if you choose to not stick to your routine, that choice doesn’t mean that you should stop working out altogether. Because, “Screw it. What’s the point?” All right, that’s the perfectionist in you. Instead, if you let it be messy you can pick right back up tomorrow and not miss a beat. That’s available to you.

Same thing with weight loss. If you’re expecting perfection of yourself, then here’s what you’re going to expect: You’re going to expect that the scale only goes in one direction, the direction you want it to go in. You’re never going to build in room for maybe a little weight gain. Maybe you go on vacation and the scale goes up a pound or two. Maybe you have a holiday weekend with family and friends, and the scale goes up.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t work to guard against those things. But expecting 100% perfection of yourself is going to lead you to quit because you’re going to be so discouraged and frustrated. Also, if you expect yourself to only eat what you intentionally decide to eat, and to never splurge, to never veer off course, you’re going to set yourself up to fail.

You’re not going to be able to sustain that because you’re human. That’s not realistic. You’re going to have slip ups. You’re going to have messy human moments, where you eat a bigger portion than planned. Where you have a snack that you typically wouldn’t eat. Or you have an extra glass of wine, or a bite of someone’s dessert, or fries or whatever.

You’re going to eat off protocol. You’re going to make a decision that isn’t aligned with the goal that you ultimately want to achieve. If you allow yourself to be messy and imperfect, you’re not going to make this a problem. You’re not going to let it be a reason to quit.

But this is a choice you have to make. You can learn from your slip ups, or you can weaponize them against yourself; it’s up to you. I highly, highly, highly encourage you not to weaponize your learning, not to weaponize your mess.

I want you to really think for a second. Where did you get the expectation that you do everything perfectly right the first time? Who gave that expectation to you? Where does it come from? Now, a much more important question: Do you want to keep that expectation for yourself? And if not, why not? What if you expected and allowed yourself to be messy? What if you wore your messiness as a badge of honor?

I don’t mean clutter, I mean unabashed, relentless pursuit of learning new things. The only way humans really know how to learn them, the imperfectly, clunky, messy way. What if you wore that as a badge of honor? As something to be proud of your mess?

You let it show how brave you are, how courageous you are, how willing you are, how determined you are, how dedicated you are, how committed you are, how capable you are, of feeling all the emotions that come along with learning new things.

You know what would happen if you made that your expectation? If you changed your relationship with learning to look more like that than what it currently looks like? You would learn so much more, so much faster, and you’d make so much more progress. So much progress. It will truly blow your mind.

So, I hope you take me up on this invitation to really embrace your mess, the imperfect messiness of learning something new. Life gets so much more rewarding, fulfilling, and fun when you do.

Alright, my friends, that’s what I’ve got for you this week. Two quick other orders of business. First things first, at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that I’m teaching a masterclass this month; it’s free. It’s all about how to manage your time. So, I want you to go register for that. It’s linked in the show notes.

If that’s too complicated, and you don’t want to deal with going to the show notes, you can just go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup and register for How to Manage Your Time. It’s September 29th, that’s a Friday; last Friday of the month, at 12pm Eastern, okay?

Tell your friends to come, tell your work besties to come, share the wealth with your colleagues. So many people, low key, struggle with this issue. Be the person that really helps them overcome it. They will be so thankful that you were the one who helped them get a handle on this issue, I promise.

Now, number two, if you are just loving the podcast, and I really hope you are, if you’re loving the podcast, can you do me a favor and leave me a rating and review? My goal is to get in front of as many people as possible to help them start living lives with less stress and far more fulfillment.

As a part of that plan, I’ve set a really extreme goal for the number of people that I want to have register for the How to Manage Your Time masterclass later this month. When you leave me a rating and a review, it helps me get the podcast in front of more people. It gets more eyeballs on what it is that I’m doing, so it helps me achieve this goal that I’ve set for myself, this really outlandish goal.

It would mean the absolute world to me, if you get value from what I teach on this podcast, if you could help me out with this by going and leaving a rating and review. Now, as a thank you, because I really do appreciate this more than you could possibly know; it means the world to me. I’m going to do a giveaway, because I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to leave me a rating and review.

So, I’m going to do a giveaway. I haven’t done this before. I’m so excited about it. At the end of October, I’m going to randomly select five listener reviews, and I’m going to give away a prize to each one of those reviewers. Get your reviews in before the end of October, so I can select, and hopefully you will be one of the lucky winners. All right?

That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. Thank you so much. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.