Episode 109: Being Unrealistic with Your Schedule

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 109. Today, we’re talking all about being unrealistic with your schedule. 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 hope your week is off to a good start. I’m so excited to talk about today’s topic. This has come up on a couple of my coaching calls recently, some of my one-on-one calls earlier this week, and we did a deep dive into this topic on this week’s Lawyers Only call. 

And for those of you who are listening and you’re new to the podcast, Lawyers Only is my signature coaching membership program for, you guessed it, lawyers only. So, we do group calls inside that program once a week, and this month, we’re talking all about procrastination. 

One of the ways that you overcome procrastination is that you start planning your schedule accurately. Because if you’re planning inaccurately and unrealistically, it’s much more likely that you’re going to put things off to the last minute, because you’re underestimating how long stuff will take you. 

So, I taught my people inside the program how to plan their day. I teach a 10-step process. That might seem like a lot of steps, but it is truly foolproof. It is so specific and so easy to implement. It walks you through absolutely every step you need to take in order to plan your schedule accurately. 

And one of the things that we were discussing, in relation to planning your schedule accurately, is that in order to get better at time management, you have to stop lying to yourself. It is absolutely essential when it comes to managing your time and planning in a way that sets you up for success. You cannot lie to yourself. 

Now, most people wouldn’t see this as lying to themselves. This is what my clients tell me, they’re being aspirational with the way that they plan their plans. Just aspirational. Maybe they’re being optimistic about what they can get done. I really want to challenge you to look inward. Are you thinking about your schedule this way? Are you thinking about your planning this way? 

I want you to replace the word “aspirational” or “optimistic” with “unrealistic” or “impossible”, because that’s really what you’re doing at the end of the day. Those “aspirational plans” end up not coming to fruition, right? Because they’re not possible. And when you start using more accurate terminology, like unrealistic or impossible, you’re going to be less inclined to make these unrealistic plans to begin with. 

Because it’s going to seem absolutely nonsensical to you to make a plan that you can’t actually accomplish. When you use words like aspirational or optimistic, or ideal, there’s still a part of you that believes it’s possible. So, I want you to shift your terminology here. 

I want to walk you through some of the ways that I see people make “aspirational”, or better yet, unrealistic plans. Now, the worst offending example of this is double booking yourself. You quite literally cannot be in two places at once. So, if you have double bookings on your schedule, you have to resolve those. You have to see those and know, “Hey, that’s not possible for me to accomplish. There is no best-case scenario where I can clone myself and be in two places at once. It’s not going to happen.”

So, when you see those double bookings, you’ve got to resolve them. I know you’re hearing me say this and you’re like, “No, no. Sometimes I really can do two things at once.” Don’t make the exception the reason that you plan this way all the time. Because more often than not, it doesn’t really work. 

You might say, “Oh, I am going to attend this meeting. But I’m also going to respond to these emails while I’m attending this meeting.” That is not ideal planning. Alright? That’s setting yourself up to fail. Chances are that meeting is going to require more of your attention and focus than you’re giving yourself credit for. Or that you’re giving credit to the meeting for. You’re going to need to be more focused. 

And that means that you’re not going to get through the other items that you planned to be doing during that time. So, even if there are some slight instances where you can technically pay attention to one thing while working on the other thing, A. you’re not showing up the way that you want to be, fully present and paying attention to what is in front of you. Okay? 

So, if you’re in a meeting, you’re going to be checked out. That’s probably not the professional impression that you want to set, or the reputation that you want to create for yourself; someone who’s checked out of the things that they’re attending. 

But more than anything, you don’t want to be doing this because you’re going to think, in your perfectionist brain, that you can make it work. More often than not, it’s not going to go to plan. It’s going to be harder for you to achieve the second thing while you’re already engaged in the first activity. So, just don’t set yourself up for that. 

And then, of course, the worst example of this is when it literally requires you to be in two places at once. I used to work for a man who would do this all the time. He would have double bookings where he needed to be in two different courts at the exact same time, and the court appearances were in person. That is asinine. It is completely impossible for you to be in two places at once. 

So, when you see those conflicts, you’ve got to resolve them. Alright? That’s going to be your new goal. You’ve got to make me a promise, no more double booking yourself. 

Now, there’s also a really subtle way that people double book themselves; actually, two ways. One is where you underestimate the amount of time something is going to take, and then you schedule something back-to-back with that initial task, that initial thing that you have to do. 

So, if you know deep down, if you’re being really honest with yourself, that court appearance isn’t going to take just a half an hour, even though it’s scheduled for a half an hour, or your assistant put it on your calendar for half an hour and it’s really going to take you an hour and a half, and you schedule something back-to-back with that half an hour time slot, you’ve double booked yourself. 

Because you’re going to be stuck in court longer than you planned for, and it’s going to run into the next thing. That’s one way that you double book. So, that’s another reason, or way, that people schedule unrealistically. They plan things back-to-back. 

If you’re a sucker for underestimating how long stuff takes, this is a way that you double book yourself and you create “aspirational” game plans for the day. We want to get out of that aspirational space to the absolute greatest extent that we can. 

Another way that people double book themselves, is they’ll plan every minute of their day, but they won’t factor in any time for the stuff that they do every single day no matter what. Alright? An example of this would be, you say, “I’m going to work from 9am until 5pm.” Okay, and then you plan all eight hours with substantive project work, some big-ticket items.

Maybe you’re working on a brief and you’re like, “I’m going to spend all eight hours on the brief. It’s going to take me eight hours to write it. I’m going to spend all eight hours of my day and crank that out.” However, if, on average, you spend two hours a day reading and responding to email, you’ve double booked yourself. Because you’re going to be checking your email; it’s what you do every single day. 

If it’s your habit to be in your inbox pretty frequently, it’s very unlikely you’re just going to ignore your inbox all day long. So, instead of planning those eight hours to work on that brief, you really need at least 10 hours. And I would suggest even more than that, because there are going to be interruptions. 

You’re going to need to be human; eat lunch, use the restroom, grab a cup of coffee, do whatever, have a conversation with someone that was maybe unplanned. Now, you can always set boundaries to avoid that for sure. But you’ve got to be realistic. Do you supervise people? Are they going to have questions that’s going to take up some of your time? 

So, if you’ve got an eight-hour project and two hours’ worth of email, you need more than 10 hours to factor in that human – being, and that interruption time, okay? And if you’re not factoring in that email time… Or let’s say you enter your billable time at the end of every day. If you’re not factoring that in, and you’re planning all of the time that you have set aside for work, you’re double booking yourself and it makes your plan completely unrealistic. 

What’s going to happen? What you’re going to see is that by the end of the day you’re going to be behind schedule. And you’re likely behind schedule because you were unrealistic about your plan. That’s what we want to avoid. 

It’s really wild to me when I have conversations with my clients… And part of this is because I coach on this so frequently, I know what questions to ask… But someone inside Lawyers Only today; we were talking about her schedule. 

When we got to talking, I started to probe into some of the standing appointments that she has on her calendar. I asked her, “Hey, does that actually go 15 minutes? You scheduled 15 minutes for that meeting with one of your team members. Does it typically take 15 minutes? Because, in my experience, very few meetings take only 15 minutes.”

She was really honest with me, and she was like, “No, it almost always runs over. I’m like, “That’s amazing to know. You’re planning aspirationally. You’re planning too little time for that meeting. How long does it normally go? Or worst-case scenario, how long does it normally go?”

She explained to me that pretty often it actually lasts up to an hour. I’m like, “That’s great information to have. Instead of planning aspirationally, you’re

going to start allocating an hour for that meeting. If you finish early, fantastic. But if you don’t, if it goes the full hour, now you’re not going to be behind schedule. You’re going to be right on schedule, because you planned accurately and realistically, not aspirationally.”

Same thing with figuring out how much time you spend on those repeatable tasks, if you just start to pay attention to your day. This is why doing time audits is so important. I have a whole episode all about doing time audits. But you want to study yourself and learn how long you spend doing things, because you can start to factor that into your daily game plan. That way, you’re not double booking yourself, or being unrealistic about how long you spend on things. 

Use the intel from your daily life to get better at planning realistically each day. If you can get 1% better at planning realistically every single day, you will be in such a different place six months from now.

The other thing that you want to be on the lookout for when it comes to aspirational planning, and this came up in one of my client’s sessions earlier this week, you’ll want it to take less time than it actually takes. So, you’ll just make that plan. And the way that I’m describing this to my clients is that you want the plan to look good on paper. 

If you were being realistic, you wouldn’t like what it looks like when it actually is mapped out on your calendar. Okay? Instead of just coming to terms with what it looks like when it’s mapped out on your calendar, and being a little frustrated or disappointed that that’s all you can get to, or that it’s going to take you that long, you’ll lie to yourself. You’ll be aspirational. You’ll make it fit into the time you’d prefer that it took. 

A client of mine was working on a brief earlier this week. And she said to herself, “Maybe that’ll take me four hours.” When I probed a little bit deeper, I was like, was four hours really realistic? Now, one of the things that I teach is that you want to break down all of the micro tasks that go into a project. That way you get a much more accurate assessment of how long each of those tasks will take you. 

Then you can add that up and get a better sense of how long the project itself will take you. And when we did that, it was very clear that it wasn’t going to take her four hours to complete this project, it was going to take her nearly 12 hours to complete this project. 

When I asked her, “Did you do the math on this?” She sort of avoided doing the math. We got to talking and she admitted, “I just didn’t want it to take me that long. So, I just picked four hours.” And that’s when it clicked for me. I’m like, “Oh, she wanted it to look on paper.” She wanted to like what the schedule looks like, rather than being realistic. 

When you do that, you set yourself up to fall behind and fail. Because the task is going to take as long as the task takes. The project is going to take as long as the project takes you. Even if you don’t like the answer, you’re not going to be able to cheat that system. Alright? Like they say about casinos, “The house is going to win.” Time is going to win. If it is going to take you 12 hours to do that task, it’s going to take you 12 hours to do that task, no matter if you only allot four for it. 

So, you don’t want to a lot four. You don’t want to be aspirational or optimistic, or better yet, delusional about the time that you assigned to that project. You want to be really honest with yourself. That’s going to be your goal when it comes to working on mapping out your daily schedules. 

And I highly recommend you take this a day at a time when you’re beginning working on time management. If you try and work on doing a whole week in the beginning, you’re going to get really frustrated because you’re not going to be good at planning. 

Realistically, this is something that you have to be willing to be bad at for a while. Let it be clunky and work on it over time. You’ll get better and better and better. And when you’re taking this a day at a time, you get to leverage the learning that you experience every single day. 

Because you can evaluate, at the end of the day, “Hey, what worked today? What didn’t work? What would I need to do differently tomorrow?” And then you can implement that learning based on the data you received on that self-exploration that you conducted, and you can apply it the very next day. You’re going to increase your speed of improving so significantly when you go about it this way. 

You can look at how you plan your schedule, and at the end of the day you’re like, “Was I realistic or was I aspirational? Was I realistic or was I delusional? Was I realistic or was I being unrealistic?” 

And if you were being the latter, if you were being aspirational, optimistic, delusional, or unrealistic, ask yourself: What would have been more realistic for me to do? What would have been a more realistic game plan? How could I have made tweaks or changes to make my plan more realistic, to better match what actually happened in reality? And you take those little kernels of knowledge, those kernels of wisdom that you gained, and you apply them to the very next today. 

So, this is my challenge for you. In this episode, I want you to commit, “I’m going to stop lying to myself. I’m going to stop making aspirational game plans when it comes to planning my schedule. When it comes to planning my day, I’m going to come to terms with how time works. I’m going to be very realistic. I’m going to review my daily game plan and check in with myself. Is this aspirational? Is this a little too hopeful? Or do I think I can actually accomplish this?”

If you had to rate it on a scale of 1-10, I want it to be higher than an eight; that it’s realistic. That’s a good space to be in. And you will know. 

If you start to have, and engage, in dialogue with yourself, and you’ve got that gut check that you force yourself to do, you will get better and better and better at hearing that voice inside of you that’s like, “Eek, this is going to be a little tight. This is going to be a little close. I’m cutting it a little close here. This is a little too aspirational. This is a little too optimistic. It’s a little unreasonable.”

When you get that sense, because you’re checking in with yourself and you’re having that really candid conversation, if that’s the answer you get back when you do that check in, you’ve got to adjust the game plan. You’ve got to make it more realistic, so you can actually get to a place where it’s like, “This is doable. I can knock this out. I’m not being hopeful. I’m not being too ambitious with this game plan. This feels really achievable and attainable.”

That’s the space you want to be in. Okay? So, no more double booking yourself. You want to go through and look for these mistakes, if you’re making them, and then figure out what you’re going to do instead. How can you make those tweaks and changes to make sure your plan for the day is as realistic as absolutely possible?

This is going to change your life. It’s going to reduce your stress so significantly, I promise you. When you stop lying to yourself, things get so much better. The overwhelm dials down, you’re going to feel more capable, and you’re going to feel more accomplished at the end of the day. So, give this a try. Get out there. Start to look for where you’re being a little too hopeful about what you can get done. 

Just be really honest, and you’ll amaze yourself with how good it feels to be a truth teller when it comes to time management. Alright?

That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. 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.