Episode 111: Increasing Your Efficiency

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, episode 111. Today, we’re talking all about increasing your efficiency. 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 we doing? I hope all is well with you. I am excited to talk about today’s topic. I find that so many of my clients are really obsessed with becoming more efficient, and I wanna talk you through how to actually do it because I find that it’s something that people aim for or strive for, but they don’t really go about doing it because they don’t know how. So I’m gonna teach you how in this episode.

So the first thing that we need to do is define efficiency. What does that word mean to you? For me, I really differentiate between efficiency and productivity. Productivity is how much I get done in a given day. Efficiency to me is really about how you work when you’re working, how efficiently you’re going about completing an assignment. So is it taking you longer than it needs to take you? Or are you maximizing your time and it’s only taking you the time that the task requires? That’s what we’re looking for here.

So one way to think about efficiency would be if you’re at work for eight hours, how much are you billing? Are you billing five hours? Are you billing seven and a half hours? And what are we aiming for? Okay, what would be an increase in efficiency for you? That’s one way to measure it. I also like to look at efficiency on a task by task basis. And I think that’s really the best way to improve your efficiency overall is to focus on completing tasks more efficiently.

So when you’re thinking about a task that you do regularly, we want to think about what would an increase in efficiency look like for that task? So the first step, of course, is going to be figuring out how long you normally take to complete that task? So you could think about how long does it take you to respond to a client email? How long does it take you to write a social media post, if that’s something that you do to grow your law practice? How long does it take you to do legal research on an issue? How long does it take you to process your inbox, okay? So those are things that you might do pretty regularly. How long does it take you to redline a document?

Now, these might be a little tricky to measure or to get an accurate understanding of how long it takes you each time you do one of these tasks because your tasks might vary a little bit. But do your best and let this be a little clunky, okay? You know, I love to tell you guys that. Let it be a little messy, let it be a little clunky. But ask yourself, how long does it take me when I normally do this? And then set a goal for yourself. How long would I like it to take me?

Now, remember, there’s going to be a point where you reach maximum efficiency. I’ve used the example, I think, on the podcast before. It takes me 20 minutes to do my daily makeup routine. I can let it take me 40 minutes if I lollygag, if I scroll on my phone and take a break, or if I get really perfectionistic about how I do my eye makeup, that would be a really good example of this, all right? 

Same thing if I’m drafting a social media post. They take me about an hour on average. I could let it take two if I wanted to. If I distracted myself with my cell phone when I got confused and I didn’t work through the confusion and then I spent time drafting and then I said, you know, “I’m gonna scrap this, it’s not any good” and then I start over from scratch or if I write half a post and then jump to a new post and then jump to a new post and jump to a new post, and I never complete one, it would take me a really long time to get that done, okay?

So if I were working on increasing my efficiency in any of these areas, I would look at how long is it taking me right now, and how long would I like it to take me, all right? So, like I said, there will be a point where you reach maximum efficiency. So you have to start to figure out where that point is, and that might be some trial and error too. You can say, “Oh, I’d really like to be able to do my makeup in 10 minutes.” But if I try and try and try and I can’t get it down, then that’s past the point of maximum efficiency. So I would probably time myself and see how long it takes me. Same thing with drafting a social media post. My posts I write on LinkedIn and there’s a character limit. 

So it’s going to take me a certain amount of time to write those words and then go in and revise and edit that post and then pick out an image to go with it. That’s gonna take me a certain amount of time. I’ve gotten it down to, like I said, about an hour on average. Down from an hour and a half when I first started and I started to pick apart, where are the areas that I could cut down? Thinking about what to write about. Overly editing things. Jumping from one post to another without finishing one, all right?

So this is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna figure out how long the task is currently taking you. Then you’re going to set a goal for how long you would like it to take. I want you to list out the steps that you need to take to complete the task. And then you’re gonna ask yourself, which ones do I think I can reduce? 

And do I think I can reduce it when I add up all of that reduction time? Does that match the goal that I’ve set for how long I think it should take? If it doesn’t match up, you want to readjust that expectation of yourself, okay? We’ve got to make sure that the math works. You need to be able to reduce the individual steps enough to get down to your goal. And if you can’t get down to your goal, then you’ve got to adjust the goal, all right?

So once you’ve done that, you’re setting the goal for this is how long I think it should take me. This is what I’m going to aim for. And you’re going to set a timer for yourself and you’re going to make a deal with yourself. “I’m gonna force myself to complete it within the time that I’ve given myself.” 

Now, this is going to require practice, all right? Because you’re probably gonna be telling yourself, “I can’t do it any faster. I can’t do it in that timeframe. It just takes me as long as it takes.” But that’s not the case. If you truly can do the steps in less time, you’ll be able to practice doing the steps in the amount of time that you give yourself, all right?

I wanna walk you through a story to evidence what I’m trying to teach you. When I was studying for the bar exam, I was a really slow test taker. I already knew that about myself going into my bar prep. I was a slow test taker all through law school. I don’t know if I ever finished an exam while I was in law school. I would spend too much time on the essay questions or too much time on the individual multiple choice questions and I would run out of time. 

Now, that was okay in law school. I was still able to get really good grades because my answers were good and I’d got enough of the questions right and things were graded on a curve. So I did pretty okay. I shouldn’t say that, I did better than okay. But I was able to get by even though I was a slow test taker.

Now I knew that wasn’t going to fly studying for or taking the bar exam. I knew that that would really be a pain point that I was gonna have to work to overcome because in Michigan, we have 15 essays on the exam and you get allotted a certain amount of time. I think you get six hours, no, five hours. 

So three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and that would break down to 20 minutes per question. Now, part of my bar exam strategy was doing really well on the essays because I normally ran out of time on the multiple choice, so I wanted to make sure that my essay scores were really strong, and in order for that to happen, I needed to make sure I responded to all of the essays.

So my habit in law school was spending 45 minutes on one essay and then not leaving myself enough time to get to all of the essays. And I knew I couldn’t do that with the bar exam. So I started out when I was studying, really focusing on the essay exams. I actually took a private course through JD Advising. Shout out to Ashley Heideman, she’s amazing. If anyone knows anyone prepping for the bar exam, definitely use JD Advising, they’re incredible. They’re the best in the business in my opinion.

So I took an essay course and we did so much more practice through that essay course than you did with BARBRI. I did both. I did JD Advising and BARBRI for multiple choice. So with that, when I started doing that essay work and I would read the questions and answer them, I just decided to see how long it takes me on average to thoroughly answer an essay question. 

And I timed myself and I found out that it was taking me about 45 minutes to finish an essay. Well, that is a surefire way to fail the bar exam. So what I decided to do is work my way down over time to become more efficient in answering questions, to be able to complete the answer in less time.

Now, my goal obviously was 20, 20 minutes per essay question, but I wasn’t going to be able to make that jump overnight. This required practice. That’s what I said a moment ago. This is gonna require practice from you too. So instead, I started giving myself smaller and smaller increments of time to work my way down to 20 minutes ultimately. So instead of 45, I forced myself to answer it in 40 minutes and then I’d do another one at 40 minutes and another one at 40 minutes. And when I was able to hit that, then I started moving it down to 35 minutes. And when I was able to hit that consistently, then I moved it down to 30 and then 25 and then 20.

Did this take me a decent amount of practice? Yes, it did. But over time, I was able to reduce the amount of time that it took me to answer each question and get it within that limit that I was setting for myself. Goal for my efficiency. And in part, this happened because I started to learn the value of a minute. I want you to think about this. 

When you really study yourself and you practice this, you start to learn the value of the time that you have to work on something, just like we learned the value of a dollar growing up. You know, our parents are always focused on teaching us the value of a dollar. Well, I need you to learn the value of a minute, meaning how long does it take you to do something? How long will a minute last? What can you accomplish in a minute? Same thing with the value of 20 minutes or the value of an hour. You need to understand what can I reasonably expect to get done within a given time period.

So when you practice, you start to really understand the value of the time that you’re giving yourself. So I started to figure out, “Oh, I need to read the essay prompt one time. I can’t go back and reread it. That doesn’t work. I need to spend a little bit of time but not much, just a minute or two mapping out my answer. And then I need to start writing and I need to say enough on a particular topic or a particular point, and then I need to move on rather than saying every single thing that I know about something.” That’s not going to get me there. That’s going to get me way over my efficiency limit, back to that 45-minute mark.

So I started to figure out how to actually budget my time and what to do within those 20 minutes. And I could gauge how far I should be along at this point in the 20-minute time period. That’s what you’re going to be doing when you practice this, okay? As you’re working to whittle down your time and become as efficient as possible, you’re going to learn the value of a minute.

So I want to give you two other client examples just to drive this home. So I was just coaching a client. She wants to be more efficient responding to emails, okay? Now, we looked at how long it takes her to normally respond to an email. And I get it, I hear you, not every email is going to be exactly the same. But what we want to work towards is her being able to say, “This should be a 10-minute email,” and to be able to respond to it within 10 minutes.

So we broke it down and we listed out what are all of the steps that go into you responding to an email. Well, she’s gotta read the email first. So when you open the email, you’re going to be able to gauge how long is this email. That should take me two minutes or three minutes to read. And then what comes next? Well, then I need to think about what to write. If you’re spending 10 or 15 minutes thinking about what to write, we’ve got a problem. That’s an area where we can really reduce the amount of time that you’re spending on something. So can you force yourself to only think about it for a minute or two and then start typing?

Are you spending a lot of time wordsmithing or revising what you have already written? If you are, we can reduce that as well. Write it once, complete the whole email. That’s a huge recommendation I have for people. That’s one of the things that I learned when I was working in big law. Someone came in and taught us how to write well or write efficiently and to be better at legal research and writing. And one of the recommendations that this person had was to not edit contemporaneously while you’re writing, just to write, sort of dump your thoughts out onto a piece of paper or into a Word document and then at the end of it, go back and revise. You’ll save yourself a lot of time.

I remember when I first learned that and I thought that that was absolutely impossible, but that really is how I write now and I am so much more efficient because of it. If you’re going through and you’re writing a sentence and then you’re deleting it and rewriting the sentence and deleting it and then rewriting the sentence, you’re gonna waste a lot of time editing as you write instead of just saving editing for the end. I’ve found that that really gets me out of my perfectionism if I edit at the end because it’s already complete, so you’re a lot less likely to go in and make unnecessary tweaks and changes. You’re really just issue-spotting for like, “Nope, I need to tweak that.” I can go in, tweak that really fast, and then get out and be done with it.

So with this client, we broke down all of these different steps, and we started to aim for where we were going to make reductions in the time that she was allocating and devoting to completing the task. So she’s going to work on opening an email saying “This should take me 10 minutes,” giving yourself 10 minutes and sticking to the 10 minutes. And then opening another email, “This should only take me three minutes because it’s a two-line email and I just need to read the two lines, draft my response, send it off.” So you can work on your efficiency there. If you’re someone who takes an hour to respond to an email when it could have been done in 15 minutes, this is what you want to work on. Examine what are all of the steps, list them out, where do you spend time unnecessarily, and let’s make some goals. Let’s aim for how we can reduce the amount of time you’re spending.

Same thing with social media posts. I just coached another client of mine on this. She spends a couple hours drafting a single social media post. So I wanted to go through and say, “All right, what are all the steps that you take in order to complete writing a social media post and how long do you spend on each one?” And a big one for her was figuring out what she should write about. And instead of spending 30 minutes or 15 minutes on that, we should be able to get that down to one or two minutes. 

And then if you’re spending a lot of time wordsmithing or editing, can we get that down? Can we not edit contemporaneously so we’re not spending as much time doing that? Is it getting too long and then you have to spend a lot of time cutting? That would be something to pay attention to. So maybe instead of writing in Microsoft Word where you’re not conscious of the word limit, write in the social media app and that will cut you off. It will tell you when you’re at the limit and then you’ll have a better sense of where you need to stop, how to reduce it in order to complete the post.

This is what I want you to do if you’re focused on increasing your efficiency. Same thing if it’s with the billable hours overall throughout a day. Can you reduce it? Can you increase your efficiency? If you’re at five billable hours for eight hours worked, can we get up to six? And then can we get up to seven? And then can we get up to seven and a half?

If you enter your time every day, I’ve had one client, she’s like, “It takes me like an hour to enter my time every day.” I told her, “I love you and you’re doing it wrong.” I mean that from the most sincere part of my heart, it should not take you an hour to enter your time. So we’ve got to look at what are you overcomplicating? What’s going on here? And when we started to dig deeper, we found out that she was really obsessing over her narratives and we needed to reduce the amount of time that she spent on a narrative.

So you can give yourself the goal, “I should be able to complete a narrative in a minute or in two minutes or in three minutes.” Now if that seems like a really huge stretch for you because you’re spending 10 minutes on a narrative, then let’s work for eight and then six and then five and then four. We can work our way down just like I did with bar exam essays, okay? Same thing with the emails or social media posts. You want to work your way down. You will feel frustrated with yourself if you try and make too big of a jump. So I want you to be willing to inch your way towards greater efficiency, but this is how you do it, all right?

Give some thought to where you would like to be more efficient in your workday or in your personal life, because this applies in both places. And then ask yourself, how can we get more efficient? What are the specific steps that we could reduce, set a goal, and then time yourself and work towards it? It will be uncomfortable. You’re going to want to go past the amount of time that you set, but if you really get clear on what you want to achieve when it comes to efficiency and why it’s important to you to achieve it and you continue to practice this, you will make improvements over time. It will pay off, I promise.

All right, my friends, that is what I have for you this week. 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.