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What Are Difficult Clients Costing You?

Have you ever had a difficult client – a client who questions everything you do, thinks they you’re your job better than you do, don’t pay their bills on time, fight you on your fees, constantly complain, don’t listen to your advice, or who just don’t “feel right” to you? I’ve been talking about spring …

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How to Auto-Archive Email

Do you wish you could make old email messages magically disappear? Actually, you can. You just need to do some advance planning. If you have whole categories of email messages that you don’t want to delete immediately, but that you don’t want to retain indefinitely either, (for example, email newsletters you receive regularly), you can …

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Publish Content Consistently with an Editorial Calendar

Do you struggle with managing, tracking, and consistently creating and publishing content for your firm or organization? If so, an editorial calendar can help. Editorial calendars are useful visual tools for: When you use an editorial calendar, rather than creating content haphazardly or wasting time trying to come up with an idea at the last …

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Do This Instead of Making New Year’s Resolutions

What’s your New Year’s resolution? It’s that time of year again, when everyone wants to know what your New Year’s resolution is. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. There’s too much pressure around them. People think they need to set a big, lofty goal for the new year, but statistics show that …

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Using Your Task List to Create Systems

In my last few articles/videos I’ve been talking about managing your to-dos or task list. We’ve talked about getting everything out of your head and then categorizing all of the tasks on your list and determining how those tasks get triggered, or how those tasks come about. Now let’s talk about how to use that …

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Are You Distracted at Work? Close Those Open Loops!

Are you often distracted at work? Do you interrupt yourself in the middle of an important project because you suddenly remembered something else that you need to do? In this video series, we’ve been talking about distractions and interruptions. Sometimes those distractions and interruptions are external – they come from someone else. Other times those …

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Are You the Source of Your Interruptions? [video]

Are you the source of your own interruptions? In this series of videos, I have been talking about how to limit interruptions. We’ve talked about limiting interruptions from clients and colleagues, setting and sticking to a communications policy, and not taking unplanned phone calls. Those are all external interruptions – interruptions that come from other …

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Sticking to Your Communications Policies [video]

In my last several videos I talked about how to limit interruptions from clients and colleagues, but what if the problem is really you? One of the ways you can be the problem is not sticking with your own communications policies. When you first start setting your communications policies, it can take time for your …

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Stop Co-Worker Interruptions [video]

Who interrupts you at work? In my last couple of videos, I talked about how lawyers can prevent interruptions from clients by setting a communications policy and not taking unplanned telephone calls. But what happens when the interruption comes not from clients, but from inside your own organization? Do any of these interruptions sound familiar? …

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Avoiding Unplanned Phone Calls [video]

(Jump to video) Are unplanned phone calls interrupting your work? In this series of videos, I’ve been talking about distractions or interruptions and how they reduce your productivity and prevent you from focusing on your most important work. One of the most common distractions for lawyers is the telephone. I recommend that, whenever possible, you …

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