I mentioned my C drawer in a prior post and promised to write about it in a future post. This is it.
I believe that the most important aspect of time management is what you don’t do. Granted, lawyers serving clients and accountable to ethical rules and calendar mandates face a different problem than most of us. I can’t address that area, but I can talk about the portion of time that managing partners devote to their management duties.
Managing time is more about what you do not do than it is about being efficient at doing things. It is the classic battle of two concepts, effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness is more important because it is about doing the right things. Efficiency is about doing things faster even if you are doing the wrong things. Likewise, one of the greatest timesavers around is the word “no”. You have to pick where you invest your time. Saying no when you are asked to volunteer, attend, etc., means that time is still available.
An effective manager takes the time to identify the 4 to 8 main things that the success of their area depends on in relationship to firm-wide goals and objectives. Once you have decided those main things, delegate the responsibility for achieving them to yourself and delegate as much of everything else to everyone else.
Let me get back to the C drawer discussion. If your day is like mine, the mail dropped on your desk is no small task, nor are the e-mail messages that are waiting for you when you arrive in the office and keep pouring in as the day goes on. Don’t forget the faxes and express deliveries that arrive as the day progresses and the folks lined up at your door.
All that stuff is confirmation of Parkinson’s Law—work expands to fill available time. Since time is the most valuable thing you have, you have to constantly fight that natural progression. You have to delegate, ration, and most importantly of all, you have to diligently simplify and eliminate.
The time management technique used by most people involves prioritized to-do’s—dividing them into A’s, B’s and C’s, for example. My point is: C’s do not deserve your time. And for effectiveness, you should not allow anything to be a B. Items are either A’s that deserve your attention or they are not. C’s should go in your C drawer in case they come back later as A’s. However, you will quickly learn that most C’s never rise again, and by ignoring them, you have used your time effectively.
For efficiency, handle everything just one time. That means handling “A” with a no-return policy. Take care of it or solve it; don’t just treat symptoms. Most A’s turn out to be opportunities with a few problems thrown in. Most C’s and would be B’s turn out to be problems that usually get resolved, are of little consequence or seldom reoccur. Excellent managers concentrate on opportunities. They operate on the basis that not all problems deserve to be solved, and of those that do, most don’t need to be solved by them.
Concentrate on the “main things” your success depends on¾that is where the payoff is. That is where increases in per-partner income come from. Those B’s and C’s are for people who major in minors and get great satisfaction from accomplishing tasks of little importance just for the rush of checking something off of their to-do list.
Now, I recognize there is a problem in the above approach. Sometimes your C is someone else’s A. Depending on who they are, it will have to be your “A” too. That is just life. Nothing is perfect.
P. S. You will need to empty your C drawer periodically. Don’t be tempted to revisit the contents. They go in the trash. They have been out of sight for some time. They haven’t come up again. They are not “main” things.
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