About the Author Dr. Joni Johnston is President and CEO of UnbeatableLawyers, a training and consulting firm that helps attorneys evaluate workplace behavior problems, gain an edge with juries in employment litigation, and promote effective law firm management. She can be reached at jonij@workrelationships.com

When it comes to work, however, many of us don't get a crash course in the penalties of procrastination or the perils of wasting time. We scramble around and manage to meet that last-minute deadline. We locate an expert three hours before the designation period and pray that she is qualified. We grit our teeth and call that nightmare client back before he decides to complain to the bar. So, in the frenzied pace of practice, we overlook the personal costs of our haphazard time habits and excuse-making rationales. In fact, for most of us, it's not that we don't know the details of how to manage our time better. Like my unspoken ambivalence about wading through a turbulent relationship, it's the psychological blind spots that prevent more effective behavior. In this article, let's take a look at the psychology of time management and the emotional issues that can lead to self-sabotaging or stress-inducing behavior.

Procrastination is Not A Personality Trait
Let's face it. We can always find ways to put off unpleasant tasks. During our most productive periods, the last thing we want to do is something that might put us in a bad mood. When our energy lags, who has the stamina to deal with a headache? However, underlying many of our immediate excuses may be some persistent beliefs that are counterproductive.

For example, for years, my personal resistance to better time management was complicated by the secret belief that, were I to admit that my messy desk and episodes of procrastination were headache-causing habits rather than endearing personality quirks, I would be admitting to the moral failings that I imagined were already in the teasing tone of my better-organized colleagues and friends. Part of my time management "recovery" process involved giving up the idea that procrastination is a harmless little personality flaw. In reality, procrastination cost me money and created stress.

Consider this: A lawyer who manages their time effectively can work 50 hours per week (2,400 hours per year) . . . spend three hours a week developing new clients or attending continuing legal education . . . spend three hours a week on management and administrative tasks . . . write off 10% for unproductive time . . . and still provide the opportunity for over 1,900 hours of billable client service! If you capture just 30 minutes more a day at a billing rate of $200 an hour you will add approximately $24,000 to your revenue. More importantly, time can been reserved for vacations, evenings and weekends for family life, hobbies, exercise, volunteer work . . . in other words, a balanced life outside of the office.

That's the upside. On the down side, procrastination can cost us money, stress, sleeplessness, embarrassment, guilt, impaired credibility, and damaged career advancement. Often we end up doing the task, the chore, the project, the work, after procrastinating about it. We've done it, but we may have damaged our own professional credibility or our own personal reputation. The balance sheet shows a negative because the client had to ask so many times, or our client was kept waiting, or our answers were so late that they were useless.

Not returning phone calls promptly is a prime example of the procrastinating snowball effect. Clients often are emotionally vested in legal matters, and when their attorney doesn't return their calls promptly, they tend to become even more nervous. They require information and reassurance, "hand-holding needs" that are crucial to a comfortable lawyer/client relationship. A colleague of mine who serves on a bar ethics committee often talks about the tenacity with which some lawyers put off dealing with an anxious or angry client, even when faced with a complaint of professional misconduct. Time and again, he says, an attorney will promise to fix a small problem by a certain date, fail to do it, and end up with significantly more problems in the long run.

Steps in the Right Direction

• Don't delude yourself. Unpleasant tasks don't get easier over time; if anything, they become more unpleasant. Even worse, the worry over not working on a project takes at least as much energy as just getting on with the task. Constantly keep the potential consequences of putting a task off in front of you as a reminder that an ounce of pain today can prevent a pound of agony tomorrow.
• Break everything into 15-minute chunks. You can stand just about anything for 15 minutes, right? And how long does it take to track down a client's medical record or call back the confrontational lawyer on the other side? OK, some things require more than a quarter-hour, but you can often break the bigger jobs into pieces, doing a little bit at a time.
• Reward yourself for progress. Once you have completed a section, give yourself a break or do something special as a reward.
• Start with the easiest part of the task. For instance, if you are faced with writing a long report, begin with a section about a topic that you are thoroughly familiar with or have dealt with before.
• Be intellectually selfish. Before you start, evaluate each unpleasant task by asking yourself how you can deal with it in the least personally stressful manner and how can you deal with it in the best, fastest and simplest manner.
• Develop a group of colleagues outside your office to whom you can go for advice. Not knowing what to do can result in procrastination because the matter appears to be too weighty or complicated or the immediate way to tackle the problem is unclear. Find out what you don't know, ask, conduct appropriate research, have a go and get someone to check your work.
• Don't wait until you feel like it. Sigmund Freud once said, "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." You don't have to feel like it to start on something. If you wait for inspiration, you run the risk that it might never come.

Manage Your Relationships
Our ability to accomplish what's most important is very much tied into the quality of our relationships with the key people in our lives. As a result, an often-overlooked time management strategy is to invest time with the people who are important to you, and to know when a relationship doesn't deserve your time or your energy.

Suppose, for example, that you have an appointment scheduled with a key client at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon. You just found out that your son's baseball team playoffs start at the same time. How successful you are able to resolve this scheduling conflict will in large part depend upon your history with each party.

Let's imagine you decide to talk with your client to resolve the problem. If this is the third appointment you've rescheduled, your credibility is low. The minute you say you have a problem, the odds are your client will become inflexible. To you, this is an unusual situation that deserves some special consideration; to your client, it's just more of the same. No matter how it gets resolved, you've lost more ground with your client. If, on the other hand, your have been consistently reliable, available and upfront, your client knows that you have his interest at heart, and so will probably be willing to try to reschedule, solve the issue over the phone, or come up with a viable third alternative to meet the need.

Similarly, if your game-attendance record includes a pattern of no-shows or broken promises, don't count on any slack from your son when you try to explain the current situation. On the other hand, if your son knows you're his biggest fan ...if, even when you can't attend, you always make it a point to ask, "How was the game?"...if you know what's going on in his life . . . if you spend time with him and he knows that he's one of the most important people in your life . . . then you'll likely get a different response: "I understand. You have to work sometimes. It's okay."

Steps in the Right Direction

• Write down your roles - attorney, spouse, parent, volunteer, etc. As you look at each role, ask yourself, "What are the one or two important things I could do to nurture this role this week?" Spend five minutes today that will make each relationship better tomorrow. Call a favorite client just to touch base. Stop on your way home from work and pick up a special treat for the family or a flower or card for your spouse. Read a story to your three year-old or sit down for five minutes and really focus on listening to your teenager or your spouse. Do something that moves your relationships forward.

• Work around other people. Take it from me; the odds of your changing a client, judge or colleague are about the same of winning the Texas lottery. Go with the flow; if a client is habitually late, tell him the appointment is 15 minutes earlier than you schedule it for. When meeting with someone who is exceptionally busy, you are less likely to have to wait if you ask for the first appointment of the day. You'll have much less stress if you work around the peculiarities of the people you depend on.

• Their procrastination does not make your emergency. A new client has sucked in many a lawyer at the 11th hour. Perhaps the statute of limitations will expire next week or a court date is a few days away. A client who acts as if s/he were the only item on our agenda has frazzled even more of us. Learning to decline unreasonable demands - and to respond promptly to realistic ones - is not only a great day-to-day time management strategy; it's probably one of keys to career longevity.

Work With What You've Got
There are as many time management strategies are there are excuses for not implementing them. Perhaps the most successful path to improved time management is to pick and choose the strategies that work best for you. Work with your own temperament.

For instance, some people find multitasking stimulating and energizing; others find it to be confusing and overwhelming. Another example; one of the most common tips for avoiding procrastination is to go public with your commitment to take action. For many of us, peer pressure serves as a motivator. For a colleague of mine, however, this has the opposite effect. When she feels pressure from someone else to get something done - even if the external pressure has been solicited -- her rebellious streak kicks in and she is less likely to do it. Which is why she thrives in solo practice and was a disaster in a large law firm.

Steps in the right direction

• Schedule some form of planning time into your day. Most people find daily "to do" lists helpful, especially if they prioritize the tasks in their order of importance and assign a time and date for completion to each task. Used the right way, lists free you. They let you visualize your tasks and organize your work. And when time gets short, they make it easier to decide what's really important instead of insisting that you do what seems urgent.
• Neutralize your weaknesses. Do you constantly underestimate how long it takes to do something? Leave for work earlier than unusual and leave time in your schedule for the unexpected. If interruptions chip away at your day, accept telephone or office contacts (unless urgent) at specific times of the work day and limit "open door" policies, particularly during the most productive hours and when meeting with clients or other lawyers
• Don't overextend yourself. Many lawyers - like others in service professions - share a type of "illness." We always feel we can fix it. It's important to realize we can't solve every problem out there and that some cases are better left to others. Taking a case you don't have the expertise to handle often leads to a fear of making a mistake, which can translate into procrastination and a lack of diligence.

We all have the same 60 seconds in every minute. If we spend it foolishly, we are squandering the very stuff that life is made of. If, on the other hand, we consistently look for ways to make our schedules consistent with our goals and priorities, we will have more energy to do the things we dream of, not just the things we must. For, after all, life really is . . . about time.

Copyright 2004 Joni Johnston.