Feeling Overwhelmed? 15 Ways to Get Marketing & Business Development Work Done©

             

Feeling overwhelmed? You may be so overloaded, busy and stressed that you do not even have five minutes to read this article! The catch-22 is that you are the only person who can lessen feelings of being overwhelmed, both for yourself and your team.

           

1.    Make Time to Meet with Yourself - Consider forcing yourself to schedule a 15- to 30-minute appointment with yourself (alone at first) to take a step back to assess yourself and your workload to determine what is necessary and what can be culled from the to-do list or done differently. You may need to wake up an hour earlier one day this week to get this done (waking up one hour early each day is a proven productivity booster). During this time, find a quiet place where you will not be distracted by computers, mobile devices, interruptions, or anything else. Then reflect on the tips below. While doing so, write any notes, thoughts or to-dos on an (old school) piece of paper so that you can take appropriate action in the future.

2.   Assess Yourself (for Yourself) – Self-reflection and self-awareness are hard but necessary skills to master. It is never easy to admit one’s shortcomings to oneself, but effective leaders make conscious efforts to do so regularly by identifying ways to better themselves and improve their team’s productivity. The only way to self-reflect and subjectively assess is to be still to focus only on your thoughts and what is on your mind. Thoughts race through the mind, which often naturally overemphasizes the negative — what’s wrong, complaints, criticisms, stress, upsetting things, etc. — and then the person reacts. 

      So a conscious and proactive effort must be made to control the thoughts that race through the mind and remain mindful and in the present moment. As a human being and a professional, work to become aware of what is on your mind, because your thoughts largely dictate what you communicate and how you act or react. Work to separate your reaction from your response. Learn to have the patience to respond strategically, rather than to simply react. 

3.     Analyze Your Use of Time – Knowing precisely how you and your team members spend and invest their time is critical to an objective assessment.  As a recent article in Harvard Business Review points out, without knowing exactly how time is currently spent, it is difficult to accurately know or assess the current workload. Measurable data is often meaningful and helpful. Most in-house law firm marketers and business developers ironically do not formally keep track of their professional time, while all the firm’s lawyers (the in-house marketers’ clients) do! Most time and billing systems can be tailored to track time by staff member, lead lawyer, project, practice group and in 10, 15 or 30-minute increments (among other factors that can be tracked). To conduct an accurate assessment of the current workload, at a minimum, consider tracking time for a three-month period to get a realistic snapshot of how time is currently spent. Doing so will also help identify projects that take more time that anticipated and possible areas of inefficiency or waste.

4.     Assess Your Self-Discipline & Use of Time – Do you proactively manage your time each day? Do you plan ahead or mainly react? Do you have any personal time management rules you live by? If not, consider adopting some proven ones. The same goes for each member of your team. Other time management tricks include, among others:

      a .Waking up a half-hour or an hour earlier than normal each day to exercise, plan and prepare. A secret to maintain work-life balance is to do this every day, and on one or more weekend days, especially on Sundays to review, plan, organize and prepare to get a jump start on the week.

      b. Planning for and scheduling specific time that realistically works best for you to get important, non-urgent things done. Without any distractions, i.e. close the door and turn off your cell. For example, to get my book written (an important but not urgent project), I planned and scheduled 2 to 4 hours each Saturday or Sunday in the early morning and I committed to myself to work 3 total hours per week on my book on one of those days. It took approximately five months of persistently dedicating time to it, but I got it done.  

      c. Scheduling specific email review time.  Those who check email compulsorily throughout the day get distracted from accomplishing more important work and goals. Instead, schedule, or plan to look at, read and respond to email only during specific blocks of time each day - maybe early in the morning, right after lunch, late in the afternoon or while at the airport on a travel day.  During the rest of the day, do not look at emails and instead do other work.  Better yet, if possible, allow your assistant access to your email account and train the assistant to handle and respond to your email as appropriate, alerting you as needed.   
d.  Not accepting a meeting unless a specific purpose and objective for the meeting have been established and agenda items circulated (preferably in writing). If no specific objective or agenda has been circulated for the meeting, initiate the drafting of one or ask what the agenda/objectives for the meeting are (in the interests of making the best use of everyone’s valuable time).

Worldwide, the most successful and productive professionals are constantly on the lookout for ways to streamline the work day and to reduce time-sucks, which leaves more time to work on the tasks that generate results.

5.    Distinguish between –

a.     What’s Urgent & What’s Important: As world-renowned author Stephen R. Covey wrote in his international best seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, any one day, week, month or year for the vast majority of professionals is overwhelmed by things that are urgent but not necessarily important — which often leaves no meaningful time to invest in what is not urgent but important (like nonbillable marketing and business and client development). Another way to identify what is important but not necessarily urgent is to consider the 80/20 rule. This rule postulates that only approximately 20 percent of what a person does each day produces 80 percent of the results. So define that 20 percent in writing, because that is what is most important.

b.     Activity & Productivity: Many lawyers and other professionals mistake activity for productivity. For example, doing ten seminars or presentations is a common activity and measurable metric, but if the seminars and presentations were done with a goal of developing new business, the more meaningful metric that measure productivity would be how much revenue was generated by how many clients as a direct result of the seminars and presentations.

c.    Laziness & Productivity: A recent study by Harvard Business Review found that sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity. In fact, common supposedly timesavers like many meetings or emails are often just ways to get out of doing real work. 2019 is the year of getting things done. So focus on doing the important things that matter most to drive results as efficiently and effectively as possible.

6.     Determine Highest & Best Use – What is your highest and best use at work? What are the most important results you/your firm want to attain, and what do you personally do best to help get them accomplished? These are the areas of your highest and best use and what you should be spending at least 50 percent of your time doing (ideally 80 percent or more). The same goes for all members of your team. What is their highest and best use? Do you know whether they are each spending at least 50 percent of their professional time directly on activities that produce results aligned with their highest and best use? If not, consider recalibrating.

7.    Create & Use a System for Yourself & Your Team – Consider assessing the above for your team also. For example, if you and your team do not have and use an organization, prioritization, project management, tracking and reporting system and routine, consider creating or using one, either through old-fashioned spreadsheets or lists, or the much more sophisticated, collaborative and efficient online resources such as Asana, Airtable, Basecamp, Smartsheet or others. For other tips, see my recent post on my blog or on LinkedIn Pulse titled: Practical Ways to Track and Measure Marketing, Business Development and Sales Results in Law Firms.

8.  Prioritize – Review your responsibilities and each team member’s individual responsibilities. Is most of the time spent on highest and best use(s)? Is most time spent on the projects and initiatives that generate the most results? List the activities or tasks that should be prioritized. Not all projects and tasks deserve the same importance and not everything has to be done today. By creating and using a consistent, teamwide prioritization method and reporting procedure, you help everyone make the best use of time and focus on what is most important.

9.   Plan & Hold Weekly Meetings – Schedule, plan and hold weekly meetings with your team, as necessary. Create and follow an agenda, perhaps to discuss and decide on one to three goals that you will focus on for that week and then ask all team members to identify what steps they’ll need to take in order to achieve each goal. For important topics and issues that fall outside of the day-to-day demands of the current workload, consider scheduling and planning an off-site meeting or retreat to discuss, brainstorm and plan for other important but not urgent items (such as some of the issues described in this article). 

10. Eliminate – Many things done during a workday have minimal effect on productivity and results. Many tasks and things are repeatedly done, and often more than once, by more than one person each day, week or month. Redundancy, overlap and errors are frequent and usually everywhere, which is why Six Sigma was born. Assess and consider what can be eliminated, streamlined or consolidated. If you and your department do not engage or have not engaged in project improvement, consider starting small and do so for one project only — let’s say for the next conference or seminar your department is producing. Work as a team to break the project down into steps (in writing) and then systematically review and discuss what can be eliminated, combined, consolidated, streamlined and/or outsourced until your team ends up focusing most of their time on the 20 percent of the project that gets the 80 percent of results. By dissecting a big project, your team will feel more focused, and their task lists will become more manageable.

11. Minimize Other Distractions for Yourself & Your Team – These days, by far the No. 1 greatest distraction and time-suck for all professionals is personal smartphones and mobile devices. Given that the average person checks theirs between 80 to over 150 times a day, and to refocus on what they were doing before takes up 10 to 30 minutes, the amount of time and productivity lost is astronomical (and growing). Does your firm or department have a policy on the use of personal mobile devices at work? If not, consider creating one and perhaps also consider testing or purchasing Yonder pouches for your team. Remember, in actual emergencies, family members can always contact the employee or the employee’s supervisor by phone (as was the practice for over a hundred years plus before the invention of cell phones). Other common distractions at work include interruptions, some types of meetings and some types of phone calls, which time management techniques can help minimize.

12. Stop Multitasking – Stop trying to do two to 10 things at once! Changing tasks more than 10 times a day drops your IQ an average of 10 points. Studies prove that we get things done more effectively and efficiently by focusing on one task at a time. The ability to focus is a muscle which needs to be trained. 

13.Schedule Breaks – Model best behavior for your team by personally scheduling and taking short breaks, by yourself or with one or more team members. A five- to 15-minute break at least twice a day to take a quick stroll, have quiet time or grab a coffee does wonders. If no one on your team has the time to take breaks (other than to eat lunch), at least schedule “standing” or “walking” meetings, arrange to meet at a coffee shop or initiate other creative ways to get professionals away from their desks and mix up the daily routine. A Staples study found that 66 percent of employees do not take a break other than lunch, even though it is proven that taking breaks keeps us fresh and more productive and helps avoid burnout. 

14. Find Other Ways to Get the Work Done – To handle the never-ending workload, regularly search for other ways to get the work done and think outside of the box. Ask members of your team for their ideas of possible ways to get the work done more efficiently. Or schedule a team brainstorming session to generate the best ways to simplify projects and processes or eliminate certain projects or tasks altogether. Regularly addressing this issue as a team generates the best volume and variety of ideas and options, and fosters a professional “teamwork makes the dream work” environment.

Examples of other ways to get work done more efficiently (and often more cost-effectively) include:      

•       Asking internally about and utilizing firm staff not on your team or in your department (as available).
•       Hiring temps or interns from local colleges to get specific tasks done.
•       Hiring qualified outside resources on a fixed or flat fee basis to get specific projects or tasks done, such as: media coverage, attorney bio updates, content drafting, client interviews, market and industry research, training programs, coaching sessions, etc.

15.  Just Say “No” – This efficiency euphemism is much easier said than done for any marketer/business developer who works for a law firm or other professional service firm. Being of service, accessible and responsive is very important, and saying no to the wrong partner can be a death knell. But more firm leaders are allowing the marketing/business development leader and staff to say no to certain requests that leadership has determined do not generate results that are as strong as others. There are also other, creative ways to say no, such as asking the lawyer or professional to provide additional information or to do something to show a commitment to personally following up or through, or asking questions such as “Would you prefer I use my time to find the contact number for you, or could your assistant do that instead?”

Other Sources & Additional Resources:

9 Habits of Productive People, Forbes

How to Get Organized Despite the Chaos, Attorney-At-Work

Reclaiming Your Time at Work, Jaffe

Maintain Your Foundation, Strategies magazine, published by Legal Marketing Association

Amazon’s best-selling books in Work Life Balance

Podcasts on work life balance

     About the Author: Julie Savarino holds an MBA, a JD, and is a licensed attorney. She assists law firms, lawyers and marketing departments to get work done and project completed. She has successfully served in-house in client and business development positions for the law firms of Dickinson Wright and Butzel Long and for the accounting firm Grant Thornton. Contact Julie at +1 (734) 668-7008, Julie@BusDevInc.com, @JulieSavarino.