Time Tracking Tips for Law Students: Lawyers focus so much of their time and energy on handling and managing cases for their clients that they lose out on time itself. In a profession as tasking as a lawyer’s manually tracking time falls by the wayside very quickly and is almost impossible to achieve.
It’s a fact that lawyers often struggle to track time and keep up with it. This demanding profession has you juggling a million things simultaneously and dealing with multiple interruptions that come in the form of calls, emails, documents, etc. The number of activities calling for your attention may be overwhelming. Hence, you’ll be stressed out and lacking in concentration. This is why time management is crucial for lawyers.
Time management skill is something all lawyers should have, considering the conditions they work under. It also ensures that you’re more productive, less stressed, better wellbeing, and improved job satisfaction. Everyone has the same number of hours per day, but we use them differently. As a lawyer, given the high standards of your profession, you can get caught up in several things and fail to manage your time correctly. However, there are tips to keep track of your time that you have been unable to acknowledge and follow.
You can leverage technology to manage your time correctly by using a time tracking app. This will help simplify your time tracking process, ensure you can capture lost hours, and reduce your frustration. This is one tool that you can use, but several other tips help you track time and help you do better in your legal profession. We’ll be discussing a few of these tips in this article.
Table of Contents
Start each day with a to-do list.
Creating a list isn’t about writing down every task you have to complete in a day (even though you’ll write them). It should be about priorities. Before you begin each day, have your tasks set out in their order of importance. This will ensure that you have a productive day, even if you don’t end up completing all the tasks on your list. Once the important and urgent ones are out of the way, then you would have been productive. It’s better than being caught up doing too many things, and at the end of the day, you would have done nothing meaningful.
Ensure your to-do list is based on personal requirements too. Note your most productive time of the day, and attend to the most challenging tasks during that time. If you’re most effective in the morning, it’ll allow you to do the most urgent and complex tasks first. However, if you’re more productive during the mid-day, save the most critical tasks until then, unless they’re extraordinarily urgent and can’t wait.
It’s easy to get distracted by clients, urgent tasks, and other works that you sidetrack your to-do list. This is a trap you must ensure you don’t fall into. Learn to do away with the distractions and follow your list.
For instance, you must ensure you don’t get caught in the rush that submitting your essays and assignments can bring. You can add it to your to-do list and create time daily to complete different phases of the essay/assignment. But seeing as this is a time-consuming task, your best bet is to outsource it to essay writing service UK, where you’re sure to get assignment writing help at an affordable price and be guaranteed excellent grades.
So, if you haven’t made a to-do list before, or you don’t like to do it manually, there are several tools such as mobile apps that you can use for this purpose.
Complete the complex tasks first
This tip deserves its separate mention because we all struggle with works we perceive as difficult. You know it is difficult, tedious, and unpleasant to do, so you’re more likely to procrastinate and try to do it last. However, you would be setting yourself up to be unproductive. So instead, you should put these problematic tasks first and get them out of the way. Then, if you start your day tackling the most complex and challenging job, you’ll be able to take the burden off you, and you’ll have a more productive and enjoyable day.
This famous time management tip works across many industries, including legal practitioners. However, if you allow yourself to continue procrastinating on these ugly tasks, it will end up unbalancing your schedule and wasting your time.
Avoid multitasking
This may sound strange to you because of the widespread belief that multitasking helps to save time on your tasks. However, this is untrue. Your brain prefers that you focus on one task before switching to another. Every time you switch from one task to the other (in the name of multitasking), your brain has to adjust and recalibrate itself to the task you’re facing. Switching between tasks repeatedly means that your brain will not settle on one task but will be forced to recalibrate itself continuously. Not only is this stressful for your brain, but you’re also losing over 20 minutes of your time, even though you don’t realize it.
What you should do instead is to pick a task that you’ll do per time. This proves the effectiveness of a to-do list. Then, focus on each task individually. This allows your brain to focus on that task and build momentum with it. You could even enter your flow state. Overall, sticking to one task per time is more effective because you’ll spend your time more resourcefully and be more productive. If you don’t believe this, you can find out by yourself through this little experiment:
- Get a time tracker app – there are several desktop apps for this purpose.
- Do two or more tasks simultaneously and track how long it takes you to complete all of them.
- Do the same tasks one per time and track how long you spend completing them.
This will help you see the importance of facing one task at a time.
Create time for email management
Working as a lawyer will expose you to loads of emails every day, and that’s not a bad thing. However, it’s one of the easiest ways to lose track of your time. You wouldn’t realize how long it takes you to manage your email because you don’t track the time. However, a study revealed that an average worker spends about 28% of their work time on emails. That’s about 11 hours per week!
Also, emails are one of the main reasons why you multitask because you have to switch repetitively between the task you’re working on and your email inbox. This eats even deeper into your productive time.
If you want to discover how much time you spend on your emails per day, use your time tracking app to create a new task. Then make sure to start a timer every time you turn to focus on emails. This is easy to accomplish, and time-tracking apps work as browser extensions. Finally, use the report to evaluate your time management and decide on a better email management strategy.
An effective email management strategy is to set apart a particular time during the day when you go through your emails. This will prevent you from multitasking and help you track your time better. First, however, you must ensure to turn off your email notifications to focus on the tasks at hand.
Conclusion
You’ll be forgiven for thinking you need a time tracking app more than anybody if you’re a lawyer. However, you also need to follow a couple of time management tips to spend your time better and be more productive in addition to the app.