Foundation 2: Set Priorities and Act Accordingly.

Posted By Cliff Tuttle | May 29, 2012

No. 841

The Second of the Seven Foundations of Time Mastery for Attorneys, as stated by Attorney and Consultant Julie A. Fleming, is to set priorities and use them to guide your actions.”Knowing your top priorities each day, ” she says,” increases the likelihood that you will accomplish (or t least advance) the most important tasks each day.”

It will also help handle frequent interruptions, a major problem for lawyers, since it will increase your awareness of what is important.

Successful prioritization requires four steps:

– Capture all of the task to be accomplished;

– Assign a priority to each task;

– Devise a plan to handle each task according to its priority;

– Execute the plan effectively.

The task with the highest priority may simply be the one with the shortest deadline.  How often have you worked on something for hours, only to discover that you should have been working on something else that must be accomplished much sooner?

On the other hand, how often have you allowed yourself to be taken away from an important task to work on something else?  What happened?  I’ll bet that you completed neither task.  In order to avoid such an outcome, identify what is most important to complete that day and complete it.

Read Julie’s book to get the details on how to master this skill.  Finishing something means that you don’t have to spend time figuring it out all over again.  That alone is a major time saver.

CLT

Welcome

CLIFF TUTTLE has been a Pennsylvania lawyer for over 45 years and (inter alia) is a real estate litigator and legal writer. The posts in this blog are intended to provide general information about legal topics of interest to lawyers and consumers with a Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania focus. However, this information does not constitute legal advice and there is no lawyer-client relationship created when you read this blog. You are encouraged to leave comments but be aware that posted comments can be read by others. If you wish to contact me in privacy, please use the Contact Form located immediately below this message. I will reply promptly and in strict confidence.

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