Legal News

How to Be Productive During the Holiday Season - Part II

By Brian Harris

By Neen James
Special to the Legal

This is the second part of a three-part series on making the most of the holidays.

In my previous post, I went over how to get started in making 2011 your best year yet by reviewing your personal marketing plan, conducting focus groups and doing a six-month review of your performance. Once you have completed this review, create a series of tasks, actions or projects to implement some of your strategies to help you really achieve all your targets for the next six months.

Clean up. You have heard of a spring clean, well this is a winter clean. This clean out could include:

• Clearing, deleting or filing those read e-mails in your inbox.
• Unsubscribing from all those newsletters that you don?t read.
• Allocating one hour to get your paper filing up to date (if you have more than one hour?s worth, do 15 minutes per week until it is all complete).
• Throwing out unwanted, unread journals that you have been "meaning" to read, but haven?t and won?t.
• Reviewing your "tasks" on your to-do list or in your Outlook file and removing those tasks that simply won?t be completed.
• Entering details into your contact management system of the business card pile that is gathering dust on your desk.
• Spending 15 minutes cleaning the top of your desk, removing unnecessary stationery, putting away files, cleaning the dust off your family photo, throwing away empty water bottles and wiping down your computer keyboard and screen. A clean and clear desk will help you be more productive any time of year!

Hold a team development activity. If you manage a team of people in the firm, allocate some time to meet for lunch at cosy restaurant with a warm fireplace and delicious food or bring food to share for lunch and conduct a meeting in your conference room. Spend time listening to your team, their challenges and achievements. Plan your next six months and how you will achieve the targets for the whole team.

Cancel unnecessary meetings.  If you have regular weekly or monthly project or staff meetings that don?t need to occur during the holidays, cancel them. Most people appreciate being given more time and spending less time in meetings.

Book a "tele-coffee" with your clients. What is a "tele-coffee"? It is where you both make a coffee and meet by teleconference. It is a more productive way of meeting (and avoids time wasted in travel), especially if you are trying to avoid inclement weather or holiday traffic. Just like a normal meeting, you set an agenda, take minutes if required and agree on the outcomes.

Watch the blog for the next post in this series, which includes more tasks to get you started on the right foot in 2011!

Neen James, MBA CSP, is the President/CEO of Neen James Communications, LLC. An international productivity expert and native born Aussie, Neen delivers engaging keynotes that have educated, and entertained audiences with real-world strategies that apply in all roles, whether at work or in life. Neen also provides one-on-one consulting and mentoring to women on a variety of business issues and topics. To find out more about Neen, visit her at www.neenjames.com/bio.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on December 20, 2010 (boomark / email).