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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is for those of you who build time for a living.

There is a big debate about whether this is the right approach to serving clients, but if you do it,

certain practices can help make sure that you are more efficient and focused during the time you plan to work.

Whenever I tell people to track their time, I suggest they

think of themselves as lawyers billing their time to different projects. Intriguingly, many

actual lawyers with billable hour quotas refuse to do this exercise. They get so accustomed to

thinking of their work days in billable

chunks that the idea of doing it for all their time, even for just a week, seems awful. Some do it,

but very grudgingly. I find this fascinating because on some level, many jobs have an expectation of a certain number

of working hours. Yet putting a billable hour quota on it somehow makes life feel like a race

against the clock. In any case, having an expectation of billable hours can make life stressful

during times when it is hard to bill hours. I was reminded

of this when I got a note recently from someone whose law firm, like so many companies, had gone

virtual during the pandemic. Many of the firm's lawyers were supervising virtual learning or had kids

who were around a lot more than in the past, and the net result was a reasonable amount

of household distraction. Same as everywhere, right? But the firm could see it in their billable hour

totals. People either didn't bill as much as they would have been, possibly leaving clients

short-staffed, or they worked a lot of nights and weekends, which can, over time, lead to burnout.

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