“Some days, I know I’ve been really busy all day, but I don’t seem to have got much done”.

This was a comment that I heard from a lawyer at a training session I ran on ‘How To Free Up Your Time and Get More Done’ (which is one of the Profitable Practice Strategies I help clients to implement into their practice).

Lots of people in the room nodded in agreement.
And it’s a comment I’ve heard many times before – and something I’ve experienced myself.
For many of us, the issue is often that we’ve spent the day fire-fighting emails and phone calls and responding to demands on our time from others around us and we haven’t been able to find time for what we wanted to get done.

There are several ways to tackle this and one of them is called ‘Diary Blocking’.
At its simplest, this is about putting the important tasks that you need to get done into your diary. And you don’t just make a list of ‘what’ you need to do, you plan in your diary ‘when’ you are going to do it.
I use this for tasks that either require a reasonable amount of time to complete OR tasks that are time-critical for that day.

Once it’s in my diary I treat it as if it were a meeting with a client or a colleague, which means I don’t allow distractions like phone calls or emails during that time, I don’t try to multitask whilst doing it, and I don’t cancel it unless there is a really good (and urgent) reason to do so.
That way, the time is blocked out in my diary to do those things, and I don’t get to the end of the day feeling like I’ve been busy but not accomplished the things I wanted to.

Take action

If you haven’t tried this ‘Diary Blocking’ method, then I recommend giving it a go.

Let me know if you want more help with how to use it.

And if you want to learn some new tools and create the ideal growth plan for your practice or firm, then you should do what you can to clear your diary and be at my next Profitable Practice Secrets Workshop. This is an opportunity to learn quick-to-implement tools that can help you get more clients and increase your profits, and it’s also a chance to be away from the ‘busy-ness’ of the office and have the time and space to focus on your strategy and plans for growing your practice.