#494: How to Stop Procrastination and Conquer Your To-Do List, with Paul Unger

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer: 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hosts 

 

 

Stephanie Everett (00:35): 

Hi, I’m Stephanie Everett. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:36): 

And I’m Jennifer Whigham. And this is episode 494 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Affinity’s, Paul Unger about overcoming procrastination. So Stephanie, in our last intro, we were talking about some common misconceptions around coaching, what people who have just heard about coaching think, and we’ve been trying to correct those misconceptions. So what’s on your mind today? What came up today for you? 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:02): 

Yeah, I think one we hear a lot is, I don’t have time for this. Oh, all the time. And it’s frustrating because it’s like nothing’s going to change in your life if you don’t make the time. Well, I just realized my interview is with Paul in procrastination, and maybe its all ties in together. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:20): 

I think it does tie into it if you don’t, like you said, we tell people all the time, if you don’t make the time for it, you’re going to be stuck. It’s not going to happen magically. It’s not going to happen later. You have to make the time now for it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:32): 

And maybe there is an opportunity with your coach to figure out what’s taking up so much time, what should him off your plate. At the very end of this episode, I’ll talk a little bit about delegation. We go way into that in lab. How can you use other people on your team better? Who should you be hiring next? There’s obviously time management pieces of it, but I think people underestimate the value that working with a coach can get both immediately in your schedule. We’re going to get to the heart of it and figure out, and maybe even what you’ll hear Paul talk about in a second is why you’re procrastinating. Well, your coach is going to be able to help you discern a lot of that and move past it. So our hope is that we can have an immediate impact and make more time in your schedule to do the things you should be doing. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:20): 

And we even ask a question on the little application we have you fill out for lab, what happens if you don’t do this now? And the answers are always so interesting. It really makes you think, if I don’t do this now, what is a year from now going to look like? And most people will say, I’ll be overwhelmed. I’ll have to shut my business. I’ll be so stressed out, I’ll never see my family. And it’s very dramatic. They’re not always that dramatic. I was going to say, they’re not always that dramatic. I chose the ones that sound the best for the podcast, but some are a lot tamer than that. But nothing will change if you don’t make the time now. So it is definitely worth the time. 

  

Stephanie Everett (02:55): 

Yeah. So whatever story you’re telling yourself in your head, jump on a call with one of our coaches and let’s figure out if there’s something there and there’s something blocking you that we could help you unlock. Because I think honestly, that’s what we really love to do. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:10): 

It’s true. And now here’s our conversation first with our sponsored guest, and then we’ll head into Stephanie’s conversation with Paul. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:20): 

Hey y’all. Zach, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist. Today, I’d like to talk to you about small law firm accounting. I have Waseem Daher with me from Pilot and they manage handle online remote accounting services, bookkeeping services, tax services, CFO Services, a whole host of things remotely and kind of, I guess fractionally, is that a decent way of saying it? 

  

Waseem Daher (03:45): 

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a team of full-time, US-based accountants who are on staff here at Pilot, and we can help out with bookkeeping, with tax prep, with CFO services and yeah, that’s exactly right. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:57): 

Okay. Well, so I guess the question that comes to mind for me is what’s the benefit of online accounting instead of maybe getting a bookkeeper in-house or training one of my assistants to do some bookkeeping and timekeeping? 

  

Waseem Daher (04:11): 

That’s a great question. It’s one we get all the time, as you can imagine from the firms we serve. If you think about a really robust, fully built out finance function at let’s say a big company, typically what happens is you have a staff accountant, you have a controller, and then you have a CFO or a VP of finance. And what’s interesting about that configuration is no one person wants to do the other people’s jobs, meaning the controller became a controller, so they wouldn’t have to do the staff accounting. The CFO may not even be an expert in accounting. They were an expert at forward-looking, budgeting, forecasting, et cetera. And so it’s actually hard to find one person brings all of these same skills to the table. And whereas with pilot, what’s nice about the 2000 plus businesses we serve is we have a robust team of all these folks, and you can get the exact fractional slice you need. It’s like, oh, well, you need a little bit of the bookkeeper’s time. Boom, there you go. You need a little bit of the controller’s time. We can make that happen for you too. You need a little bit of the CFO’s time. You can make that happen too. You need to talk to our tax team, make that happen as well. It just ends up being much more efficient for the actual needs of your small law firm as opposed to trying to staff this in-house. Right. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:19): 

Well, so if I’m a lawyer using a virtual firm like this, what does my interaction look like with that company? 

  

Waseem Daher (05:27): 

That’s a great question. So you have an account manager on our side, which as I mentioned is a full-time, US-based employee of ours. You correspond with us really in one of three ways, depending on your own preference. We, of course, we’ll answer your emails, we’ll do a phone call, we can hop on a Zoom with you. We also have a little dashboard where we can interact with you about the financials, where we’ll list for you in any given month. Hey, here are the open questions we had. Here’s some stuff we need for you, or here’s some particular transactions we want to call to your attention. So there’s a little bit of a surface that you can interact with us that’s not just, Hey, I hop on the phone and talk to you, which is pretty 

  

Zack Glaser (06:00): 

Cool. Okay. Well, so how are you guys connecting with the firm’s accounting, their software? Is it a shared QuickBooks? Is it something where they have to send it to you every month? What’s going on there? 

  

Waseem Daher (06:13): 

Yeah, great question. So the cool thing about Pilot is in addition to employing the team of accounting experts, we also have a quite sizable software engineering team. And so we build a bunch of software that connects to your QuickBooks, to your practice management software, to your billing system, to your corporate card to your bank. And ideally, if we set everything up, well, we’re actually slurping in all this data automatically for you. Meaning we should not need to email you and say, Hey, send us this thing when we get in touch with you. It should be about something that’s actually solving a business problem. You have like, Hey, how do I bill more hours or resolving an issue that we really need your expertise on? Not can you send us this PDF? 

  

Zack Glaser (06:54): 

Right, right. Yeah, I remember practicing and I would have to send the desktop accountant’s version of QuickBooks to my accountant every month. Then it would remain open and things weren’t able to be reconciled until it got back to me. So we’re not talking about that, but we’re also not talking about giving somebody like pilot access to the law practice management software, something like that. We’re talking about kind of the backend where the money is, where the action’s happening. 

  

Waseem Daher (07:23): 

So anything we need to do, the books we’ll get, read only access from. And I think that’s actually a really important, we don’t have the ability to move funds around. We basically want to save you the effort of having to send us statements. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:35): 

Well, so I think the biggest question that I think lawyers get, and you guys have obviously answered this. How familiar is pilot with lawyers trust accounting and all the specific type of accounting that lawyers need to do? 

  

Waseem Daher (07:51): 

That’s a great question. And one of our very specific practice areas is precisely around serving small law firms. So we’re very familiar with the joys of the trust account, the perils of incorrectly tracking revenue. If you have a cost related to a matter, you first have to offset that incurred cost. This is definitely something we live, eat, and breathe, and we’re really excited to work with lawyers to help you grow your law firms. I mean, that’s ultimately what this is about, letting you do more of what you went to school for or Jeff Bezos is actually an investor in our company. He has one phrase, he says, focus on what makes your beer taste better, meaning the thing that’s actually going to cause the service to be better. That is the high leverage area for you and your firm as opposed to the stuff that look that we are experts on. Let us be the experts in the stuff we’re experts on so that you can focus on what makes the firm more successful. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:47): 

So the one thing that I want to, and by the way, I love that the focus on what makes your beer taste better, the CFO service, I think that’s something that a lot of small law firms haven’t necessarily really thought about. What is that? I know it’s strategy in the abstract, but what is it in a real sense? 

  

Waseem Daher (09:06): 

Yeah, that’s a great question. So if you think about accounting and tax prep, what is that about? Principally accounting is really about telling you what has happened. It’s really about looking in the rear view mirror. How much money did you make? What were the expenses? What are the balances, the various accounts? And that’s important, but that’s all a foundation to hopefully let you make decisions that actually make the business stronger so that some of this could be forecasting, Hey, what do we expect is going to happen next year over the next few months? What do I anticipate my cashflow will be? Can I afford to hire this person or to incur this expense? But also, how do I optimize things? How do I stay on top of my billings? How do I shorten the amount of time that I have between when I invoice someone and when I collect on it? How do I track some of the key metrics like utilization in the firm ultimately with an eye towards how do you make the business stronger in a forward looking way? And you’re absolutely right. It’s not something that the average small law firm can do because you’re never going to hire a full-time CFO to help the firm out. It just doesn’t make economic sense is you really have to do it in this fractional way. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:12): 

Right, right. Fair enough. Okay, well, I’m sure we could ask tons and tons more questions. Where could people get answers to those questions or where could they follow up with Pilot? 

  

Waseem Daher (10:21): 

Well, I think the best place to do it is if you go to pilot.com/ Lawyerist would be a great place to check out and we have a special promo for listeners of the pod. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:30): 

Fantastic, fantastic. And we’ll put that link in the show notes. Wasim, thank you for being with me and I appreciate all the explanation. 

  

Waseem Daher (10:37): 

Thanks for having me. 

  

Paul Unger (10:42): 

Hi, I’m Paul Unger and I’m with Affinity Consulting. Today we’re going to talk about procrastination and how to overcome it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (10:48): 

Hey Paul, welcome back to the show. We’re excited to have you talk about something that I think we all suffer with this idea of procrastination. It’s a tough one. 

  

Paul Unger (10:59): 

It is. It’s one of the toughest topics when we talk about time management. 

  

Stephanie Everett (11:04): 

And so maybe just to get us started, we should just level set and what is procrastination? I feel like I beat myself up about it pretty on the regular. 

  

Paul Unger (11:14): 

Well, I mean, lemme tell you what, it’s not in our profession. I don’t think it’s laziness. I don’t think it’s lack of discipline. I think that we have moments of laziness. We have moments of lack of discipline. Sometimes I call it rest, but it’s voluntarily delaying something that you need to do logically, that you have to do it, and there are negative consequences. But despite the negative consequences, we still decide to not do it and it results in, it has negative consequences. It puts us in a really bad position for a lot of us, kind of what you just alluded to, it leads us into this what we call doom loop, where we not only are we dealing with the reason why we are procrastinating, so that might be fear of failure on top of it, now we have this doom loop, which is guilt on top of it, which even makes it, I think, doubly difficult to overcome. 

  

Stephanie Everett (12:15): 

Yeah, for sure. I love that you say it doesn’t mean you’re lazy, you’re a bad person. We all struggle with this at some level, I think, right? Is there anyone out there that’s completely overcome procrastination? 

  

Paul Unger (12:30): 

I don’t think so. Not no one that I’ve encountered. 

  

Stephanie Everett (12:33): 

So I guess that leads us to why do we do this? We don’t want to do it. We don’t set out to be procrastinators in most cases, and yet at times we probably all find ourselves struggling with procrastination. 

  

Paul Unger (12:48): 

Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because our profession in particular, I mean if you look at the amount of work product that we pump out, that is the opposite of laziness. So there has to be an underlying reason why we procrastinate. And that in fact is in my little prescription for people, is the first step is doing some real deep reflection about the reason why. There are many reasons why there’s fear of failure. There’s fear of success, which is, I know that sounds goofy, but some people fear success because then they fear that people will question, why didn’t you perform that way before? 

  

Stephanie Everett (13:29): 

Oh. 

  

Paul Unger (13:30): 

I might get a lot more work that I can’t handle boredom. There’s usually some underlying pain I call it, and identifying that particular pain. It could be pain, it could be boredom, it could be fear of success, fear of failure. I mean, there are dozens of reasons why we procrastinate, but we have to do that deep reflection first. And sometimes some people just say that’s enough to melt away that avoidant behavior. Just knowing and realizing what you’re doing oftentimes gets you over the hump. 

  

Stephanie Everett (14:06): 

So just stopping and asking, wait, why am I avoiding this project or this task is how we should do it. 

  

Paul Unger (14:13): 

Well, it’s a little bit more difficult than that. Procrastination is all about, or defeating it, I should say, is all about emotional regulation. And at the end of the day, it’s this battle between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. And the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that does our analytical thinking, our writing, our problem, solving our creativity logic. Like logically, we know we have this deadline this coming Friday and it’s Monday, and we still choose not to do it, and that doesn’t make any logical sense. So the prefrontal is in battle with the limbic system, which is saying the limbic system is all about pain, avoidance and pleasure seeking. So during I think our workday, it’s probably more about let’s do something less painful than go out to a party, not going to, we don’t have time for that and we would be fired. 

  

(15:11): 

So it’s usually let’s do something less painful. And that’s the limbic system. And the limbic system is by some accounts, 200 to 500 million years old. It’s a much more developed part of our brain where the prefrontal cortex is estimated to be, I have no idea how they figured this stuff out. That’s fascinating in of itself. But 250,000 to 500,000 years old. So the scientists already tell us that the limbic system has this advantage over the prefrontal cortex because it’s older and it’s more developed and it’s more advanced. So when we do something that would deplete the prefrontal cortex’s capacity or its ability, we’re already putting ourselves a half a mile behind in a five mile race. So we have to set ourselves up for success and we have to just a simple example, sleep or lack of sleep. When we don’t sleep just one night, the science clearly shows that that decreases the amount of activity in the prefrontal cortex. 

  

(16:21): 

So the prefrontal cortex is already not firing on all cylinders. And then we have this big project that we have to work on, and we’re kind of doomed to fail because our brain, the most important part of the brain to overcome this, procrastination isn’t firing on all cylinders. So when we engage in time management techniques, oftentimes if you break that down, for instance, planning, daily planning, I have my daily planner right here, and it’s right next to my keyboard, and this now frees up my prefrontal cortex. I don’t have to worry about what I have to do if something lands on my plate, I can pivot. So that allows my prefrontal cortex to do the things that it needs to do. It also calms me, which is very important with procrastination because it’s about emotional regulation. If I feel like I’m in control and I feel like I have a plan and I can pivot and my prefrontal cortex is really firing on all cylinders and I have sleep, then I’m less likely to procrastinate. 

  

(17:32): 

And the science is very clear on that as well. So we have to set ourselves up for success. And sometimes we do a terrible job at that. We show up to our desk last minute and we just look at our email and we dive in. We do no planning. We don’t get enough sleep, we don’t get ready to do the thing that we need to do, and that just makes it even more difficult. So you have to understand the reason. We have to slow down, get a sense of control, and then we have to remove the hurdles. And still most of the time that will get us over the hump, but still, sometimes it doesn’t work. 

  

Stephanie Everett (18:07): 

I mean, you have some other kind of best practices that people should follow if they find themselves in a situation where they’re procrastinating more than they want to. And so what are some of those that we should be adding to the list? 

  

Paul Unger (18:22): 

Well, I like a technique called getting in theater mode. So you think about you go to the theater and you sit there for two hours, sometimes even more, and you do nothing but watch the movie. You don’t do anything else. You get it done. But what do we do? We get ready, we go get our popcorn, some of us bring a blanket in to the theater, we go to the restroom, and we’re in theater mode. So one thing that I really like to encourage folks to do is if they have a big task in front of ’em. So let’s say I have to produce a set of documents in a real estate or estate planning matter, and it’s a doozy and maybe it’s something that I’m not very familiar with. So my pain there is a fear of failure or imposter syndrome. I fear I don’t have what it takes to do the job, so what can I do? 

  

(19:19): 

So I like the buddy system, so think of theater mode. What’s everything I need to do to get ready for this? Well, I might need a buddy, so I might reach out to you because you’ve done this before. I’m going to give you a little bit of billable work and we’re going to conquer this thing together as well. I like the buddy system too, just by the way, because it also deals with another issue, which is boredom. And sometimes when you have a buddy, you can overcome the boredom because it just brings a little energy and excitement into the project too. So I might set my materials out if I have a lot of case law, something like that, or some sample documents, I might even print them out. I don’t have enough monitors for all of them. I might clean off my desk, go to the restroom, get my coffee or my beverage of choice, go on, do not disturb, shut my door. 

  

(20:13): 

I like the pomodora technique as well. We’ve talked about this one before and I have my little, I don’t have the tomato timer, but I have a little timer here. It’s silent, doesn’t tick. Oh, nice. And so I might block off three hours to work on the project and Pomodoro for 25 minutes and take a five minute break and then go back and forth. So single task for a period of time and then take a break, single task for a period of time, take a break. I might also use brown noise or white noise. So I set up my space. In fact, I’m on. If I have this tomorrow, then maybe at the end of the day today I get everything set up, then I show up and I do the work. Micro milestone is also important too. Steps. That’s very helpful for a lot of folks, even if it’s not a monumental task, just breaking it down in some steps, getting that one step done and then you get that dose of dopamine that gets you going. 

  

Stephanie Everett (21:12): 

Yeah, the steps really help me when I have big projects and just figuring out I have one hour. Can I get this facts section written or can I get one argument outlined that really helps? I love the movie theater analogy, and that totally makes sense to me. Once I get into the theater, I’m like, I don’t want to leave for nothing. I’m going to be locked into this movie. I’m curious though what you would say, because I have talked to people that will get in ready mode for a day, they’ll get to their office and they’re like, whoa, I got this big project I need to do. Let me get ready for it and get ready. Might be, let me empty my inbox. Or they get into email, they find other little tasks to do because they need to clear their decks to get ready for the big project. And then they look up, it’s three o’clock and they haven’t even started the big project. 

  

Paul Unger (22:02): 

So that is a very common thing. And so this is why time management by itself. Some people say time management by itself just doesn’t work or address the procrastination problem. I kind of disagree a little bit. I think again, when we set our prefrontal cortex up for success, we’re much more likely to succeed. So if you break it down, a lot of folks plan. They’re excellent planners, they’re excellent time managers. They block time off at two o’clock. Like what you said, they show up at two, they have nothing else to do and they still don’t do it. And that’s why time management by itself sometimes doesn’t always work. And if you uncover the rock, what’s going on there is there’s another pain. So think about emotional regulation. There’s some other pain going on and what is it? And if you’re really honest with yourself, it’s probably something like fear of failure. 

  

(23:01): 

It could be boredom, it could be, I mean there are lots of reasons why people procrastinate, but there’s an underlying reason that is not being addressed and that’s why that’s they’re not getting started. And that’s why it’s all about emotional regulation. Sometimes just having that sense of control is enough to just get started. And that’s what the psychiatrists tell us is the most important thing is to just get started. That in itself is a technique. And sometimes just saying that to yourself, you know what? I’m just going to get started. That’s actually why the Pomodoro technique is so helpful to some people who procrastinate. In fact, I was doing a program last week on this, and then afterwards I went and met with people and the attorney told me, he said, you know what? I’ve been putting off this project for two weeks and you just said just get started. And I went back to my desk and I told myself just that and I got started and I’m knee deep in it now. I don’t want to stop. So that alone can be a technique too. But if you don’t get started, there’s another underlying reason. There’s an emotional response that is not being regulated. And it’s probably something like fear of failure. 

  

Stephanie Everett (24:23): 

You’re reminding me that one of the things we do in our lab community, which is our coaching community we have for Lawyerist, we actually have time set up where people can come onto a Zoom and we do a little priority setting. What’s that one thing that you’ve been meaning to do that you haven’t done? What’s the next steps of it? We have them. So we spend about five to seven minutes outlining it, and then everybody goes on mute and turns off their camera and for the rest of the hour they just have to get the thing done. And then we come back at the end and everybody unmutes and puts and is like, I got four things done, or whatever it was, and we celebrate. And it’s so powerful just knowing that you’re on a call with other people and you’re going to have to report at the end of the hour what you got done and having that little bit of planning love. Yeah, it’s so powerful. And sometimes we even do that for our team. We’ll have a writing hour come on this time and everyone who needs to write something and let’s do that and support each other. 

  

Paul Unger (25:22): 

I love that. We used to call ’em, and I don’t know, I didn’t come up with this term. I think somebody else in my office did, maybe Danielle, we called ’em accountability of buddies, and that’s another great technique. So here’s the thing that we often do. We make an appointment or a deadline for ourselves, an artificial deadline of some sort. The client didn’t give us a deadline. I didn’t discuss a deadline with the client, but I put a deadline of next Friday on my calendar. Well, usually that doesn’t work. I’ll tell you when it does start to work though, when you get old like me and you forget that it’s a fake deadline. And I’ve done that before too, and I’m like, okay, well that kind of worked, but it doesn’t work when you’re young and you remember. But so what I tell people is create the real deadline with your accountability buddy. Now that could be your client. So you have a real deadline now. And of course then you have to hit it and hopefully logic takes over and your prefrontal cortex takes over. But having that buddy to do it, you say, Hey, let’s show up and do this. That’s a great technique. I love that. 

  

Stephanie Everett (26:30): 

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like we kind of framed this talk today about overcoming procrastination, but really we’re slipping back into it all works together. It’s like you have to sort of have a universal management plan and doing that will also help with the procrastination. Is that what I’m hearing? 

  

Paul Unger (26:49): 

I think so. I think it’s a great way to sum it up. I know very few people who don’t procrastinate, who don’t also have pretty good time management techniques. So they go together, they really go hand in hand. But occasionally I hear a speaker, I hear, I read an article where somebody says, time management doesn’t work for procrastination. I think that’s really kind of simplistic thinking. I think that it is much more complex than that. And if you break down what is going on, you could take almost any time management technique, take email management as an example, like a methodology to process email on your tasks. You think, well, that’s a really practical, pragmatic hard skill. But that methodology, if you break that down, it creates a sense of control in somebody. And getting organized, feeling organized is a sense of control. And that sense of control when we don’t have it is anxiety. And that anxiety is processed where in the prefrontal cortex. So when we free that anxiety, when we remove that anxiety now that has a big impact on procrastination. So all of these things are related. I don’t think it’s so simple as saying time management doesn’t work for procrastination. It absolutely does, but it’s not always enough. And we have to dig deeper into the emotion. And that’s what I think they’re trying to say is that we’ve got to dig deeper and regulate that emotional response. 

  

Stephanie Everett (28:30): 

It occurs to me too. There’s another thing that potentially that could come into play here, which is the art of delegation. I’ve been doing a lot of training lately it seems like on delegation. I was thinking about that boredom. If you’re avoiding a task, not because the fear of failure, but you’re just bored with it, I think a lot of times we hold on to task and projects. We think we’re the only ones who can get them done. And we’ve been using the phrase around here a lot. Delegation is a gift. And so you could potentially, if you’re just bored with the task, I mean there could be a reason you have to do it, but there could also be an opportunity to give that to another team member who might be excited and challenged and learn a new skill. So we’ll do a whole nother show on delegation. But that’s just in my mind right now because I’ve been doing a lot of delegation training, 

  

Paul Unger (29:18): 

An excellent point. And sometimes, hey, listen, sometimes I don’t have the right skill to do it and maybe there’s somebody who can do it who has that skill, and I could delegate that or I could ask somebody else to do it. And I think we don’t do enough of that because like you said, we kind of hold onto it and we’re like, well, I took the responsibility I’m going to, and that’s a good thing. But sometimes there is somebody else who could do it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (29:49): 

Yeah, for sure. Alright, well, any parting tips? Anything that you’re like, oh, if I could just get people to do this one thing, it would make their lives better and I’d be happy. 

  

Paul Unger (30:00): 

I would say slow down, slow down. I know that that sounds very cliche and very obvious, but I call it slow motion brain. And so you’ve got to identify what you have to do, but you have to slow down too, just not just figuratively, we need to slow down in life, but we know that when we slow down our heart rate, that we calm that what we call the amygdala hijack in the limbic system. And so there’s something physiological that is going on there that can really make a difference. So I would say identify the reason, be true and honest with yourself. Slow down and remove the hurdles. Get into theater mode. Remove the hurdles. Try like Pomodoro Micro milestone, which is just a fancy way of saying create steps, and I think you’re going to dial it down. Don’t try to defeat it a hundred percent. That’s just unrealistic. But you can seriously dial down your procrastination. I think you follow just those steps. 

  

Stephanie Everett (31:04): 

Absolutely. I love it. There’s so many more techniques and ways to do the things you’re talking about, right? If you’re listening right now and you’re like, I know I need to plan my day better, I’m not really sure how to do that. Paul mentioned email management. I know I should process my email, and I don’t really know how to do that. The good news is that, Paul, you’ve created this amazing course that we have available on our website all about time management. And when I tell you guys it’s thorough, there is a lot in there. There is a lot of information, good information in there, but it’s broken out in a way where you could follow the whole thing or you can kind of go in and see, oh, I need help with this specific thing in my life. We’ll make sure they’ll put the links in the show notes. But if you haven’t checked out Paul’s time management course, or if you have someone on your team maybe that could use some extra help, then I want to encourage everyone because there is so much good information in there, Paul, 

  

Paul Unger (32:01): 

Thank you. And I do a lot of CLE programs, and one of the post covid benefits of the programming today is that they’re available online. So even if you want to attend one in another state, I usually do two or three a week. So you could look out for me there. 

  

Stephanie Everett (32:19): 

Yeah, and actually you just reminded me. We’ll make sure the news goes out, but you’re going to be doing some live webinars with our company through the team, so we’ll be opening up seats here. Probably by the time this thing airs, we’ll be ready to go. So we’ll make sure we have that link included as well, because you’ll have the to come in and sign up for a live class with Paul, which is going to be amazing. 

  

Paul Unger (32:44): 

Absolutely. Well, thank you Stephanie. This has been fun. 

  

Stephanie Everett (32:48): 

Alright, now I have to go do some planning and some micro steps, get some stuff done. 

  

Paul Unger (32:53): 

Ditto. 

  

Stephanie Everett (32:54): 

Thanks Paul. 

  

Paul Unger (32:55): 

All right. You bet. 

 

Announcer: 

The Lawyerist Podcast is edited by Britany Felix. Are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your first two steps. First. If you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at Lawyerist.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book? Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities, are right for you. Head to Lawyerist.com/community/lab to schedule a 10-minute call with our team to learn more. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you. 

 

 

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