Take Control of Your Email to Carve Out Time to Write
Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2009
by Jennifer Carsen
Big Juicy Life
As the old saw goes, "writers write." There's no comparable saying for lawyers, but it might be something along the lines of "lawyers work inefficiently and generate massive amounts of paper and waste." (You can see why it never caught on.)
You may be billing 2000+ hours a year, but if you want to be a writer, you've got to carve out time for it now--while you're still lawyering. One of the best ways to do that is to get a grip on your email habits.
1. Never check your email right when you start work for the day. Even if you ignore everything else in this article, this one step can have an incredible impact on your life. Once you fire up Outlook for the day, you're firmly in the mode of responding to crises rather than setting--and pursuing--your own priorities.
Make time each morning--an hour or more is ideal, but even 30 minutes will do--to work on something important to you that will never get done otherwise. Do this before you even look at your email. You may need to start your day a bit earlier, or inform your assistant that you cannot be reached via email before X time if something comes up.
2. Check email only at designated times. Turn off your auto-indicator so that your attention is not diverted every time a new email comes in. Make a decision that you will check email as infrequently during the day as you can reasonably manage. Even if you can get your email checking down to only once every 30 minutes, that's far better than dealing with it in small fragments throughout the day.
3. Batch your email tasks: At your designated times, process all of your emails at once. Process the emails that can be fully dealt with in 2 minutes or less, delegate any that can be delegated, and save the others for when you have time to address them.
4. Step away from the device: Just because you can check email 24/7 on your BlackBerry or iPhone doesn't mean you should. If you're not waiting on something urgent, designate certain times as email-free zones. The world will not end. As you get more comfortable with this, you can start implementing whole email-free days or even weekends.
Once you've freed up that time, use it for something that will advance your writing goals--you'll be amazed how fast just a small bit of progress each day can add up.
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Jennifer Carsen, Esq. is a the founder of Big Juicy Life. Her work is turning lawyers into writers. Go to http://www.bigjuicylifecoaching.com for your free copy of "6 Myths About Leaving the Law for Writing."
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