Archive for the Good Questions

Now that the real presidential election is over, pretend you are running. The office is “President of [your name here]’s Life”.  Successful candidates paint a vision of what life will be like after they’re in office. You need to create a compelling reason for you to win, an ideal vision for [your name here]’s life.
That’s a problem. Visioning doesn’t […]

One of the things I talk most about with clients is how to respond when their first thought is “this is something I don’t know anything about.”  Usually the feelings that accompany the thought are fear and overwhelm, which just makes it worse. The fact is, if you have a process to handle new-to-you issues, you’re […]

This post describes how to develop a marketing goal in the context of your big picture. Say you want to plan a special vacation every year and next year it’s cooking school in Italy, with Lydia Bastianich herself. One of the areas of focus that  might come out of your financial forecasting exercise is “I need more […]

This morning, the 4th and nearly last day of my daughter, Hanna’s, soccer camp- we couldn’t find the ankle pad for her shin guard. She’s grown out of everything, we’re down to one set of guards, and this one was incomplete. MUCH gnashing of teeth. MUCH grumbling. NEARLY tears. And the car pool approacheth…
We found […]

Front page, Saturday, June 14, NY Times: “Lost in E-mail, Tech Firms Face Self-made Beast”. The article discusses how the use of email has “fractured” attention spans and hurt productivity. Intel and other companies are heeding the research and conducting workplace experiements to assess the problem and generate solutions.  A Besex study in the article […]

Solo lawyers must pay themselves salaries.
First- your business exists to serve your life. Your practice is a part of your life, but you also need to take enough money and free time out of it to have the big-picture life you want. Do not be satisfied with leftovers. Figure out what your target income is, then put yourself […]

It’s easy to get so caught up in billing that you fall behind in collections. Realization, a key financial management metric- asks “what percent of what you bill do you collect?” Until an invoice is paid, it is a receivable. You can see that no matter how much you bill - if you don’t collect, you aren’t […]

You aren’t exactly overbooked, so why should you have office hours? Two reasons:

You need to be able to tell clients and other professionals what hours you work.
You need to have a boundary or target work schedule to help you manage work/life balance.

Your work hours may change as your professional and personal life changes. You might […]

3 Month Goal Planner
A deadline can be very motivating. Who doesn’t think more about a goal and work harder to achieve it as the deadline approaches? Have you ever been astonished at how much you’ve done in record time to meet a critical deadline?
Use the energy that a deadline gives to your benefit by setting deadlines for […]

SO, last post was about who you want to work with, now think about why those people should choose you as their lawyer.
First, review the profile you created describing the people you serve. You’ve already started this process. If you got stuck, then pick it up again. Don’t worry about perfection or the consequences of […]