the [non]billable hour

May I have your attention?

Watch this video:



Remember, what we look for is what we see. It is only when we open our eyes to see everything that we notice what should be obvious.

What are you looking for in your practice? Billable hours? Maybe you should look for something different. You might be surprised at what you'll find.

You Gotta Try PicLens

Trust me on this one. If you EVER view photos or other images in the web, you've got to try PicLens. Easily the coolest thing you'll see on your computer this year. Don't believe me? Check out this demo. I love it!

Are your customers, or your employees, always right?

For another worthwhile read this morning, check out the Top 5 Reasons Why "The Customer is Always Right" is Wrong from the Chief Happiness Officer Blog.  Reason Number 4, it results in worse customer service:

[W]hen you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• That treating employees fairly is not important
• That employees have no right to respect from customers
• That employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible - the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: courteous on the surface only.

Do you put your customers first, or your employees?

Need a Vacation?

Brad Feld has a great recap of the ways he takes time off to recharge, including a quarterly, week-long vacation and semi-regular weekend getaway:

Go Dark Weekend: When I find myself feeling burned out, I do a go dark weekend. I turn off my computer and cell phone at 6pm on Friday night and don't turn it back on until 5am Monday morning. I cancel anything that is scheduled for the weekend and just do whatever I feel like doing. This is usually a once a quarter event; occasionally more frequently depending on how busy I am. I'm considering doing this around each of my marathon weekends also.

Anyone reading this feeling burned out? How about "going dark" this weekend and reconnecting with your kids?

Your Brain Rules!

Want to learn more about what's going on inside your own head? Check out Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina. The site (linked to above) has lots of pretty cool, short videos explaining why our brains work the way they do. Working for XPLANE, I especially liked Rule # 10: Vision Trumps All Other Senses, and it contains this rule of thumb for presenters:

You'll get 3x better recall for visual information than for oral. And you'll get 6x better recall for information that's simultaneously oral and visual.

Here's why:

• We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.
• Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.
• Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it's how we've always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.
• Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

Wow!

Got Anxious Clients?

Think about it. Every client who enters a lawyer's office is anxious. In fact, they'd probably prefer going to the dentist. That's why this article on How to Deal with Anxious People is important reading. It sets out some research, with some valuable tips for deciphering visual cues, that every lawyer should know. Here's why:

The more you talk over or at anxious people, the more pressure you put on their middle brain and the more they will close their minds to what you are saying.

Alternatively, the more you talk to an anxious person -- or even better yet, with them -- the more you alleviate that pressure and the easier it is to access their upper brain and open their minds to you. Here's a critical point, though: the approach you may think you are taking in a conversation with an anxious person may not be the approach the other person perceives.

Also worth remembering when you are confronted with that big guy in the bar who accuses you of cheating at pool.

Size Matters

If you are still tooling around with a small computer monitor (or worse, your staff is), check out this post from the WSJ's Business Technology Blog. It is time to supersize:

Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones. There is an upper limit, however: Productivity dropped off again when people used a 26-inch screen.

Think Learn Share Do

LexThink 08 is coming. More details next week.

The Devil's In the Details

The New Yorker has created a series of 10 second animations for several of their cartoons. If you are a PowerPoint (ab)user, check out this one.

Let's ReThink LexThink

If you head over to the LexThink! site, you'll see it is "Under Construction."  We'll have some more info soon after Techshow.