the [non]billable hour

(How) Do You Take Credit?

Here's a great idea for ways to remember the folks who've helped you along the way, from this post on How to Take Credit:

So when the time comes to take the stage, remember that you didn’t get here alone: go ahead, grab the microphone and acknowledge your team. Do it before a crowd and in e-mail. Say it with bonuses and baked goods -- but be sure to say it. No one likes to be left out. By sharing the credit the right way, you won't diminish your own accomplishments, you'll add to them by building a reputation as the kind of person people want to work for and for your focus on developing others.

Not sure whom to credit? In their book, Becoming a Resonant Leader, Annie McKee, Richard Boyatzis and Frances Johnston suggest keeping running lists of peers who have helped you along your route to success -- along with notes about what you actually learned from them. Keeping such a list will likely help ensure that you don’t forget them in your acceptance speech.

I really like the idea of keeping a running list of people who've helped you along with a note or two about how they've helped.  This is a pretty powerful way to not only remember how you've gotten to where you are, but to also remind you to give help to others who seek it from you.  More on this in the next post.

Six Word Memoirs

If you liked my PowerPoint Haiku exercise, you've got to check out this Six-Word Memoir video (thanks, Magda).  Can you write your memoir in six words? 



My first shot:   Stopped lawyering. Having way more fun.

Kill Your Projects, Not Your Clients

Here's an interesting idea from Scott Young that may just help with your growing to-do list:  Set up a Project Kill Day. In short, you schedule a distraction-free, off-site day to "kill" off one of your projects.  Check out the entire post for his step-by-step guide.

Not sure which projects you have that merit an entire day?  Try writing down the first client-related task you think of in the morning and the last one you think about before bed.  If it is the same one for more than a day or two, kill it before it kills you!

Need More "Work" to Do?

Hugh MacLeod has a great idea for juicing your creativity:

Add 25% to amount of hours you work every week, and fill them with fun, interesting, useful stuff. Google allows its employees 20% of their work time to devote to their own personal projects. If your employer won't allow you to do this, you should unilaterally make the time for yourself, either at the office or at home, hence the extra 25%. Your peers in the office may think you weird at first, but after a while it'll start paying off.

I've been trying to do this for a while now, and it is starting to pay off.  I'm finishing up the e-book and stretching myself to be creative in different ways.  Give it a try!                 

Tags: creativity, gapingvoid, homann

Spending My Vacation on You

Now that I'm at XPLANE, I've got some real, honest-to-goodness vacation time to use.  So, during the next two weeks, instead of catching up on my usual resolution series, I'm going to be putting together an e-book that will capture "The Best Of" this blog.  I've been working on it for a while, and I'm really excited about how it is coming along.  I'll be sharing it with you right after the New Year.  Happy Holidays!

Ideate for the Holidays

Church Marketing Sucks continues a great series on Lessons in Not Sucking with this post on Building an Ideation Team.  There are some absolutely great tips in the post, including: "Invite People You Don't Like," and "Invite People with Unusual Professions."  Read the post, and then think about ways to do a firm-wide ideation session at your holiday party this year.  That's right, gather up some of your people and your clients and spend a bit of time thinking of ways to get better as a firm -- perhaps by focusing on what your top-ten firm resolutions for 2008 should be.  You might be surprised at the result.

15 Thoughts for Law Students: A Mini-Manifesto

I've written a few mini-manifestos for clients and lawyers before and remain quite enamored with the format.  Here's one for law students with some random (semi-related) thoughts on law school and the legal profession.  Let me know what you think, and feel free to add your own in the comments.

1.  Law school is a trade school.  The only people who don't believe this to be true are the professors and deans.

2.  Want to piss off your professors?  Ask them if they've ever run a successful law practice.

3.  Being good at writing makes you a good law student.  Being good at understanding makes you a good lawyer.  Being good at arguing makes you an ass.

4.  You can learn more about client service by working at Starbucks for three weeks than you can by going to law school for three years.

5.  Law school doesn't teach you to think like a lawyer.  Law school teaches you to think like a law professor.  Believe me, there's a huge difference.

6.  You can get through law school without understanding anything about what it is like to be a lawyer.  That is a terrible shame.

7.  The people who will help you the most in your legal career are sitting next to you in class.  Get to know them outside of law school. They are pretty cool people.  They are even cooler when you stop talking about the Rule Against Perpetuities.

8.  Your reputation as a lawyer begins now.  Don't screw it up (and quit bragging on your MySpace page about how drunk you got last night).

9.  Law is a precedent-based profession.  It doesn't have to be a precedent-based business.  Be prepared to challenge the prevailing business model.  Somebody has to.

10. Experienced lawyers work with clients.  Young lawyers work with paper.  You like working with paper, right?

11. You are about to enter a world where getting your work done in half the time as your peers doesn't get you rewarded.  It gets you more work.

12. Except for prosecutors and public defenders, nobody tries cases anymore.  Especially not second year associates.

13. You have a choice:  You can help people and make a decent living, or you can help corporations and make a killing.  Choose wisely. 

14. There are plenty of things you don't know, and even more things you'll never know.  Get used to it.  Use your ignorance to your benefit.  The most significant advantage you possess over those who've come before you is that you don't believe what they do.

15. People don't tell lawyer jokes just because they think they are funny.  They tell lawyer jokes because they think they are true.  Spend your career proving them wrong.

Personal Technology Challenge: 10 Things

I really liked this post in Zen Habits titled The 100 Things Challenge.  The essence is that you cut your personal possessions down to 100 things.  Things that are shared, non-personal stuff, books, and tools don't count.  It got me wondering about our personal technology burden.  How many different programs, web applications, tools, toys and gadgets do we accumulate?  How many of those do we use everyday? 

I'm going to cut my tech burden down to ten items for the next 30 days.  This includes hardware, software and web apps.  Here's my initial list:

1. MacBook Pro
2. iPod
3. Treo
4. Google Reader
5. GMail
6. Google Notebook
7. Entourage
8. MindManager
9. Keynote/Pages
10. ScanR

What's on yours?

An Unreasonable Request

I am a big fan of making Unreasonable Requests -- requests that I don't expect a "Yes" answer to, but that I make nonetheless.

I'm going to be sharing several on this blog over the following months.  Here's the first:

I need someone to redesign my blog.  I've got quite a few projects I'm working on, and need to incorporate them in a new, non-template based site.  I know what I want, but don't have the HTML and CSS chops to do it myself.  In exchange (in addition to ample credit) I will work with you to make your business better -- and I promise you'll find the trade more than fair.

Resolutions III: December 31

Take Lisa Hanneberg’s advice.  Choose one resolution, and each day:

- Tell two people about it.
- Take two actions that support it.
- Make two requests that support it (no matter how unreasonable).