Day 1: Commencing GTD Week – Getting Things Done for Lawyers

Day 2: How and Why a Lawyer Should Implement a GTD System

Day 3: Capturing and Transforming “Stuff” into Next Action Items

Day 4: Do it, defer it, and delegate it; the two minute rule; and organizing your practice

Day 5: The Weekly Review

Nicole Black, writer, attorney, blogger, foodie, and expert social media pro, is today’s host of the post!  If you aren’t following Nicole on Twitter you’re missing out, and she creates great content at Sui Generis and Practicing Law in the 21st Century.  Click here to read the full article:

A perfect way to wrap our Legal Getting Things Done Week is a discussion of the Weekly Review, one of the most important ideas in the GTD system.  In fact, I would argue that if you were going to take away one thing from GTD, implementing the Weekly Review will keep you in touch with your priorities and prevent your organizational system from coming unhinged.

What is the Weekly Review?

It’s a simple concept, but harder than it sounds.  You need to find an hour or two each week.  Block off time on your calendar where the phone can’t ring and the door can’t open.  For a busy attorney this can be very difficult, since deadlines, opposing counsel, and judges can pop in at any time.

Today we’re very excited for a new guest blog experience at Lawyerist, a very progressive source of information for attorneys.  I’ve had a number of converstations with Lawyerist’s Sam Glover, a brilliant writer and technology tinkerer, who has reviewed Rocket Matter a couple of times.  Click here to read the full blog post:

In our series so far we’ve discussed the basics of GTD, and introduced important concepts.  We looked at writing your to-do’s as “Next Action” items, and aggressively capturing all “open loops” (incomplete items).  Now it’s time to start looking at organizing and prioritizing.

When you capture items needing attention, via your initial Mind-Sweep or daily activity, you’ll need to put them into an inbox for processing, whether physical or virtual.  You’ll also have an email inbox to look through as well.  It’s at this point you need to decide whether to Do it, Defer it, or Delegate it.

Do it: The Two Minute Rule

You look at an item in your inbox.  Can you take care of it in two minutes?

Today, our friend and social media Obi Wan Grant Griffiths is hosting our post on Legal GTD.  Thanks so much for the opportunity, Grant!  Click here to read the post in its entirety.

Yesterday we painted an overview of Getting Things Done for the legal practitioner.  As GTD adherents will say, becoming an organizational “black belt” takes a lot of time.  And utilizing all components of the system may not work for you.  But several of the techniques, such as the ones I’m presenting this week, are those that by themselves can really impact your productivity.

Dealing with “Stuff”

In GTD, “stuff” has a specific definition: “anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t determined the desired outcome and the next action step” (from “Getting Things Done”, Chapter 1).

In other words, stuff is anything you have to deal with that requires a plan of action, from the trivial to the complex.  The problem most people encounter when they attempt to get organized is that they don’t think about their stuff and transform it into actionable plans.  For example, recording a to-do called “work on matter” will not help you move forward with your work, as there’s no clear result from the activity.  It’s too vague.

Today, Rocket Matter is very pleased to announce the roll-out of a major product upgrade: tasks!

A total rewrite of our existing to-do lists, tasks help attorneys take their productivity to new levels.

With the new task functionality, you’re able to integrate tags (a more powerful form of keywords), into your tasks so you can more easily describe and organize them. In addition, the new tasking functionality provides the following:

• *  The ability to assign tasks to other employees and track their progress.
• *  A simple way of assigning due dates to tasks, which are then easily viewable on the user dashboard and highlight as as due dates near or expire.
• *  Filtering capabilities that help users quickly find and organize tasks, which, in turn, can easily be converted to billable activities.
• *  Drag and drop organizing that allows users to prioritize tasks.
• *  New, intuitive icons and an elegant look and feel that makes the product easy to use.

To celebrate our roll-out, we’re conducting a weeklong Legal efficiency-fest. Yesterday, we introduced the Getting Things Done productivity system at a high level, including its advantages and general ideas.  Each day, from here to the end of the week, we’ll write guest posts at prominent legal blogs exploring the system in more detail.

We’re proud to announce that today’s article on Legal GTD is hosted at The Mac Lawyer by Ben Stevens.  Click here to read the post in it’s entirety.

In a profession such as law, where time is quite literally money and losing track of tasks and events incurs significant penalties, an organizational system such as GTD is key.  The current economic downturn places even more emphasis on streamlining operations and gaining efficiencies.

Granted, you may have your own system that works wonders.  But if “the art of stress-free productivity”, as the GTD book is subtitled, seems compelling, and you’re wondering what exactly GTD is, take a look at my first post here.  But let’s say you’re ready to take the plunge.  How do you start?

The good news is, you don’t need your entire firm’s buy-in.  You can come up with your own GTD system just fine.

As we first started studying law offices when creating Rocket Matter, I was struck by the lack of GTD adoption in legal circles.  I thought it would be a given.  I mean, here’s an industry where time is literally money. Furthermore, if you miss a deadline you can be sued, or even worse, have your license revoked.  Literally and figuratively, law firms have a ton of i’s to dot and t’s to cross. And in a typical law practice, there’s a lot of balls in the air at once, so it’s very easy to miss something.

This week Rocket Matter will take a deep look at David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system of productivity and personal organization.  Used by C-Level executives, and highly popular in creative and high technology disciplines, the GTD system helps practitioners achieve high levels of efficiency and lower levels of stress.

What is GTD?

The popularity behind GTD is its stark simplicity, especially when compared to other forms of organization (i.e. 7 Habits).  The whole system revolves around:

• * Capturing information and getting it out of your head.
• * Creating an actionable plan of concrete next steps.
• * Organizing your next action items in a logical and workable manner.
• * Deciding what to do, delegate, or defer.
• * Reviewing your projects and next actions on a regular basis.

We’ll explore these concepts over the next week in detail.  But the core idea is to transform the stress-causing “stuff” (and Mr. Allen has a specific definition of “stuff”) floating around in one’s psyche into recorded, concrete next action items, placing them in context, and reviewing them continually.

Key idea: Getting Things Done is highly correlated to  Getting Things Out Of Your Head.

The cool thing about the system is that it doesn’t force you to get a Filofax, or use a specific software program.  Any systems that allows you to review and capture your thoughts and put them into working order will do.  So GTD systems are as high tech as new software or as low tech as a stack of 3×5 index cards.

And Rocket Matter, with it’s highly flexible task and categorization features, combined with headache-free billing, is a perfect vehicle to implement GTD for lawyers.

Tomorrow: A look at why and how a lawyer should adopt a GTD system.
Links:  “What is Getting Things Done?” from David Allen’s website.

It seems odd that I might use an online legal practice management and time and billing solution for my GTD system.

When we designed Rocket Matter, we wanted to offer users a revolutionary way to trap their billable time through our Bill As You Work (TM) technology.

And we wanted to come up with a flexible organizational system.

We built this notion of a User Dashboard, where you can see all of your calendar events and to-do’s at a glance.  You can quickly capture next actions, then assign them to matters.

Matters in our system allow you to trap your file information, but really they can organize any information. So, you can just as easily create a matter “Rocket v. Matter” as you can a matter called “@Phone”, and assign a to-do item to either one.

You can easily re-assign a to-do item from one matter to another, allowing you to easily track your next actions.  And with Rocket Matter, all to-do’s can be converted into billable activity.

Look for more upcoming posts on Rocket Matter and GTD in the future!

The topic of mind maps has been explored recently on the SOLOSEZ listserv. Nerino Petro, PMA for the State Bar for Wisconsin, offered some great advice and tidbits:

“I’ve found it to be helpful when in meetings with ideas or thoughts
coming from a number of different folks. It’s easy to ID topics and
subpoints and group them together. So you could have a mindmap with
topics for each issue with subpoints for pro and con issues and the
comments and thoughts for each one. You can easily move them around and
group them as needed.”

Nerino uses the products MindManager and Gyronix. He likes the export feature of MindManager. A simple mind map flattened into a Word file might look a little like this (Nerino’s example):

1 Breach of Contract
1.1 Elements necessary to Prove
1.1.1 Existence of Contract

Hope this helps take mind mapping from the theoretical to the concrete!