Like the Getting Things Done personal organizational system, The Pomodoro Technique is popular in technology circles but I haven’t seen a wide discussion of it in Legal. And even though I’m a dedicated David Allen fanboy and wrote a weeklong series on Legal GTD, I have to admit that GTD is hard to master whereas Pomodoro is simple, simple, simple. It doesn’t really require reading a whole darn book or going to a seminar.

You can visit the project’s homepage here, or take the shortcut and download a cheat sheet here.

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The guy who invented it lives in Italy and had a wind-up tomato timer in his kitchen. The idea is simple: you wind up the timer for 25 minutes and work on only one thing. The timer rings, and you reward yourself with a little break and get ready for the next Pomodoro.

Here are the basics:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the timer to 25 minutes
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (3-5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break (15-30 minutes).

I’m currently testing out the system and will be writing a series of posts about my experiences.  So, please, follow along and take part in the discussion!

Note:  for you gung-ho tinkerers like me who are going to start this immediately, watch out, some of the Pomodoro timers for the iPhone will suck down your battery faster than you can say “Droid”.

We hope to see you on February 25th, 2010 for Barabara Nelson, legal productivity guru.

Mark Merenda Contact Information
mark (at) smartmarketingnow (dot) com
www.smartmarketingnow.com
www.twitter.com/markmerenda
www.lawfirmhelp.com

Larry Port Contact Information
larry (at) rocketmatter (dot) com
http://www.twitter.com/rocketmatter
http://www.rocketmatter.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/Rocket.Matter

TED Talks: Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world
http://www.ted.com/

Lee Rosen’s Post on Arranging Speaking Opportunities
http://blog.technolawyer.com/2010/01/smalllaw-speaking.html

Google’s SEO Starter Guide
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Sign up for Google Alerts
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en

Ghost Blogging Resources
www.elance.com
www.guru.com
www.legalghostblogger.com

Seminars
www.eventbrite.com
www.leelawyers.com

Electronic Frontier Foundation
www.eff.org

Great Read on the Internet and my favorite book of 2009
The Big Switch

YouTube Fun
Trolman, Glaser, & Lichtman Attorney Commercials

Now that Google has rolled incorporated legal opinion and journals into their Scholar search, building and organizing your cases has never been easier.  Here’s how you can use Google Scholar in conjunction with Rocket Matter.

1.  Navigate to scholar.google.com and type in your search term, selecting the “ legal opinion and journals” radio button.

2. From the search results page, click on the article that appears most relevant to your case.  Decisions are ranked by number of citations and relevance.

3. In Rocket Matter, navigate to your matter using the Global Intelligent Search and click “Add Document”.

4. On the Add Document screen, click “Web Address”. Copy the URL of the article of interest by selecting its web address in the browser address bar, and paste the article URL into the Rocket Matter dialog:

5. Add tags, billable time, and whatever other information you wish to associate with your research.

6. Click OK, and note that you can click on the link in your documents list and pull up the legal article whenever you need!

Now I get it.  It took me a while to learn the ropes, but gradually I began to appreciate the appeal of Twitter.  Once I followed enough people and enjoyed their reciprocal following, I came to understand that Twitter is a massive, real-time conversation happening all over the world at once.  It’s an incredibly rich informative and social experience.

Some tools have helped me leverage Twitter’s capabilities. I discovered Summize, which became search.twitter.com, to look for mention of our product in the Twittersphere.  After experimenting with several Twitter clients, I downloaded TweetDeck, which makes the experience much more enjoyable and usable.

Taking a look at our Tweets, I’ve classified them into distinct groups:

1) In iCal, from the Calendar menu, pick “Subscribe”.
2) A popup window will appear. In the “Calendar URL:” field, paste the address of your Rocket Matter calendar. A Product Specialist can provide you with your Calendar URL for RM.
3) A detailed screen will appear after a brief status bar. Choose a good name for your Calendar, such as “My Name RM”.
4) Choose an “Auto-Refresh” interval. Selecting 5 mins will force iCal to refresh your Rocket Matter calendar every 5 minutes, which is the maximum.
5) Hit OK – your new calendar will show up in the left-hand calendar pane.

Anytime you want to force iCal to refresh the subscription, Ctrl-Click or Right-Click on top of your RM calendar in the left-hand calendar pane and choose “Refresh”.

Sunbird is Mozilla’s FREE Calendaring application, and can be downloaded here. What’s cool about Sunbird is that it’s cross platform, and can be downloaded for Mac, PC, or Linux.

Here’s how you subscribe to your Rocket Matter Calendar using Sunbird:

1) From File, choose New Calendar
2) Select “On the network” from the 1st screen and click ‘Continue’
3) Make sure iCalendar (ICS) is selected and paste your calendar URL above into the Location field and click Continue.
4) For the name field, you should type in something descriptive, such as “Larry’s Rocket Matter Calendar”

Any time you want Sunbird to refresh its subscription, right click on your RM calendar and click “Reload Remote Calendars”

But you’re wondering – what about my existing data? How do I bring it over to Rocket Matter? This was a discussion that recently popped up on the Macs in Law Offices discussion group, so I decided to post my response to them.

Most programs allow you to export your data to CSV files. We actually have some very powerful import functionality that we currently offer free of charge:

1) Rocket Matter can import your Contact list for you either via vCard (preferred) or CSV.
2) Calendars can be imported into RM using either iCalendar (preferred) or CSV.
3) You can import any list of matters and clients via an import format we created. We have sample files we can send you so that you can assemble your data – it then gets imported right into RM.
4) You can also, more powerfully, import a list of matters, clients, and all billable activity corresponding to those matters. Per #3, we have sample files for you.

We’ve brought in CSV data from a variety of programs: Time Matters, Outlook, Quickbooks, PC Law, Small Office Suite, and Harvest, to name a few.

CSV’s can be easily manipulated via spreadsheet programs such as Numbers or Excel, then exported or “saved as” the CSV format.

If you have a lot of data to work with, or if it goes beyond the scope of contacts, calendars, matters, and billable activities, and you really don’t want to reproduce it manually, get in touch with us and we can put together a customized import package for you.

1. Stop Checking Email: You heard me right, stop checking it. At least, not all the time.

2. Don’t Check Email First Thing In The Morning.

3. Filter, Filter, Filter.

4. Respond When You Read.

5. Keep It Short and Sweet.

6. Have Multiple Accounts.

Training is a fundamental part of a firm’s adoption of legal practice management software. Law.com recently featured an article, “Coming to Terms With Case Management”, stating:

“..the annual American Bar Association technology survey consistently shows that only 53 percent of their respondents actually have purchased a CMS (case management system) — and only 36 percent report actually using it.”

If you’re considering a traditional practice management software package, which you install locally in your office, prepare to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars to encourage usage of the new software by your staff.

Or, when you sign up for Rocket Matter, feel free to attend our weekly webinars where we will be covering various aspects of our product – included in your monthly fee, with no need to pay extra.

Of course, Rocket Matter is so simple and intuitive to use, no one may show up for training!

Those cool buttons on your home screen? Those are technically called badges. And for those of you thinking “badges? we don’t need no steenking badges“, in this case, it’s very convenient and looks super-cool.

1. Navigate to your Rocket Matter login page and tap +.
2. Tap “Add to Home Screen.”
3. You have a chance to edit the icon’s name. Type “RM” or “Rocket” or “Rocket Matter” or whatever your preferred nickname is for Rocket Matter!
4. You’re done.