Here’s the form for the legal productivity survey.

We’ll be judging the entries. The top 20 will be included in our volume, with complete attribution and reference to your firm and website, along with a flying Rocket Matter rocket. The top 5 will receive a Rocket Matter Flying Cow, and the winner with receive a Rocket Matter Snuggie® and a $100 gift card to iTunes!

The question is simple and takes 5 or 10 mins to answer:

What productivity techniques do you incorporate in your work routine?

A paragraph or two is perfect, with a max submission of 200 words. Good luck!

Here’s the form for the legal productivity survey.

Carolyn Elefant of MyShingle and I were recently speaking, and she mentioned her love of mind mapping as well.  In fact, she put one together for starting a law firm! I took a look, and she used the same tool I did, MindMeister, to put together a stunning, easy-to-read, and informative summary of how to hang your own shingle.

View the “Starting a Law Firm” mind map at MindMeister.  The image below shows just a couple of nodes on this comprehensive map!

A growing chorus of scientific evidence confirms what you may already suspect: that massive consumption of the web, email, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, or other online activity is changing the way you think, and the ability to concentrate is a casualty of your connected habits. And the multi-tasking you pride yourself on? Guess again.

Nowhere is this discussion of connected mental chaos more thoughtfully laid out than in Nick Carr’s new book, ‘The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.’ Here’s an excerpt from my review on Law.com:

Human brains are sophisticated devices, as it turns out, and a process called “neuroplasticity” allows our brains to change based on how we use them. The constant disruptions our digital lives place on us physically alter the makeup of our brains. On a biological level, we crave connectedness and prize newness, so we’re constantly checking e-mail, sending e-mail, or engaging in another typical form of 21st century communication. When we constantly interrupt our work or trains of thought to perform another action, we actually train our brain to jump around to the detriment of our faculties to maintain deep thought. As a result, “frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious”.

“The Shallows” then explains that since we change the actual structure of our neural pathways by our computer usage, our thought process is the same whether we’re online or not. So even when we’re not checking e-mail thirty to forty times an hour, and instead eating dinner with the family or driving to work, we’re easily distracted, because essentially, we’ve worn grooves into our brains which tell us to constantly scan for new information.

But it’s not all bad news. Our new neural pathways hewn from the river of the Internet allow us to discover information much more quickly. When it comes to sorting and filtering skills, finding relevant information in a heap of data, we humans are advancing on that front.

So for Lawyers managing their practice, research, and time and billing, the web is an undeniable benefit. But, if you’re feeling something chipping away at your attention span, make sure you carve out plenty of time for deep thinking and undistracted activity.

We’ve even rolled together an inexpensive and highly efficient alternative to an expensive office PBX system. Phone.com allows us to have support and sales queues and office extensions, which we route to Skype In numbers.

But – Mood Messages. Worst feature in any of the software I normally use. Finally, after years of having my attention tugged by meaningless Skype “You Have a Message” type notifications, I Bing’d how to do it and here’s how to end the misery:

Go to Preferences->Advanced. Unclick “Enable Mood Message Chat.” Voilá. That’s one small step for man, one giant victory in the constant battle against machine-induced attention deficit disorder!

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.

A month or so into practicing the Pomodoro Technique, I’m finding it has definitely helped me avoid getting side-tracked, especially in the area of interruptions.

I have a friend who’s a litigator at a big law firm down here in South Florida. He’s constantly working nights and weekends, because he’s finishing work that gets interrupted during the day. When I told him about the Pomodoro Technique, he said it would be impossible to implement in his situation.

In the case of a judge calling, sure, I can understand that. But in a more typical case, can the interruptor wait less that 1/2 hour for a response? What would happen if, during the course of your day, someone came into your office while you were working and you asked them, “can I get back to you in x minutes?”

On average, x is 12.5 minutes, with a minimum value of 1 and a max value of 25. Even in matters considered urgent, people can usually wait a handful of minutes.

According to the rules of the tomato, when someone interrupts you, there are specific rules:

1) Inform the interruptor you can’t talk right now.
2) Negotiate a time to get back to them.
3) Call them, and be true to your word, so that the next time they interrupt you they can believe you when you say you’ll get back to them.

Then, record the nature of the interruption on your daily To-Do sheet. Add a dash (-), which will allow you to track the interruptions you’ve avoided.

And by the way, guess what happens if you switch gears? You’ve lost your pomodoro. You don’t get to count it for the day. It’s null and void.

In my case, I tell people: “I’m in the middle of a tomato.” And that’s enough – they know I will get back to them in a handful of minutes.

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

Stay tuned to our blog or Twitter for a recording of the webinar!

Below is the Prezi Presentation:

With Jason Mendelson

On a scale of 1-5 (5 being the highest) rank your level of agreement with the statement: I know the most profitable and efficient way to run my law firm.

* This webinar is sponsored by Rocket Matter and is free to attend.
* We’ll be raffling off a $50 certificate to Best Buy!
* We’ll also give away a flying Rocket Matter cow.
* Date: Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
* Time: 12PM – 1:30PM EST
* Check out Rocket Matter’s new YouTube channel and see highlights from ABA Techshow, LegalTech NY and other excellent adventures.

Description:

Rocket Matter is proud to host a free webinar on Law Firm 2.0: Understanding Alternative Fees and the Future of Law.

Someone recently said, “If law firms didn’t know they were businesses in 2009, they certainly know it now.”

The changing nature of the business of law can be daunting, even frightening for most small firms. But with the right knowledge and tools, lawyers in the know have an amazing opportunity to take their firms to new heights.

Join Jason Mendelson and Larry Port as they draw on business techniques to discuss Alternative Fee Engagements, Pricing, Hiring Techniques, and other forward-thinking ideas to craft a 2.0 law firm.

About Jason Mendelson:

One of the most innovative legal business thinkers in the country, Jason Mendelson is a lawyer, venture capitalist, musician, and ABA Blawg 100 award winner.

Prior to his involvement with Mobius Venture Capital, Jason was an attorney with Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, where he practiced corporate and securities law with an emphasis on representation of emerging companies in private and public financings, mergers and acquisitions.

As an attorney, Jason has consummated over $2 billion of venture capital investments, $5 billion in mergers and has extensive experience in fund formation, employment law and general litigation, serving as an expert witness in these related fields.

As one of the first full-time, in-house general counsels at a venture capital firm, Jason has been on the forefront of thought leadership and has co-chaired the National Venture Capital Association’s General Counsel group and is an active participant on the NVCA’s Chief Financial Officer group.

Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, with distinction and a Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from the University of Michigan.

Jason blogs about his experiences in the venture industry on his
blog Mendelson’s Musings and www.askthevc.com.

Please join us by clicking here!

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”.

In Part Two of this series, we examine your document scanning “workflow”.

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. (Wikipedia)

And when you’re going paperless, you need to embrace a systemized approach to storing your documents. A scanner can’t do it alone.

In Part One of this series, we examined scanning in a document using ScanSnap Manager’s Profiles. Let’s say we set up our profile, and scanned all of our documents, which are now tucked away with automatically generated names into our “staging area” folder called “Awaiting Filing” in an easy to work with location, such as the Desktop.

Quick Look on Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the key ingredient here, because it quickly allows you to see your file without opening it in an application. Using Quick Look, your arrow keys, and your Enter key, you’ll be able to fly through your scanned files, rename them, and file them to your liking.

(Windows users, I’m not sure what to recommend, but a quick search turned up something called maComfort which emulates the Quick Look functionality).

Steps:

1) Open your “staging area” folder – in our example “Awaiting Filing” on the Desktop.

2) Enable Quick Look by clicking on the eye icon.

3) Use the arrow keys to move between documents, and hit Enter when you’re on a document to trigger the rename function.

NOTE:  Consistent naming convention are a must. My files are named “year-month-day description”, i.e. “2010-03-08 Bank Statement.” For words I type over and over again, like “receipt”, “statement”, or “invoice”, I use TypeIt4Me to speed up the process and eliminate errors.

4) Once you’ve named all your files, open up two Finder windows. Keep the “Awaiting Filing” window on the left and a working window on the right. Drag your renamed scanned files one by one into their target destination.

You’re done!

Have other paperless workflow techniques? Post ‘em as comments. We’d love to hear them.

This allows a head of steam to be built up in the morning, a la the “don’t check your email in the morning” philosophy.

And I would bet money that this attorney is not going to get into a car wreck responding to his or her mobile device while driving.

Thank you for your email. In an effort increase efficiency and effectiveness, I am now checking my email two times per day, at 11 am and 4 pm. If your situation is urgent, and cannot wait until 11 or 4, please call my office at xxx-xxx-xxxx and we will attempt to assist you. Thank you for your cooperation and I look forward to assisting you.