Try Something New For 30 Days – Like Getting Paid

Recently, TED posted a fun lecture by Google engineer Matt Cutts called “Try Something New For 30 Days“.

The gist of the talk is: what are you waiting for? There are so many things you want to try, why not conjure up a little Morgan Spurlock-ness and sign up for your own 30-day experiment? It’s just about the right amount of time to dedicate to something to see whether it’s something that could really make a positive change in your life.

Of course, since we converse primarily with lawyers, we understand that there are more than a few practicalities at play. 30 days worth of  skydiving lessons isn’t going to fly within a lawyer’s schedule (bad pun intended), nor does it exactly offer the nice side benefit of being completely risk-free. So, an acceptable compromise might be to try something for 30 days that I know I can accomplish without a major disruption in the rest of my life.

Given that there are a lot of different ways one could go with the whole “30 day” idea, to simplify things the Web is a easy place to start, especially if you don’t really yet have the time to write your novel or hike the Himalayas. The Web provides opportunities to experiment with all kinds of cool new stuff.

But if you can subscribe to this “try one new thing for 30 days” idea – if it sounds kind of fun (particularly if it can also deliver an increase in productivity) – consider using it to address an area that we write about constantly: billing practices. Billing is the bane of virtually every lawyer who hasn’t yet leveraged what today’s well-designed, inexpensive technology can do.

Consequently, I have no shortage of completely ridiculous lawyer billing stories that I hear constantly.    Stories that inevitably end up in “lose-lose” results: angry clients and lawyers not getting paid what they should’ve been paid. If you think your billing practices could stand a little improvement, the next 30 days can serve as a nice discrete window within which to get better.

Imagine what your practice would be like if you could regularly send a timely bill to each of your clients with little or no effort. Imagine how that would immediately improve your life. If you can picture that, consider us for your simple “try-it-for-30 days” experiment, with the primary purpose of streamlining your billing.

So, think about trying something new for 30 days. If it’s a new Web application, pick something risk-free with a big upside – that’ll help you stay committed to it. But regardless of what you choose, give it an honest try; that is, don’t just sign up, diddle around for few minutes, tell yourself you’ll “learn more when you have time”, and so forth.  That’s pointless. Instead, decide to really follow through.  Schedule a live demo, sign up for a little free training if it’s available, call up the support team to see if they’re knowledgeable, use the application, follow the recommended advice, and see if it can really do for you what it says it can.

You might be really surprised at the payoff from just a single, committed 30-day effort.