By Jim Calloway
Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

There’s an old saying that “when you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to remember your objective was to drain the swamp.” (OK, maybe some of you heard it differently, but that’s the Bar Journal-friendly version.)

The point of that witticism is not alligators, but priorities. When survival is at stake, everything else becomes a lower priority. Long term planning becomes totally unimportant until you are sure you have a long term future.

When I talk with lawyers on the phone I often hear that they have spent their morning or afternoon “putting out fires.” We all know how that goes. One may be an expert in planning and organization, but unexpected things still crop up frequently.

We lawyers live by our dockets. (The rest of the world uses the term calendars, but the rest of the world never uses phrases like res ipsa loquitor in conversation either.)

The young lawyer will be taught by circumstances that calendaring an item is of the utmost urgency. If you do not put a court appearance on your office calendar as soon as you learn of it, there is the possibility that the next time you think of it will be when your office gets a notice of default judgment or dismissal. Careful attention to the calendar is a critical part of law office management.

But while the calendar (aka docket) is a great tool for managing appointments, court appearances and deadlines, it is not a great tool for setting priorities. The most obvious example occurs when a hypothetical lawyer looks at the calendar for tomorrow and sees a deadline that requires a few dozen hours of work to complete.

Of course lawyers don’t (and shouldn’t) operate like that. Most scan the calendar for weeks in the future regularly and use some combination of to-do lists, ticklers and other systems. But like so many office systems, using those traditional methods that are paper-based may not allow the lawyers to take full advantage of the digital tools that are available today.

For example, exclusive reliance on a pocket calendar that the lawyer carries in his or her pocket or purse is too dangerous a business practice. If it is lost, there is a big potential risk. That is why your professional liability carrier requires that you certify that you maintain duplicate dockets. But, if you have a courthouse practice, writing entries in the pocket calendar while you are at the courthouse leaves a time-consuming job for staff to synchronize the pocket calendar with the office calendar by comparing the two calendars. At a minimum, you should make an additional note of what additions you are making and let the staff use that to update the office docket.

If you happen to leave the pocket calendar in the office overnight, you are still subject to risk as a fire or other calamity might destroy both calendars.

Most lawyers understand that a digital calendar is safest and best because you can regularly back up the data offsite. Synchronize the calendar with a smart phone and you’ll have it with you most all of the time. This is true unless you have a judge who bans lawyers from having mobile phones in the courtroom. While that issue that is outside the scope of this article, a recent article on law.com at http://tinyurl.com/mlde25 lists the arguments in favor of lawyers having mobile phones in courtrooms.

Let’s move on from calendars to “to do” lists. “To do” list is a clear, but antiquated term. In the digital world we call these task lists. But whatever you call them, these are a critical part of organization and management. You make a grocery list because you will not recall everything you need at the store. But you also make a grocery list so you can shop quickly and efficiently, instead of pausing to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

So it is with task lists. You record something in a task list to make sure you don’t forget it. But you also use your task list to organize and prioritize. The problem for most of us is that a complete list of all pending tasks might well be so huge it is impossible to deal with, not to mention the fact it would be daunting to view and perhaps even depressing to contemplate. So no one keeps every possible future assignment on their task list. It is for what we need to be doing now and in the short term. A client’s file might have a list of dozens of items that need to be done, but the lawyer’s current task list only reflects a few, often those which must be done before the others can be accomplished.

The same rationale for why the office calendar should be digital applies to the task list as well. It can be synchronized to the smart phone and the data safely backed up. It is true that a paper task list is not as likely to be lost as it rarely leaves the lawyer’s desk. But it is equally true that a digital task list allows you to enter a task that must be done three months from now and set it to be brought to your attention at the appropriate time. It is not really possible to do that with a paper task list, which is, why so many tasks get placed on the office calendar when they really shouldn’t be there. We’ve all put “start on X” on the calendar at 9:00 a.m. on some future date when those items should be tasks rather than calendar entries.

Let me be clear that I understand that for many of you working from a paper task list is the way you feel comfortable. You should print out your task list each morning, use it all day and then you or staff can enter completed and new tasks at the end of the day.

Many people now use digital task lists.

So what digital task list tool should you use? Well, for the vast majority of readers, you should be using the task list that is a part of your practice management software solution. It is the superior tool because it integrates with all of the other information contained in the digital client file. So when you are working on the client file you do not have to re-enter data like client name and file name when you create a new task.

If you do not have practice management software yet, Microsoft Outlook handles tasks as well as e-mail. In fact Microsoft Office 2007 has a very powerful and easy to use tasks feature. One great time-saving feature is when an e-mail in your inbox contains a task you can drag and drop the e-mail into the tasks, rename it as a task and then delete it from your inbox. There’s more on this at my blog, online at http://jimcalloway.typepad.com.

There are online task management utilities as well. Remember the Milk is a very popular free tool and is available at www.rememberthemilk.com. Searching for “to do list software” in Google will locate desktop applications for you.                                                           

Google Calendar was upgraded with a powerful tasks feature this year, although some lawyers are uncomfortable using this tool due to perceived security and terms of service issues. I use many Google apps.

The challenge in properly using a tasks list is determining your priorities from it. What do I have to get done today? What do I want to get done today? This is, and likely always will be, a challenge, in part because this is a moving target and seems to be constantly changing. But, like the shopping list, having the tasks organized and in front of you whether on paper, computer monitor or smart phone makes adapting to changes easier.

I believe that prioritization is the one of the most important skills of our times. We all have more things that we would like to do and should do than we will ever be able to do. Determining what eventually gets done and what doesn’t is our daily challenge in both our personal and professional lives.

So now we are back to the alligators and putting out fires, the metaphors for those emergency tasks that seem to require immediate attention and make us drop whatever we are doing to address them. These are the things that upset our priorities and increase our stress. How do we deal with these? For me, the answer is not perfectly at best. But we have to cope and we can always improve.

First, if one of these emergencies which pops up and requires your immediate attention can be handled in a couple of minutes, it probably makes sense just to do it right then. You won’t benefit by adding it to your list if it can really be done in 120 seconds or so.

But if it is going to take a while to accomplish, even though it may be a true emergency, a moment of reflection is required. In the language of time management Stephen Covey, we all run the risk of filling our time with tasks that are “urgent” but not “important.” So before you drop everything to fight that alligator or fight that fire, you should look at your priorities for the day. Can it be delegated? Should you finish a more urgent project first? Can some other priority be bumped until tomorrow?  Can some other priority be delegated? Or is there no choice but to add to the task list “call family and tell them I will be late” or add something to the “work to be done at home tonight” category?

This is, of course, the best example of why we should be working on the things now that are due next week, with those things that are due tomorrow already accomplished. That is not easy, and some would say not possible, in a busy law practice. But hopefully the information you have read here will help.

And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must note that as I am finishing this piece, it is past the due date.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal Aug. 8,  2009 - Vol. 80; No. 20.