Episode 67: Time Management + The Path to Partnership

Your calendar can either run your life or give it back to you. In this episode, we get honest about why time management is not about squeezing in more work, but about protecting your energy, your goals, and your attorney mental health as demands stack up over time. When everything feels urgent, it is easy to slip into a reactive cycle that fuels overwhelm and burnout. We talk about how planning creates time and how a stronger sense of autonomy can change your day-to-day experience in a demanding legal career. In this episode, we break down time blocking for lawyers and legal professionals. We also dig into practical deadline management.

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Find out more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilystedman/.

Transcript

Welcome And Disclaimers

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Grace Period, where we get real about attorney mental health and well-being and pull back the veil on the high-stakes world of big law. I'm your host, Emily Logan Steadman, a commercial litigator, partner, and someone who believes there's always room for a little more grace, even in a high-stakes profession. Here I share real stories from my own journey in Big Law and invite you behind the scenes, beyond the billable hour, to talk about what it means to stay human in a demanding field. Whether you're a lawyer, a legal professional, or someone trying to find your footing, this space is for you. Let's pull back the curtain, start the conversation, and find our grace period together. Disclaimer, the views and opinions shared on this podcast are mine alone and do not reflect those of my firm or any organization. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not legal. Advice and listening does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Ownership Requires Time Management

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Welcome to episode 67 of the Grace Period. Today I want to follow up on episode 66, in which I defined what it means to take ownership over your files as an associate. Today I'm going to talk about time management. If you're a longtime listener, you've heard me talk about this before. Taking ownership requires you to really deeply hone your time management skills. And it is that a skill you can learn. Taking ownership is something that will be required of you as an associate, and if you want to be partner one day, it is a lesson that we all learn along

Time Management As Self-Care

SPEAKER_00 1:03

the path to partnership. If you want to do that, if you want to prepare to be partner, you must develop time management skills. As you age in this profession, many, many, many things will vie for your time and attention. Personal things, professional things, good things like marriages, promotions, children, and hard things will vie for your time and attention. Aging parents, divorce, death. That is part of our shared humanity and lived experience as humans. We're not immune to those things simply because we're attorneys. You can't always control those things vying for your attention. But what you can do is control how you manage your time and your energy. Otherwise, all of those things will lead to overwhelm and burnout if we're not careful. In a high pressure environment, effective time management is not a productivity hack. It is a form of self-care and a tool to protect your goals, improve your well-being, and make time for both your personal and professional obligations. Time management is a practice. It's the practice of organizing and prioritizing your tasks and goals to make the most effective use of your time. Time management helps you move from reacting to whatever fire needs putting out to being more proactive about how you structure your day and more proactive around your efficiency. Time management reduces overwhelm and stress by giving you a sense of control over your schedule, a sense of autonomy. Many of us feel like we lack autonomy, we lack control and choice over how we spend our days. And poor sense of autonomy is a key driver in low workplace satisfaction for attorneys and all professionals. When you implement time management, when you have a clear plan or a list of prioritized tasks, you're not constantly wondering what you should be doing next. With better time management, you have time not just for work, but for other things, exercise, hobbies, relationships, you name it. I believe that attorneys overestimate the time it takes to put time management in place and underestimate the benefits you get from it. Yes, solid time management requires upfront planning and intentionality, which does take time, but it creates time. It creates space on your calendar later and a lot of it. You get back time you can use for whatever means most to you for whatever you need in that moment. That in turn reduces stress, boosts productivity, and creates space, time, and freedom of choice.

Time Blocking That Actually Works

SPEAKER_00 3:11

So what are some time management tools you can start practicing right away? The biggest one I recommend is time blocking. This involves dividing your day or week into dedicated time slots or blocks for specific tasks or activities. Instead of working reactively from a never-ending to-do list, you proactively schedule your priorities into concrete blocks of time on your calendar. This approach helps you maintain focus, it minimizes distractions, and it ensures that important tasks receive the dedicated attention they need and deserve. This kind of time blocking looks like this. You open your email on Monday and you have a request from a partner to do some research. The partner says this will take about three hours. You look ahead in your calendar and you see that you have about an hour and a half block on Thursday and an hour and a half block on Friday. You put a calendar invite on your calendar, an appointment, you schedule it, and you say and you label it with that email and that information, and you commit to doing those three hours of research in those two hour and a half blocks. I, however, am horrible at that type of time blocking. I did give it the good college try, but I tended to do the tasks before their scheduled time arose, or as many of you will experience, some other emergency popped up and I needed to use that time block for something else. So what I do instead is I try to protect time where I have no meetings. So maybe I look ahead, do that same look ahead I described a moment ago, and I see that I have an empty block on my calendar for an hour and a half on Thursday. Instead of saying I'm gonna do a specific thing in that block, I'm gonna go ahead and block off that time and show myself as out of office or in a personal meeting so that no one else schedules a meeting at that time. So I put a reminder to myself not to schedule meetings during that time. So that block is protected for whatever deep focused work I want to do when that hour and a half time on Thursday rolls around. Another way to do that is to use Outlook's focus tool. Outlook's focus tool, about once a week, looks to the week ahead and it puts focus blocks on your calendar in any open time. It blocks those off, shows you as busy, turns your whole system to do not disturb. It's protecting white space on your calendar for deep work. And now you can move those blocks, you can extend them, you can shorten them. So part of my weekly review is to look at the focus blocks that Outlook has created and adjust them as I want. Finally, the way I do time blocking is my calendar shows me as out of office every Monday until 1 p.m. and all day on Friday. Am I out of the office at those times? No. But none of us love, no human loves, rushing in to an 8, 8:30, 9, 9:30 meeting on Monday. None of us love having afternoon meetings on Friday. So these calendar appointments remind me, when someone asks me when I'm available for a meeting, do I have to give them Monday mornings or Friday afternoons? Sometimes the answer is yes. I have to give up that time for clients, for partners, for teammates, for depositions, for hearings, for trial. But often, no, you do not have to give up those times. You can say instead of Monday before 1 p.m., I'm available Monday at one or later. Instead of Friday afternoon, you can say I'm available Friday, noon, or earlier. Or you can say I'm available in these blocks on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I will tell you, I put these calendar blocks on Monday and Friday to try to have no meetings on my calendar a couple years ago. And it took me, I'd say, six months for those to hold so that I would not actually have meetings for the reminder to not give away that time to really stick. And I still remember the first time I came to a Monday and didn't have any morning meetings, or I came to a Friday and didn't have any meetings. And I could focus on my substantive tasks and really spend that time getting my week started or wrapping my week up in a way that was productive and proactive rather than reactive.

Deadlines, Reminders, And Deep Work

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Related to time blocking is being diligent about docking deadlines and reminders on your calendar. For example, there are certain administrative tasks I do every week. So I put a recurring calendar reminder on my book, on in Outlook, so I don't have to remember these tasks on my own, so that they don't weigh down my brain and take up capacity in my brain. I don't have to remember them. It's on my calendar. Over time, that becomes habitual or automatic. I do this for updating my master case chart, for certain sending certain client updates and certain business development activities. Your firm might have a docketing system for things like court deadlines or transaction deadlines, but I like to also calendar my own deadlines, both internal and external. And what I mean by this is in addition to calendaring when the court or other deadline is, I'll put a calendar appointment on the date I want to get a draft to the client, on the date I hope to have a draft ready, and on the date I hope the associate I'm working with will send me the draft. I include all relevant team members on these calendar invites and I put them on my master case chart. I do this so no one is surprised by deadlines and there's planning ahead of the deadline. It doesn't always have to be a fire drill the day of the deadline, and those deadlines help me do that. If you're interested in learning more about time management, I highly recommend Cal Newport, and particularly his book called Deep Work. Now, his book on deep work talks a lot about authors and poets who would go into the woods and shut themselves off for months at a time to think deeply. Lawyers can't do that. But the concept of that really empowered me to think creatively about how I treat my time and how I manage my calendar. Lawyers and particularly associates can't always create huge blocks of time to think deeply, but our job requires it. You can't do a document review, due diligence, write a brief, do substantive research if you don't have blocks of protected time for deep focus work. And Cal Newport really helped me think creatively about that.

Experiment With Boundaries And Availability

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Finally, about time management, I want to say this. You need to experiment with time management. You need to find the systems and tools that work for you. What works for you may not work for me because, and vice versa, because we're different humans, we have different practices, different lives, different personalities and styles. As an attorney, we've got to be available to clients, partners, colleagues. But mostly gone are the days of being available 24-7. You need to be reasonably available and responsive. To do that, you don't have to give up every second of your day. I promise. You really don't. Um, you need there will be times where you have to be on 24-7, right? If I'm in trial prep, um two months, maybe three months out from trial, I will tell my associates, my paralegals, my assistant, we're all hands on deck. It's going to be very intense for this next period. And maybe you do come closer to being available 24-7. But most days you won't. And over time, you'll get a real sense for when the days are you do need to be available a lot of the hours of the day, and days where you can take those breaks. So use time management to help you figure that out. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Grace Period. Remember, you don't have to choose between your well-being and your ambition. By setting boundaries, building supportive habits, and giving yourself permission to pause, you can thrive in law and in life. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. That is the path to our grace period. Disclaimer The views expressed here are solely my own and do not represent the official policy or position of my firm or any organization. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only, not professional or legal advice. Listening does not create an attorney client relationship.