The Two Time-Management Systems Every Woman Lawyer Should Know About

Cecilia Poullain shares her personal organisational system for busy women lawyers balancing work and family. Discover practical principles and tools to streamline your daily and weekly planning, including calendar blocking and managing short-term tasks.

You can download the free guide on How to Make Partner in a Law Firm on  www.ceciliapoullain.com/free-guide

Key Topics

• Principles of organisation: one life, one system
• Using diary and calendar blocking for effective planning
• Managing short-term and long-term goals
• The importance of focusing on the next action
• Adapting systems for personal and professional balance

Transcript

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My name is Cecilia Poulain. Welcome to the Pathway to Partnership Podcast, where we talk about what it really takes to succeed as a woman lawyer in a law firm. I am amazed at how poorly organized some of my clients are. Even women who are juggling partnership in major law firms with small children at home. My name is Cecilia Poulain and I'm a former finance lawyer. Today I help women lawyers make it to partnership and thrive when they get there using the tools and insights I've developed in my program. In this episode I want to get into the nitty gritty of how I organise myself on a weekly and daily basis and describe the systems that hold everything, so my brain doesn't have to. Okay, let's jump in. I am amazed at how poorly organized some of my clients are, even those who are juggling partnership in major law firms with small children at home. The sort of systems I see are post-its stuck on computer screens or on desks. I see to-do lists rewritten in the notebook every day. I see people opening all the emails that require work to be done and closing them one by one as they are dealt with. I see complicated tables that are color-coded and prioritized, but that take so much time to update, they quickly become unworkable. Before I share how I organize myself, there are three organizational principles that I have found incredibly helpful. The first principle is that you only have one life, so you should only have one system. If you need to make a telephone call to book a doctor's appointment for yourself, for a child or for a parent, you will probably need to do it during work hours from your office. And similarly, if you need to take a work call after dinner from home, that needs to be on your home radar. Our lives aren't neatly compartmentalized into home and work. So your system needs to capture it all. That's the first principle. One life, one system. The second principle is that if it's not in your diary, it's not in your life. I'll share in a few moments exactly how true I found that to be. The third principle is that when you're feeling overwhelmed, just do the very next thing. And somehow you'll discover that it it all gets done. So with those three principles in mind, I'd like to share with you the nitty-gritty of my weekly and daily system. In the last episode I talked about OKRs, so objectives and key results. And now let's get even more concrete. I have an Excel spreadsheet and it's got three tabs on it. In the third and last tab, that's where I keep all my long-term goals. In the second tab is where I keep my quarterly goals or OKRs. And the first tab is called Getting Things Done. And getting things done is my dashboard for each day and each week. And then in the Getting Things Done tab, I have two columns, shorts and longs. So for me, a short is one of those little pesky tasks that doesn't take very long but can take up an enormous amount of brain space. Things like phone calls, scanning documents, buying train tickets. And the problem with shorts is that they can build up very, very quickly. And if I don't list them on my getting things done tab, it means that I'm trying to remember them all the time. Everything that isn't a short is called, as you would expect, a long. So longs are the bigger tasks that take a serious amount of concentration. I try to have a maximum of three longs for each day, and if possible I keep it to one. How do things get on to the getting it done tab? Well they arrive from two directions. They arrive from just anything that's coming into my world via my inbox, telephone calls, conversations, whatever it might be. Then they're also arriving from my quarterly goals. So you can see that by having the quarterly goals right there next to the getting things done tab, it means that when your client work goes quiet, you can quickly pull them over onto your getting it done tab. And because your OKRs or quarterly goals are coming from your long-term goals, this means that gradually you're starting to achieve your long-term goals. When things get quiet, you immediately know what you need to be working on. It also means that even when you're busy, you can include small actions in your shorts. Just another word on my the way I manage my shorts. Every day or so I put time in my calendar to deal with them. So as I said before, if it's not in your diary, it's not in your life. I often hate doing the shorts, so if I'm able to get dedicate an hour or two to ploughing through them and getting them all done, getting that column empty, it feels really good. So this morning, for example, I had to make some medical appointments and I wanted to buy a new desk chair. I'd scheduled an hour in my diary and got them all done. If I hadn't included them in my diary, they would still be sitting there. When I send something out and I'm waiting for a response, I simply put a line through that task so that I remember to keep an eye on it and follow up if necessary. So that's the system I've used and adapted for about 20 years and it works really well for me. But I'd also like to mention a second system that I'm experimenting with. I've only been using it for, say, the last three or four months, and it's called calendar blocking. And again, on the principle that if it isn't in your diary, it isn't in your life. It involves putting absolutely everything into your diary. And here's how it works. I now spend an hour to an hour and a half every Friday afternoon planning the following week. And I do a ton of different things in that planning session. The first thing I do is to look at what I'm worrying most about and come up with a plan to address it. Or realizing that it's not actually under my control and I stop worrying about it. The reason I do that first is that it's often the emotional energy that drains us more than the physical effort or exertion of work. The second thing I do is I celebrate everything that's gone well in the previous week. We so often forget to do this and only focus on the negative. Then I check where I am on my big projects and work out what the next steps are on each of them. I look through my long term goals, I dream a little. I look at my quarterly goals to see what is most important to get done, and move them onto my longs. I look at my longs and my shorts and readjust. If I have too much to do, I work through the four D's and Icy, which I talked about in a previous episode, to determine my priorities. Because I work at home, I make sure that across the week I'm getting enough contact with other people, and reach out to have lunch or drinks if the week is looking a little light. I make sure I'm spending enough time with my family and have a good balance of work, sport, and rest. I put time in the calendar for organizing fun things like dinner parties, weekends away, holidays and theatre tickets. I check my handwritten notes and various post-its that have accumulated on my desk to make sure that nothing has been missed. I tidy my desk. And then the very last thing I do is I block time for each of those things in my calendar. Now this might sound incredibly controlled, and I resisted this for a long time. And you might be asking yourself what the benefits are. I personally have found the benefits to be amazing. Firstly, it means that planning and executing have been separated out. So when I get to Monday morning, all I need to do is execute. I don't need to think about what I'm going to do when because it's all been planned out. This is actually incredibly important for lawyers as they become more senior. Because in the early years of practice, we are expected to be very reactive. Our lives can look very much like email comes in, draft a response, send it to the partner for approval. Or senior associate or partner walks into office, asks us to draft a document. We draft it, send it to them for comments. We're reacting all the time. But as we become more senior, we're not being paid for that anymore. We're being paid to think and to strategize. And for that we need to block out time. It's very difficult to be effective as a senior lawyer if we haven't blocked out time for thinking, concentrating, and strategizing. The other enormous advantage of calendar blocking is that when I'm hesitating about taking on another a commitment, I can see visually where there's room for it. This is enormously helpful in getting me to say no. It also helps negotiate priorities and manage expectations. So if a partner wanders into our office with a new matter, we can say, okay, that's great. Just so you know, if I do that now, then X won't get done until Friday. Is that okay with you? And when something urgent comes in, it means that we can see visually what has to shift to next week to allow us to get that urgent thing done. So they're my two systems. And for the moment those two systems coexist. I may at some stage choose one or the other, but in all likelihood they will continue to evolve and adapt as they always have. Please feel free to take and use any of these ideas or to continue to evolve and adapt your own systems. Before I sign off, I wanted to leave you with a short exercise which might help you to get yourself better organized. Could I suggest you take ten minutes to do the following? Choose one place where everything will live for the next week. So it might be a notebook, it might be a spreadsheet, it might be a notes app, it doesn't matter where it is, and then write down everything that you currently need to do. And then for the next seven days, use only that as your time management system. And see how it works for you. See how it works to have got everything out of your brain into a single place, and whether that makes you feel calmer and more in control. So that's it for this episode. Just to recap, we looked at three simple principles that make a huge difference in managing our time, having one system for one life, if it's not in your diary, it's not in your life, and focusing on the very next thing when everything feels overwhelming. I then walked you through how I organise my days and my weeks using the shorts, longs, and quarterly priorities, and how calendar blocking helps me create space for thinking, strategy, and saying no. And we looked at how with this simple, flexible system, big life dreams can turn into reality. Thanks so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe, please share it with a colleague, please leave a review. And if you'd like to stay in touch, head over to www.ceciliapoulin.com and you can sign up for a free guide called How to Make Partner in a Law Firm. Until next time, remember, you really don't have to do this alone. And you get to define success as a woman lawyer on your own terms. Thanks for listening.