Why Your Current Billing Approach Isn't Working

The Billing Coach Website

Discover why technical billing solutions aren't working and learn the mindset-based approach that actually creates lasting change. Explore the three biggest obstacles that keep attorneys stuck in poor billing habits and master the 4-step process to transform your relationship with billing forever.

Key Takeaways

• Billing challenges aren't due to laziness or inefficiency - they're mindset issues
• Three major obstacles: perfectionism, people-pleasing, and over-promoting legal work
• Habit change happens at the thought level, not the action level
• The 4-step process: Notice, Narrate, Normalize, Replace
• Three core principles: resourcefulness, patience, and embracing imperfection

Topics Covered

Why Technical Solutions Don't Work

• Common billing struggles aren't about lack of systems or tools
• The real issue: improper mindset and approach to billing
• Shifting from technical fixes to mindset transformation
• Why self-validation and internal rewards matter for time management

The Three Common Obstacles to Effective Billing

1. Perfectionism

• How perfectionist tendencies sabotage billing habits
• The paralysis of wanting to get billing "just right"
• Why good enough is better than perfect when it comes to time entry

2. People-Pleasing

• How focusing too much on others' needs derails billing
• The tendency to prioritize everyone else's time over tracking your own
• Setting boundaries around billing time

3. Over-Promoting Legal Work at the Expense of Billing

• Viewing legal work as "real work" and billing as administrative burden
• How this hierarchy of tasks undermines billing habits
• Reframing billing as essential business skill

The Think-Feel-Act Cycle in Billing

• How thoughts about billing lead to specific emotions
• How emotions drive actions or inactions around billing
• Example: Thoughts about time scarcity → feelings of overwhelm → avoidance behaviors
• Why habit change must happen at the thought level, not action level
• Shifting from action-based relief to constructive relief

The 4-Step Process for Overcoming Billing Resistance

Step 1: Notice

• Becoming aware of unhelpful thoughts about billing
• Catching yourself in negative billing thought patterns
• Building awareness without judgment

Step 2: Narrate

• Describing what you're thinking and feeling about billing
• Putting words to your billing experience
• Creating distance between you and your thoughts

Step 3: Normalize

• Accepting that resistance to billing is normal
• Understanding that all attorneys struggle with this
• Removing shame and self-judgment from the process

Step 4: Replace

• Substituting unhelpful thoughts with more positive, empowering ones
• Creating new neural pathways through thought practice
• Building evidence for your new billing identity

Identity Transformation

• Shifting from "poor timekeeper" to "contemporaneous timekeeper" identity
• How consistently practicing new thoughts changes your identity
• Collecting evidence to support new billing habits
• The importance of identity alignment with desired behaviors

The Three Core Principles

1. Resourcefulness

• Maintaining a solution-focused mindset
• Believing you can figure things out
• Looking for ways to make billing work rather than reasons why it won't

2. Patience

• Accepting that learning new billing habits takes time
• Understanding that transformation is a process, not an event
• Allowing yourself time to develop new patterns

3. Embracing Imperfection

• Focusing on progress rather than perfection
• Understanding that backslides are inevitable and valuable
• Using failures as opportunities for growth and learning
• Viewing obstacles as information, not evidence of inability

Reframing Setbacks

• Backslides as opportunities to identify obstacles
• Failures as learning experiences rather than reasons to quit
• The importance of persistence and self-compassion
• Why perfectionism hinders progress

Your Action Steps

1. Identify which of the three obstacles affects you most: perfectionism, people-pleasing, or over-promoting legal work
2. Practice the 4-step process next time you feel billing resistance:

• Notice your thoughts
• Narrate what you're experiencing
• Normalize the resistance
• Replace with a more helpful thought

1. Choose one core principle to focus on this week: resourcefulness, patience, or embracing imperfection
2. Start collecting evidence of your progress, no matter how small
3. Reframe your next billing setback as valuable information rather than failure

Key Insights

• You're not lazy or inefficient - you just need the right mindset approach
• Habit change requires changing thoughts first, then actions follow
• Your identity as a timekeeper drives your billing behaviors
• Setbacks are inevitable and valuable for growth
• You can always figure things out with time and patience

Next Episode Preview

Deep dive into the three core principles - resourcefulness, patience, and embracing imperfection - with specific tools and practices for each.

Resources Mentioned

• Think-Feel-Act cycle model
• 4-step process framework

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Bill Your Time Today and a Stress Free Way podcast. I'm your host, Molly Kramer, the billing coach. And today we're talking all about why your current billing approach is likely not working. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about the fundamental shift you need to make from viewing billing as a technical problem to understanding it as an emotional and mindset challenge. Okay, let's dive in. So many of you are listening right now have tried to improve your billing habits before. You've downloaded apps, you've set reminders, you've made promises to yourself, and yet here you are still struggling with the same unhelpful billing patterns. This was me. And if this sounds familiar, don't worry, you are definitely not alone. So many attorneys struggle with their billing habits. In this program, I am going to teach you how to normalize the struggle so that you can step out of it once and for all. Get off that billing struggle bus once and for all. So here's what I want you to know right up front. It really isn't your fault. You're not broken. The problem isn't with you. It's not that you're lazy. It's not that you just suck at billing. It's just that you haven't learned a better approach, a better way to think and feel about your billing so that the action of actually entering your time as you go is seamless, is easy, is simply an afterthought, is a habit. So most billing advice, I know a lot of billing advice that I received when I was practicing law, and I practiced law for 16 years until I started all in on my billing coaching business. But the advice I got was typically purely technical. It was a lot of action-based advice, like just get a better billing system, or make sure you use timers, or just set reminders so that you can bill throughout your day. Most of it was just bill your time. I know a lot of you hear that too from partners. Just bill your time, or as you were uh it as a lawyer. But if the technical action-based solutions were enough, you would have solved this problem already. So the truth is for me, what I've realized over all the years, and now coaching other attorneys on their billing challenges, that the solution has to be based on the mindset first. And then the action-based solutions will more easily follow. And that's what I'm going to be explaining in these podcast episodes in many, many different ways, how to approach your billing first through a mindset approach, and then we'll talk about the action approach. So the concepts I'm going to share with you are pretty straightforward, but what happens along the way is that some of the straightforward concepts are harder to implement. So I'm definitely going to help you with the implementation part. So we're going to focus first on some small, consistent mindset changes and then the action changes that will eventually add up to bigger and bigger results. I'm going to give you some clear, actionable steps that you can implement immediately, since billing your time is something you do every day. And I'm going to give you the mindset tools behind those actions so that you can make those changes permanent, so that it can feel easy to bill your time as you go. Many of you know what you should be doing with your billing. Again, over and over, you're given lots of action-based tips. But as you may have realized, there are something that gets in the way, right? And typically what I've seen coaching now thousands of attorneys over the last three, four years now is that there are typically three things that get in the way of entering your time as you go. The first is perfectionism. And I'm gonna have a whole podcast episode on how to create imperfect billing habits so that you don't get caught in that trap of perfectionism that typically leads to doing it later, telling yourself you'll do your billing later. Also, the other thing that trips a lot of attorneys up is a lot of over-people pleasing or overprioritizing other people's needs, wants, and desires over your need to bill your time. And I'm gonna talk about that in another separate episode as well. And then the last thing that I think gets in the way is that so many attorneys over-promote the legal work to the detriment of their billing work. And this typically happens as you become an attorney and you get assignments from partners or other attorneys who are in a managerial position over you that does not include the task of billing, and they don't give any mentorship on how to bill for the work that you are given from them. And over and over and over, your brain learns that it's the legal work that is the most important thing, the priority to get to that day. And there is no importance given to the billing work. It's an afterthought. It's like maybe you get a reminder from an attorney to bill, or maybe you get an email reminder from the firm to bill. Again, it's it's very underprioritized. So what you're going to learn in this program is how to prioritize your billing work because again, it's really just for you. I always say billing is invisible work. Nobody is there applauding you for contemporaneously entering your time. Nobody's giving you a kudos for getting all of your time captured as you go every day. Instead, they're giving you the kudos, they're giving you the great job for the legal work that you're doing. So, what you're gonna learn in this program is different ways that you can create that self-intern validation, the internal celebrating of your billing so that you are getting those dopamine hits, you are getting that internal uh reward system, and you don't have to rely on other people because I promise you, they will not give you that validation. I never got it practicing 16 years, and it typically is not out there. I don't really know any attorneys who ever got a mentor or a partner or somebody they worked with to consistently give them at a boys, out of girls for contemporaneous timekeeping. So that is what you were gonna learn inside this program. Okay, so what you're also gonna learn is the foundation of what I believe will help you create your better billing habits. And it is this think, feel, act cycle, or in the life coaching world, we call it the model, the circumstance, thought, feeling, action result model. And don't worry, I am going to go into much detail about this model. This is what helped change my whole approach to billing. This helped me change into a contemporaneous timekeeper identity. This helped me change my relationship to billing. That's something that was easy, effortless, and even empowering. And so that is what you are going to learn in this program as well. So I also refer to it as the think-feel-act cycle. It's another, just another way for me to talk about it so that your brain, whatever way resonates the most, um, you can hear it better. So this is what I mean by that think-feel-act cycle in the model. So when you think, right, your thoughts about the circumstance, typically here we're gonna talk about billing, it will create or cause a specific feeling in your body, a specific emotion. And that emotion will drive all of your actions, your billing actions, either the action of actually entering your time, of doing the billing, or the inaction of avoiding your billing, right? And then that ultimately will create a result for you or an experience for you in that moment. Either having the experience of getting your time entered, or the experience of not having any time entered. And this cycle, the think-feel act cycle, or the model, uh, CTF-AR, circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result, it repeats all day long. Sometimes thousands of times per day. So once you see this connection, the think-feel-act cycle with your billing, clearly you will really understand that the root of all real habit change, all real billing habit change lies not in the action line, but in that thought line. The think part of the think, feel, act cycle, right? Act is at the end of it. The thinking piece, the thought piece, that's where you make real permanent change that will show up in your action and result line. And again, I'm gonna talk about this a ton in these episodes. So don't worry. I that's just a little precursor to what you are going to learn. Um, all right, so let me give you an example of the think feel act cycle or the model. So you think, right, when it's time to go bill, right? Let's say you just enter an email or you just complete an email and you think, I don't have time to bill right now. And that thought kind of whizzes by your awareness, right? You know you want to bill, you know, you should be billing right now if you want to create a contemporaneous timekeeping habit. But that thought, that kind of negatively charged thought, that scarcity-driven thought, I don't have time to bill right now, ultimately creates in your body, maybe for just a second or two, a feeling of overwhelm or a feeling of a little bit of pressure, right? A little bit of stress. Anytime we're in time scarcity, anytime we feel like we don't have enough time, we're going to feel some kind of negative emotion. And when we feel negative emotion, our brain, which is always trying to keep us safe from threats, from things that could cause us harm, our brain is gonna come online and say, hey, let's solve for this feeling of overwhelm. Let's solve for this feeling of stress, let's avoid this thing that I think is causing the stress, which is time to enter our time, right? It thinks that the billing is causing the stress. The fact that you have to bill in that moment is causing the stress. When really the actual cause, the but for cause, for all you lawyers who loved that in law school, the a priori cause, whatever you want to call it, is actually the thought. The billing itself is neutral. The billing itself could go either way. You can either think more helpful, positive, wanted thoughts about it, or you can think more unhelpful, unwanted, negative thoughts about it, which will always lead to a, right? If you're thinking a negative thought, an unwanted thought, something like I don't have time to bill right now, that will lead to a negative, unwanted feeling in your body, something that feels like resistance, something that feels bad, right? Something that feels like overwhelm or pressure or right, something that feels like you need relief from. And that feeling, again, your brain will want to avoid that feeling by taking an action, like avoiding your billing, that when you do, when you take that action and you avoid your billing and you jump to the next task, you feel relief. You feel better because now you're not focused on the billing. Now you're focused on the next legal task. So you do get access to relief, but the relief you get access to is not the relief that I want you to feel in that moment. I want you to change the relief you get from an action-based relief to a thought-based relief. Right? And so I'm gonna teach you how to do this in my four-step process to change. I'm gonna go over that briefly right now, but again, I have a whole episode on the four-step process to change. It's something that you are going to use over and over and over to change your neural connections, your neural wiring, your thoughts so that you feel better about billing, so that you will not want to avoid it. You want to show up and bill and get the result of having some build time. So let me deconstruct this. So what if instead you had the thought, I don't have time to bill right now. That old thought that keeps coming up. And instead of avoiding that thought, instead, what I want you to do is notice when it comes up, and it will come up a lot, because you have to bill your time all day long, lots of opportunities for that thought to surface. And most attorneys have that thought some point during the day. So when you notice that thought, I don't have time to bill right now, or it could just be I don't have time. If you notice it and narrate it, right, I call it name it to tame it. Notice it, narrate it. And then what I want you to do is normalize it. Like, of course, I don't think I have time to bill right now. I've likely been thinking this thought, I don't have time to bill right now for a very long, long time. And if you are a seasoned attorney, it may be 20 or 30 years. Or if you're a younger attorney, it may be a couple years, right? This is a very well-grooved neural pathway. I believe thoughts are literally they create neural pathways in our brain. And so part of this program will be you ignoring that neural pathway and creating a very new neural pathway, a neural pathway of what if it's possible that I did have a lot, I did have some time to bill right now. That's a very new neural pathway, a new thought that I want you to start to practice. So, what you're doing with this notice, narrate, normalize is you are generating awareness around the unhelpful thought. I don't have time to bill right now, so that you can start to shift it to a more helpful thought. If you want to say a more positive thought. What if I'm becoming the attorney who always makes a little bit of time to bill my time as I go? Right? So there are a lot, there are a lot of easier feeling, right? Better feeling thoughts. You can start to think purposefully, deliberately, intentionally in that moment. Even though your brain offered you the thought, I don't have time to bill right now, it's okay. Again, just a default thought that you've been thinking a long time. Goes back to the over-promoting the legal work, over-prioritizing other people's needs, like the need to, you know, get back to another email from somebody, or the need to finish up a motion that somebody is waiting for. And so I just want you to notice when that thought comes up, and this is a very common one. This came up for me all the time, and then apply this process. Notice it, narrate it, right? Name it to tame it, normalize it. Always say, of course. Of course, I'm thinking this, right? I don't want you to judge or criticize yourself because that's not helpful. And then the fourth process, the fourth step in the four-step process to change is next best thought. This is where you're going to deliberately create a better feeling thought. We're not going to jump to I always have time to bill, right? Because it's not believable. But instead, you can go to what if it's possible that I do have just a little bit of time to enter my narrative and build my time for this? Is it? Right. And so when you actually ask that question, you will feel a little bit calmer. You'll feel a little bit more empowered in that moment. You will not feel overwhelmed or stressed, right? There's not as much time scarcity in that thought. Because remember, your thoughts create your feelings, not the circumstance. You ultimately can start to shift how you're thinking about billing in the moment so that you feel a little bit better. And whenever we feel a little bit better, our brains are like, ooh, there's nothing for me to avoid. I don't have to solve for this negative emotion by avoiding the billing. I can just do my billing, right? There's nothing scary about the circumstance of entering your time in the moment. So your brain will not offer you that action-based solution. Instead, your brain will be like, calm, feeling calm and feeling empowered. This feels good. I do have a little bit of time to bill. And so you're directing your brain so that the action you take of more likely going in and capturing your time in that moment feels better. So this is really important because what I want you to start creating is an association of feeling better, feeling calm, possibly more empowered around billing, so that your brain doesn't have anything to avoid. So your brain will start to associate billing with this feeling of calm, with this feeling of empowerment, with this feeling that is the opposite of stress, the opposite of pressure, the opposite of overwhelm. And so over time, you will start to collect evidence in your action line of your model or the think-feel-act cycle that you can take a minute or two to enter your time. You'll start to collect more and more evidence as you practice this approach over and over and over again that at the end of the day, your brain sees, oh yeah, I actually do have a little bit of time to enter my time. And so your brain starts to believe that you actually do have some time throughout your day to enter your time. So, as you can see, we are trying to prove to your brain that you actually do have a little bit of time throughout the day to bill your time, to enter your time, to record your time. And you'll hear me talk about billing in different ways. Whatever feels better, some attorneys like it when I talk about recording their time, right? That sounds like not actually billing the client, but it's like recording the time that you spend on a project feels better than I have to go bill my time. So, however, you want to talk about it to yourself, however, it feels more empowering. That's what I want you to say to yourself around billing. Okay. So again, over time you're gonna develop a very new relationship with your billing. You are going to shift from viewing it as an administrative burden to recognizing it as something that actually feels like calm, feels like freedom, feels like empowerment. It will feel better. And you do this by deliberately shifting your thoughts so that you shift your feelings, so that you slightly shift how you show up in that moment, and you shift your results or the experience that you get in that moment, which will be billing more of your time. So by the time we finish this journey together, you won't just have better billing habits, you'll actually be able to see yourself and how powerful you are very differently. Right? You will be throughout this program shifting and changing your identity as a billable timekeeper. And this is very, very powerful. So many people have the identity as I suck at billing, or I'm a terrible billable timekeeper, or I'm the poster child of bad billing habits, or I've never been able to change my billing habits. I've always waited till the end of the week, end of the month to bill. Right. And so what you are doing in this program is you literally are shifting your identity one small step, one stone, one small experience at a time. And the more you collect evidence that you actually can bill your time in the moment, the more that identity of you being a bad timekeeper will start to fall away. And the identity of you actually being a contemporaneous timekeeper will take its place. And that will just happen a little bit over time. Okay, so I want to shift gears just a little bit. I want to give you a brief overview of the three core principles or three essential traits that I want you to start to cultivate as you move through this billing coaching program. So in the next episode, I'm gonna really dive into these three principles or essential traits, but right now I'm just gonna give you a little overview. So I want you to start to be willing to embrace number one, uh embrace resourcefulness. Number two, embrace patience. And number three, embrace imperfection. That's that last one that's the hardest for most attorneys. Uh so just briefly, I'm going to go over these three and then in the next episode, I'm going to dive deep. So resourcefulness. This just means pivoting over and over and over again to a solution-focused mindset. So instead of thinking, I can't do this or nothing is working, right? Which ultimately creates negative emotions in your body that again, your brain will want to solve again for taking more unhelpful actions of avoiding your billing and creating unwanted results. Instead, I want you to start to cultivate the thoughts of resourcefulness, like I can figure this out, or I'm willing to figure this out, or I'm learning how to figure this out. Or you could think, maybe there's something I haven't tried yet. Right. So there's, I'll be in the next episode talking about a lot more thoughts that will help you in cultivating more resourcefulness. Because resourcefulness, I think, really helps you with finding more solutions to your specific billing problems. But the first thing that needs to happen is that you need to develop this essential trait. You need to cultivate resourcefulness in order to get the results that you want in this program. Okay, number two, that core principle that I want you to practice throughout this program is patience. And patience is simply accepting that you are learning something new, right? You are learning a new skill set around billing your time as you go, and it will take some time. It is a process. Learning a skill is a process that does take patience. Think about any new skill you're learning, and it takes a little bit of patience as you get up to speed with what you want. So mastering new billing habits takes time and also it won't be a linear journey. There's gonna be backslides. I always say billing backslides are inevitable and they're a good thing. I want you to have backslides. They're inevitable and they're good. I'm gonna talk about failure gold, the backslides being failure golds and how to interpret them as such, so that you really can start to improve all of your billing habits. I always say billing backslides are such an incredible opportunity to learn about what are the main obstacles in your way from having better billing habits. Those backslides are literally screaming at you exactly what is in your way, the obstacles in your way towards creating better billing habits. So that's why I say they're gold. If instead you think the backslides are failures and that you're never gonna master your billing habits and that it's no use and that you're gonna quit, that's what will keep you not changing your billing habits. But instead, I will help you with creating a mindset that sees those backslides as gold and also what to do when you have a backslide. Um, there was something recently I heard from one of my coaches about, and I think it applies here, about the feeling of regret and the feeling of failure. So I want you to remember that the feeling of regret you will feel if you never try to create better billing habits. And the feeling of regret feels way worse than the feeling of failure. I want you to remember a time where maybe you regret not doing something and how that felt, and then also a time where you felt like you failed at something. I mean, they both feel terrible, let's be honest. But I think the feeling of regret feels worse. So you get to decide do you want to regret that you never tried to change your billing habits and that you went your entire career, your entire legal career without changing them? And at the end have a massive feeling of regret because you know it could have been easier the whole time, or you could have made partner, or you could have gotten that promotion if you had changed your billing habits, or you could have just felt more ease in your practice every day, right? Instead, you just have the feeling of regret that you never tried. Or there's the feeling of failure, which if you try and fail, you will feel, right? You're gonna feel the backslides, they're not gonna feel great, but at least you're trying. And also we're gonna turn those failures into opportunities, into gold, into all the ways you can start to improve your billing habits. So all I like to say, if you decide to never quit at trying to better your billing habits, you actually will never fail. Right? If you just take quitting off the table, if you take quitting, trying to get better at your billing habits off the table table, you actually never do fail. You just keep going, you just keep trying. So there really is never a failure. So I think the better approach is to, and obviously you're in this program, so you are trying, but I want you to think about that too. Anytime your brain wants to try to quit, anytime your brain thinks this is too hard, anytime your brain tries to say you'll never get this, right? If you just take quitting off the table and keep trying to better your billing habits and keep going with this program, you will never fail. Right? Just keep going. Okay. So practicing patience with yourself as you master your billing habits will require you to cultivate thoughts like, I'm willing to be bad at this for however long it takes me to be good. That's such a good thought. I'm willing to be bad at this for however long it takes me to be good, versus the thought like, oh, I should be further along by now. Or I can't believe how bad I'm still at at this. Okay, and we'll definitely talk about that number two core principle, patience, in the next episode and go deep. Okay, so number three, the number three core principle is embracing imperfection. This is so crucial. So many of my attorney clients, perfectionistic A plus, right, um, mindset. You don't need to be perfect to make progress inside this program. In fact, perfectionism is often what's keeping you stuck in old unwanted billing habits. Progress over perfection always. You will be more tempted to quit if you have an A plus perfectionistic standard. You'll be more tempted to tell yourself, oh, I'll get it 100% perfect tomorrow if you have a billing backslide, instead of progress, not perfection. I've got this, no big deal, right? You're gonna hear me repeat that over and over in this program because it really is the only way to change. It's the only way to get better. You'll never get it perfect, you'll never get it done. So we're never gonna aim for A plus billing habits because you will be frustrated with yourself, right? Especially on your busier days, right? At work when you're super busy. B plus or even B minus is good enough to keep you in that contemporaneous timekeeping habit, to keep you steady, to keep you consistent. So I want you to remember everything is figure outable, right? You can always figure it out. Just takes a little time, a little patience. If other attorneys have transformed their billing habits, like I have, like many, many attorneys have done in my programs, then you can too. This is super cheesy, but if you spot it, you got it. Super cheesy. But if you spot other attorneys with better billing habits, that just means that you have that ability as well. And you can you can create that habit as well. Okay, so that's all for today's episode. The first one. And then next episode, I will be diving deep into those three essential traits that you need to succeed in your billing transformation resourcefulness, patience, and imperfection. So we'll go deep in how to cultivate these three core principles, these three core mindsets, and what specific thoughts you can practice. All right. I will see all of you there. Bye.