Over the next few Rainmaking Recommendations and blogs on JaimieField.com, we will be talking about time – your time and your clients’ time. These posts will be about client service & productivity management, rainmaking and legal marketing. However, all will deal with a theme of time.
Image courtesy of stock images/freedigitalphotos.net
One of the biggest excuses I hear about why attorneys are not performing Rainmaking Activities is because they “don’t have the time.”
Just a quick mathematics lesson in time management for attorneys:
We are going to start with a few assumptions:
- That you are required to bill 2000 hours per year, and
- That you like to sleep.
That means you have to average 40 hours a week for 50 weeks of billable time (I’m giving you two weeks of vacation a year – am I nice or what?) or 160 hours per month.
So let’s talk about just one month of time (and we aren’t even going to discuss working weekends):
On average, there are 20 business days per month.
20 business days x 24 hours per day = 480 hours total hours.
480 hours – 160 hours (8 hours of sleep per night for 20 nights) = 320 hours left
320 hours – 160 hours of billable time per month = 160 hours left
Even if you work out 1 hour per day for those 20 working days you have 140 hours remaining per month. Those 140 hours per month (and remember, this is only during the working week, this does not include weekends) equals 7 hours per business day to use any way you want.
Even if you take time to be with your family, your friends, pursue hobbies, etc., those 7 hours per day are yours. Yes, I know you have to eat meals, but why not take an hour or so of those 7 hours to meet with a referral source for lunch? Take 15 minutes to pick up a phone and call an old client to reconnect. Send an email. Take an hour to write a blog post or use social media for business development.
I am not asking you to spend the entire 7 hours per day on Rainmaking – I want you to have a life. In fact, I am not requiring you to do anything per day – but how about taking a few hours of the 35 hours per week you have left to do something related to business development?
If you want to build your book of business, you have to spend some of those hours connecting with, meeting with and creating relationships with other people – and that takes time.
Rainmaking Recommendations are sent the first and third Wednesdays of the month. They are bite size tips that when implemented will cause you to make rain. To learn more about Rainmaking, Goal Setting and Achieving the Life you want as an Attorney please contact Jaimie B. Field, Esq. If you would like to have these sent directly to your email please follow the directions here to sigh up.
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