Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Smart Time Management for Busy Lawyers
What if you could strike the perfect balance between your professional and personal life as a lawyer? Join us on "Life Beyond the Briefs" to master the art of time management using the transformative rocks, pebbles, and sand framework. Discover how prioritizing significant life activities like family time and personal development can profoundly impact your well-being, even amidst demanding professional duties. By sharing practical strategies such as leveraging a 365-day calendar, scheduling around school breaks, and dedicating time for rest, we challenge you to rethink your time allocation for a more fulfilling life.
In our second chapter, get a sneak peek of an exciting upcoming webinar where we reveal how our office achieved a remarkable 72% increase in signed PI cases year over year without spending a dime on digital marketing. Learn the secrets behind our success, including how we grew our caseload while turning off Local Service Ads (LSAs) and PPC ads. Don't miss this valuable opportunity to enhance your practice and personal life. For those who can't attend live, feel free to reach out to me for a recording. Enjoy your weekend and start making meaningful changes today!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back in to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot, lawyers that want to exit the traditional Bill Moore hours model, and lawyers that want to say hi to each other without saying I'm busy, but it's better than the alternative. If you want to live a life of your own design and control your own future, join us as we explore Life Beyond the Briefs. I am your host, brian Glass, and today I am talking about time management. As a lawyer, time is your most valuable resource. In the early part of your career, you will use your hours and use your time to get dollars, and in the middle and the second half of your career, you're going to spend your dollars to buy back some more time. And if you haven't gotten there yet, I promise you that those days are coming. And today I want to walk you through a framework that I think most people are conceptually aware of but are very poor at putting into execution. And that's the rocks execution. And that's the rocks pebbles sand framework for time management. And if you haven't heard of this, maybe you're living under a rock somewhere, because this metaphor has been out there for decades. I did not make it up. When I Googled I found that it's attributed to Stephen Covey, so that's probably accurate. But it's this idea that your time in your life is like a jar and that you have three sets of things to put into the jar you have big rocks, you have medium-sized pebbles and you have little tiny grains of sand. And the order with which you prioritize putting these things into your life and onto your calendar dictates whether you have any space for the big rocks. Because if you do it right, if you put in the big rocks first and then you put in the medium-sized pebbles and then you sprinkle in the little tiny grains of sand, then it's all going to sort out, because the big rocks take up the most space, pebbles fill in around the big rocks and then the sand is going to fill in around the pebbles. But if you do it backwards, if you put in the sand first or you put in the pebbles first, you're probably not going to have enough space for the big rocks.
Speaker 0:And I think that most lawyers approach their career thinking that things like trials are the big rocks and depositions are the pebbles and the administrative stuff is the sand, and I think we leave out a huge piece, because what I see happening especially my friends in the insurance defense world, like I, have a trial every day or every week for the next 15 months and you go like, how did that happen? You have to block your calendar a year in advance if you want to preserve this trial time, or you end up having to take last minute vacations. How did you get to a place where you have a trial every week for the next 15 months and you don't have any space for the actual rock in your life? The actual rock in your life is the time with family. It is the time for personal development, it's the time for going to conferences, for going to masterminds and for getting better Trials. The work, that which we get paid for is actually secondary to all of that, and so what I want to challenge you to do as we get into the back half of the year is those spaces on your calendar that have been freed up by cases that settle, by things that have gone away. I want you to block them now. Block them now with rock style activities.
Speaker 0:The big thing if you said this is the only thing that I did in 2024, you could look back and be like that was awesome that I did that. I'm just back from a 12-day trip to Arizona with the family. It is the longest trip we've ever taken with the kids, for sure. I'm pretty sure it's the longest vacation I've ever taken in my career. It took me 16 years to get here and I wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I had the work set up and the ability to do it sooner. So here's how I conceptualize this and here's the tactical stuff that I do to make sure that I'm getting all my big rocks taken care of in any given year. The first thing that we do and I have a 365-day one-page calendar and this is where all of my big stuff goes so first thing we do is we highlight all of the days that the kids have off of school and we try to populate that with family trips Did not do a great job of that in 2024, admittedly, as I have some conferences that overlap some big gaps where the kids are out of school, but in a perfect world, we've highlighted the days that they're going to be out, especially for spring break, and they seem to have more and more extended weekends every single year.
Speaker 0:We highlight all those and we try to go somewhere on those, try to create family memories on the weekends where my kids are out of school. That's the first thing that goes on the calendar. Second thing that goes on the calendar is the conferences that I want to go to. So, looking at all the big legal conferences, entrepreneurial conferences and masterminds that I can find for 2025 and trying to chunk in maybe two big conferences and two or three out-of-town non-great legal marketing mastermind events that I can get to, those are usually GoBundance events, but there's a couple of other good entrepreneurial, small scale mastermind events that I like to get to during the year. So those are the big things that go on first.
Speaker 0:The next thing that goes on is our US quarterly meetings and our annual retreats, both Create Legal Marketing and for Ben Glass Law. And then all my trials go on the calendar. Those are actually already there for the most part, but those things get chunked into the calendar. And then my rest days. So days after trials, days after conferences, either a travel or a rest day so that you have some time to process all this stuff that you're doing Like it doesn't matter. You could go to 12 conferences a year and absorb all that information, but if you don't take the time to process it and do something with it, it doesn't matter. So usually when I'm going out of town to a conference or a mastermind, I like to stay one extra day and process and make a game plan and begin to delegate some of the things that I've learned.
Speaker 0:So those are the things that I consider my very large scale rocks family vacations, conferences, masterminds, trials, of course, and in the US days, and as you look back like there's a lot of them in that list, I think it's just because I'm in a busy stage of my life. You might have more or you might have less big rocks, but the point is, if you tried to fit everything else in first into your calendar and then you went and looked for space for that stuff, you would never find it. And so then, as we break it down to a quarterly and a monthly basis after I've sorted those very big things in, now, we find time for the good size pebbles. I got to make sure that I have time to go to the gym. Work usually doesn't interfere with getting gym and getting exercise time, because that happens first thing in the morning, but one of the things that we make sure that we block off during sports season is anything after four o'clock. I don't do hardly anything after four o'clock. That's work-related, because I'm going out to coach soccer and baseball. The only exception to that would be if we're running a mastermind in great legal marketing in-house, then I will take those days off. But I don't schedule any depositions, any casework, any phone calls with clients, any of that stuff, after four o'clock during sports season.
Speaker 0:The other thing that gets scheduled on my calendar on a monthly basis is my thinking time. So I like to take at least a half day every week. Like to take at least a half day every week and go analog, go sit at a coffee shop with a journal and a pen and some music, usually, but almost never with a computer, and think and work on, okay, during the next seven days, what needs to happen. What are the pebbles small pebbles in the sand that needs to fit in around all this schedule and how do we make sure that we're moving the ball forward? And then, of course, the pebbles in the, the small pebbles in the sand that needs to fit in around all this schedule and how do we make sure that we're moving the ball forward and then, of course, the pebbles in the, the small pebbles in the sand. That's things like podcast recordings, client phone calls, actual casework Funny like at this stage of my career how far down the line actual casework is. But most work that I'm doing in cases tends to be that high level strategy thinking, stuff that you can do on the analog Thursdays. So that works out for me.
Speaker 0:You may be at a different stage in your career, but what I want to challenge you to do as you step into the back half of 2024 is to make sure that you are prioritizing the things that are actually important the time with your spouse, the time with your family, getting out the door and making it home for dinner with your kids. And if you don't make time to do that, I promise you that your calendar fairy is not going to show up and bless you with this time at some point later. The message of Life Beyond the Briefs is that you are on a one-way trip through this life and you are never coming back to this age and this day in your life again. So if you haven't prioritized your activity correctly, you are going to watch your life pass you by, and I don't want that to happen to you. So please prioritize the actually important things in your life. Get them on the calendar, make space for them, because nobody else is going to do it for you.
Speaker 0:Mind you, if you don't already know that, at one o'clock Eastern time, I'm doing a webinar on how we increased the signed PI cases in my office by 72% year over year, and how we did it without spending an additional penny on digital marketing, in fact, while we shut off all of our LSAs and our PPC ads. You can find that link on any of my social media and I hope to see you there. If you are catching this after the fact and you aren't on the email list and you didn't get notice of this, reach out to me, brian, at greatlegalmarketingcom. I will make sure that we get you a copy of the recording. All right, that's it, everybody. Have a great weekend.
