The Productivity Pivot: Build a Profitable Legal Practice By Selling Yourself One Hour Every Day

Book Synopsis: It’s as important as it has ever been for lawyers to build profitable books of business, but it’s harder to find the time to do so. Higher billable hour requirements, 24/7 connectedness, unceasing distractions, and increased competition all conspire to make business development a difficult endeavor.

In The Productivity Pivot, author Jay Harrington, a lawyer, executive coach, and consultant to the legal industry, lays out a step-by-step strategy to help lawyers motivate themselves and manage their attention so they have the time—and the mental and emotional fortitude—necessary to develop business.

This book is not merely a collection of disparate and unrelated productivity tips or hacks. Rather, it lays out a comprehensive system that will: (1) challenge you to determine what you really desire out of your life and career, (2) prompt you to examine your limiting beliefs about what you’re capable of accomplishing, and (3) provide you with fresh and unconventional ideas that will transform the way you think about productivity. By reading this book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge and tools you need to prioritize the time necessary to build a profitable legal practice.

Some of the foundational principles that are addressed in this book include:

• Vision: Success starts with getting clear on what you want way out in the future so you can know what steps are required, starting today, to get you there.
• Goals: A big vision for the future must be reduced to an achievable goal. A goal should not merely be an intention, but rather a commitment to uncompromisingly pursue your most desired professional outcome. A clear goal allows you to affirm your vision and establish a framework for your behavior.
• Goal Deconstruction: Making progress on long-term objectives is all about deconstructing your goals into specific action steps within the constraints of allotted time. It’s important to work backwards to understand the component parts of your long-term goal, establish a series of smaller goals based on that understanding, and then create a plan that will keep you on track. You should deconstruct your big goal to the point where you have a clear understanding of the appropriate action you should be taking today—at this very moment—to be on the right path.
• Time: In Chapter 4 of the book, you’ll be challenged to do something you may find impossible, or at best improbable, which is to devote one hour of time each workday to business development activities. The reason lawyers resist the idea of spending what is, for most, merely ten percent of their time each day focused on business development is that they view the pursuit of billable hours in service of clients as their highest calling; the key to their long-term success. But that is short-term thinking. Instead of selling all of your time to clients to help them achieve their objectives, it’s imperative to start selling yourself one hour of your time every day to achieve your own.
• Focus: Real productivity results from understanding what you should do, not merely what you can do, to move along a linear path toward realizing your vision of building a profitable practice and having more autonomy at work.
• Leverage: Yes, you probably can do most things on your to-do list better and faster than anyone else. No, you shouldn’t try to do everything all by yourself. Better yet, have you stopped to consider whether many of the things you do even need to be done in the first place? Lawyers who generate meaningful results for their clients and themselves leverage their time by working only on their most important priorities, and delegate or eliminate everything else.

Building a productivity habit that will enable you to build a practice isn’t easy. It probably won’t happen quickly. It is possible, however. Many have done it in the past, and are doing it now, which means you can, too. There is no time like right now to find out what you’re capable of.