Planning Methods to Help You Stay Organized
[00:00:00] I'm a first-year, second-year corporate associate who's been struggling to stay organized. I feel like I picked up a few things that help over the past year, but sometimes I find myself overwhelmed and struggling to keep track of everything outstanding. Do you have anything that's been a game-changer and helped you stay organized when things are crazy?
Yes. Most good associates and attorneys in different firms will keep - and you'll start your day. There are typically a couple of different things to do, but I'll just show you the list.
There are a lot of focus planners out there. But, one of the things that I'd like to do is, at the beginning of the week, this is what I've been doing for years, you can list, 20 things you need to do or whatever, 20 to 50 things you want to do. Then you can rank them on one to five, where five, do immediately done this week or whatever. And then you see, list those out at the beginning of the week, on one sheet of paper and then on Monday to Friday, or Monday through Saturday or whatever days you work, you list maybe, things need to do and things must do today, and then things would like to do today and then you just cross things off of [00:01:00] that list. And then as the week goes on, things will come up. But that's really, the big thing is it is a simple thing like that. There's a document. I think that I recommend that it's helpful. And you can look at it online, what it is to think it's called focus planner or something.
I have nothing to do with it, but that's one of the ways to organize things. Now I do something much more significant than that because I try to have personal goals work goals and different types of goals. So, recommend doing other types of planners that are much more comprehensive than that, but just from a professional standpoint, the focus planner, that's what it does. It just says you know what I'm going to do at the beginning of this week. And then, so every week you write down the things you did. Then, Monday through Saturday, write down the thing you should do, you did, and then you have things I must do today and things I would like to do. And that's it. And then the other thing that's important, just from a planning standpoint, it makes your job much easier, is you have every Sunday, most people recommend you do it on Sundays.
You write down, what accomplished this week and, then you, [00:02:00] and you can do what I learned this week, about, whatever. And then you spend 15, 30 minutes writing down what you need to accomplish.
And if you do that, you're going to be much better off. I think the planning that you do is extremely important. Very few people have long-term goals. So, if you write down things like, I want to be a partner within six years, or I want to start my law firm or whatever.
If you have those things as part of your goals, you should have goals that you're working towards. And, if you do you're going to be much more successful in the long run. Keep in mind that, regardless of what your job is, where you're practicing law, or what you do for a living, you're competing against people that have goals.
If you're competing against people that have goals and you don't have goals, you're going to lose. You're going to lose against them and that's the problem. It's something to be aware of.
I hope that's helpful, but again, it's a focused planner.
There are lots of planning gurus out there. Tony Robbins has a system called, RPM. There's also another one called Michael Hyatt. Those are a couple of good guys,[00:03:00] in terms of planning systems. Tony Robbins is RPM and Michael Hyatt, then also focus planner.
There are just a lot of other systems out there. I think there's one called squirrel or something along those lines that it's also very quiet. But I think, this simple system there just writes down 10 things or 20 things at the beginning of the week you need to do. Then every day, write down the things you need to do then you spend 30 minutes at the end of the week writing out what you accomplish, what you've learned. That's all very helpful. I do an exercise like that every day. Cause, I learned stuff every day and it's fun to write it down. A lot of times, most of what I learned is not business-related, it's just about people and things.