Take Control of Your Time by Operating Proactively, Not Reactively

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“You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide. And if you don’t decide, others will decide for you.” ― Tony Morgan

Review your day so far. If you’re reading this first thing in the morning, think about yesterday.

How have you spent your time? Specifically, break it down into two categories:

  1. Time you’ve spent proactively. Advancing your own agenda. Working towards your own goals and objectives. Examples of proactive time could include planning your next marketing campaign, improving your systems and procedures, setting new financial goals, reading a book about killer sales strategies, and so on. It’s time that you’ve spent working towards your goals for yourself and your business, in the way that you deem most valuable.

  2. Time you’ve spent reactively. Putting out fires. Responding to the events of the day. This is time that you’ve spent doing things in reaction to your surroundings – dealing with an angry client, resolving a dispute between employees, responding to emails and phone calls, calling the plumber to fix a leaking faucet, etc. This is time that you have spent not because you chose to spend it this way… but because you found yourself compelled to respond to events that happened around you.

Simply by reviewing this information – and by asking you a few questions about what you’ve said – I could predict two things with a fairly high degree of certainty:

  1. How profitable your law firm is.
  1. How happy you are.

Simply put, the more proactive you are with your time and energy, the more successful your firm is going to be, and the happier you’re going to be. It’s not rocket science. When you’re able to spend your time growing your firm in the way you see fit… it’s going to grow. And when you are able to spend your time the way you choose to, as opposed to how you’re forced to, you’re going to enjoy it more.

This is a pretty big deal, right? Make it a top priority, as we prepare to kick off the New Year, to spend a higher percentage of your time proactively, and to spend less time reacting to the events of the day. You’ll be happier and you’ll make more money because of it.