Mastering Your Calendar, A Tip for New Attorneys

Ever find yourself wondering how your Facebook friend, “Karen”, does everything? She manages important deadlines, birthdays, meetings, soccer games, and all? I will tell you, it is possible with a well managed calendar. As true as it is in life, it is 10x more important as an attorney.

having a well managed and followed calendar will help you schedule all your important duties, it will also help you prioritize, time manage, and feel relief. Ahhhhh doesn't relief sound nice to a first year attorney or law associate.  I recently took an intern, my first lesson to her "Live by the calendar, die by the calendar".

Good Habits Now, get in the habit of calendaring everything! I said NOW! As soon as you find yourself in any type of time committed activity calendar it. It will only take a second. Another great tip is split your day into A.M. and P.M. events for anything requiring your personal attendance. Running all over, trying to accomplish it all will just make you look sloppy.

The Right Stuff-Calendaring Programs

But, Mackenzie, what tool do I use to accomplish all this organizational glory? As a contractual attorney, I often find my self bounced between differing soft ‘wear for calendaring, depending on the client. However, as simple as it is, Google calendaring is still the A-1 software for calendaring. Any why should not be? It is virtually universally known from everyone to the highest tier one attorney to my mom (whom I love dearly). I have tried a few other programs but nothing beats Google and if it does, Goggle will create a plug-in to integrate it. when someone asks me to appear or have a project done by a particualr deadline, their invite on Google Calendar automatically sets the event for me. Easy peasy. Best of yet, its free. Woohoo.