I read an article recently about the work habits of a novelist. He said that he works best when he doesn’t write every day, as conventional wisdom suggests. Rather, he gets more done in “burst mode” (my term) where he will write up to 8,000 or 10,000 words in a day.
His job (full time as I recall) and family obligations make it difficult to carve out sufficient blocks of writing time during the week. He found that an hour a day wasn’t long enough to find his writing mojo and get up to speed. Give him eight or ten hours on Saturday, however, and he could knock out an entire book in record time.
The point is that each of us works differently and we need to honor what works best for us.
As you know, I advocate setting aside time each work day for marketing your practice. You can get a lot done in as little as 15 minutes a day, if you do it consistently. But I acknowledge the value of working in bigger blocks of time, especially on bigger projects. In fact, I do it myself.
In my practice, I would often show up at the office on a Saturday and plow through a pile of files. In a few hours of undisturbed time, I would do more work than I might do in an entire week.
In school, instead of studying every night, I often crammed for tests the night before and wrote entire term papers in a weekend. That’s how I liked to work and I got good grades. In fact, I’ve read that we often do our best creative work when we do it quickly.
All hail burst mode!
In school, we have deadlines and due dates. The same goes for most legal work. But that’s not true with marketing. So, if you want to do marketing in burst mode, you need to schedule the time in advance and stick to that schedule.
You might schedule one Saturday each month for marketing. In a few hours of undisturbed time, you could create a new seminar or produce a month’s worth of articles, blog posts, emails, or social media content.
Getting things done in burst mode doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing throughout the week, however. The above mentioned author uses snippets of time throughout the week to take care of administrative and less demanding tasks related to his writing. You can, too.
During your Saturday marketing session, you might plan out the people you want to call that month. With your plan in hand, you can take a few minutes each week day to make those calls.
You can also use your weekdays to make notes and outlines and collect research material in preparation for your Saturday session.
Being productive is simple. Figure out what you want to get done this week or this month. Look at your calendar and decide when you’re going to do it. Then, do it.
As long as you’re getting important things done, when you do them probably isn’t that important.
