When achieving your goals requires a long-term commitment, it’s easy to get discouraged along the way. Playing the long game can be challenging, but there are a few things you can do to make success a reality.

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Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

All this month, we’ve been discussing strategies for successful project implementation in your law practice. When it comes to executing on your big goals, persistence is key. But how do you stay motivated throughout a long project (especially when you get busy and let urgency overtake importance?)

We recommend using a Matter Management Board. Not only do these boards allow you to effectively break down big goals into achievable, bite-size chunks, but they also give you much-needed visibility. By prominently displaying tasks, deadlines and milestones, you won’t succumb to the “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon and are much more likely to remain motivated to achieve your goals.

We LOVE Matter Management Boards here at Gimbal (we run our entire business on a combination of Trello and a huge physical board on a wall in our office). Not only can they give you a great bird’s eye view of your matters, they’re also very useful for managing big projects.

If you’ve been following along, in the last 2 tips here and here, we gave you some recommendations for how to determine your major goals. It’s time to translate your big goals into smaller, actionable, time-based tasks. Here’s how:

Think about the steps—the smaller tasks—you need to complete as you move towards your final goal. How are these smaller tasks connected? Does one task need to be completed before another can start? Are there any tasks that can be done simultaneously?

Let’s say you’re writing a book. Drafting must be done before proofreading, but maybe you’d like to work on the cover design while you’re drafting so that you won’t be scrambling to get that done before publication day. Look at the big picture and determine the sequence that makes sense for you.

Next, organize your tasks on a Matter Management Board. Customize your board in the way that makes the most sense for your project. Columns can be as simple as “To Do, Doing, Done” or can represent different steps in your implementation process.  Tasks can be color-coded based on type (research-based tasks in green, communication-based tasks in blue, etc.) or colors can be used to assign tasks to team members. Maybe you’re using one board to represent multiple big goals and the tasks are color-coded based on that.

Once your board is complete, display it prominently so that all team members can refer back to it. If you want to learn more, get our free Matter Management Quick-Start Guide [insert link].

Working with your board can be a lot of fun. It’s surprisingly gratifying to move cards towards the “Done” column. These boards can help you and your team stay committed to those big, long-term goals.

So this week’s tip is to use Matter Management Boards to streamline the implementation process. These boards provide you with visibility into the project and enable you to track easily your progress.  

We also know that legal professionals who remain motivated are able to deliver more value for themselves, for their firm and, most importantly, for their clients. Put simply, they’re much more likely to be recognized as true value-driven professionals.

And that’s it. Join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice.

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Thanks a lot everybody!