Lawyers essentially get paid to think. Or that’s how it should be, anyway.
If you’ve optimized your practice for the Digital Age (i.e. being a high-value knowledge worker) then you’re in a great position.
As a knowledge worker who gets paid to think, you have an advantage over people who get paid not to think (i.e. fast food employees and people who work in the DMV).
And, as I’ve said before, knowledge workers get paid in proportion to the difficulty of the problems they solve by thinking.
So, the upside of being a knowledge worker can be pretty high.
But, there can be downsides too, as I’ve pointed out before.
Besides getting bogged down in digital drudgery, there’s the challege of dealing with too much intangible stuff. For example…
Digital data, digital information, and…
…the neverending stream of ephemeral tasks, projects, ideas, plans, and flashes of insight that float through your head.
In your head, and in the head of every other knowledge worker.
Now, here’s an important realization…
All of this intangible stuff is hard to manage, or even deal with, right?
Sure you can use a nifty free app to track your tasks on your phone or whatever. But…
That’s just another intangible place where your intangible stuff gets stored.
Do you need more places to store intangible stuff?
Probably not.
What you need (if you want to do high level knowledge work and get paid commensurately for doing so) is insight.
Specifically, practical insight about how to prioritize the important elements of your “Knowledge Factory” (i.e. your law practice)…
So you can earn more money and not get bogged down with annoying hassles, and not waste valuable time doing low-level drudgery.
Ponder this…
From now on, consider how much of your knowledge work is invisible or intangible.
And consider how insidious this is in the grand scheme of things.
This intangibility/invisibility problem is the crux of most knowledge workers’ frustration and confusion.
And it’s also why we spend too much time on low-level tasks that aren’t worth much to clients.
That’s a really big problem if you think about it. And…
Sadly, most “solutions” to this problem are largely invisible too.
P.S. If you want my Ultimate Guide to Technology for Lawyers click here.
