Beyond knowledge management to better management
It was a headline guaranteed to grab my attention: "Email is making us miserable." And the subtitle really hit home too: "In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate." This is how Cal Newport began his recent article in The New Yorker on the misery of email. Work... Continue Reading →
Are you ready for your firm to flip the transparency switch? For many law firms, their Achilles' Heel is e-mail. Almost all correspondence is handled electronically, but lawyers around the world have not always been diligent in sending copies of this correspondence to their firm's records management system. To be fair, most firms I know... Continue Reading →
How productive are you? Really??? A recent post by Rees Morrison on the subject of productivity caught my eye. In it he described the "five-or-10-minute rule," which recommends that you wait five or 10 minutes between the time you write an e-mail message and the time you send it. The theory is that this... Continue Reading →
At a recent gathering of law firm knowledge managers, I was told that I could make their lives easier by enabling subscription by e-mail to Above and Beyond KM. To be honest, until that point I had mistakenly assumed that nearly everyone in this social media savvy crowd had migrated to RSS readers. Therefore, I... Continue Reading →
New York City's Daily Post reported recently that residents of the Big Apple, Washington D.C. and Atlanta tend to check e-mail more than residents of any other place. And, apparently, more women admit to e-mail addiction than men. (Although, based on what I've observed, I can't help wondering if this is more a reflection of... Continue Reading →
Dave Pollard has posted on his blog, How to Save the World, a memorandum that every firm should consider sending.The question is, how would sending it change the practice of law in your firm?Take the challenge of this thought experiment. At a minimum, it will help you better understand which communication tools best suit particular... Continue Reading →
I used the telephone the other day.Of course, using the phone isn't exactly a radical thing to do, except that my reason for using the phone was important: I picked up the phone to short-circuit an e-mail mess. What was the e-mail mess? My colleague and I were e-mailing each other to make some practical... Continue Reading →
Returning from a few days out of the office, I was reminded again of how oppressive a jammed Outlook Inbox can be. Even though I diligently checked and responded to e-mail messages during my absence, I still faced a daunting pile of messages and related items that required follow-up. The resulting sensation was a little... Continue Reading →
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