Professional Development

Procrastination, the habit of putting tasks off to the last possible minute, can be a major problem in both your career and your personal life. Side effects include missed opportunities, frenzied work hours, stress, overwhelmedness, resentment and guilt. This article will explore the root causes of procrastination and give you several practical tools for overcoming it.

The behaviour pattern of procrastination can be triggered in many different ways, so you won’t always procrastinate for the same reason. Sometimes you’ll procrastinate because you’re overwhelmed with too much on your plate, and procrastination gives you an escape. Other times you’ll feel tired and lazy, and you just can’t get going.

Let’s now address these various causes of procrastination and consider intelligent ways to respond.

1. Stress

A New App Aims to Make You Less Apologetic

Here’s an interesting game to play if you monitor your boss’s emails. How many of the incoming emails start off by apologising (“I’m sorry to bother you, but ...”) or by minimising the subject (“I just need a quick word with you about ...”)? And of those, how many have been written by women? I’ll say this next bit in a whisper: are you even a bit guilty of doing this yourself?

The thinking behind Just Not Sorry, a new app for Gmail, is that women in particular (though not just women!) are prone to sabotaging the content of their emails by using certain words. The app works by highlighting the “weasel words” in your emails and giving you the opportunity to substitute them with something less, well, apologetic.

A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version. It’s also a great way to develop new habits, and best of all, it’s brain-dead simple.

Let’s say you want to start a new habit such as an exercise programme or quit a bad habit such as sucking on cancer sticks. We all know that getting started and sticking with this change in behaviour for a few weeks is the hard part. Once you’ve overcome inertia, it’s much easier to keep going.

Be honest, now. On the final day of the Christmas hols, when you were tidying the last of the festive debris from your handbag or pockets and thinking about your first day back at work, did your heart lighten – or sink? Or was it somewhere in the middle? 

There are exceptions to every rule, but it’s not generally a good sign if you are either ecstatic or profoundly depressed to be back in the office. Even if you are somewhere in the middle, it’s worth taking some time as you start the new year to decide where you are on the spectrum, and to consider whether making one or more work-related resolutions for the new year might help.

ILSPA is working with Prodigy Learning to offer its Members, Students and applicants the chance to become a certified Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS).

As law offices become more reliant on technology, it has never been more important for their staff to be confident and competent using common software such as Microsoft Office.

Emma Stacey (CEO, ILSPA) said, “It is essential for Legal Secretaries and PAs to have good Microsoft Office skills in order to perform their work accurately and efficiently. We are very pleased to be offering Microsoft Office through Prodigy Learning to enable people to gain employment or advance their skills in the workplace”.

If you took any employee to one side and asked them whether or not they believe they truly give 100% to their work, I wonder if they would answer affirmatively. Let’s try to delve into the inner depths of our beings here and evaluate just how committed you really are to your work.

Job Satisfaction

One of the most pertinent factors to dictate whether you really feel you are giving your job 100% boils down to your level of job satisfaction. If you jump out of bed in the morning with a spring in your step at the very prospect of going to work, this is excellent, and you are probably putting your all into what you do. However, if there are negative thoughts and issues getting in the way of the enjoyment of your work, you are likely to find that the figure you are putting into your job will be closer to the 50% mark or perhaps even lower.

Last month we looked at the advisability of checking the financial viability of the parties in a conveyancing transaction before contracts are actually exchanged. This month I want to deal with another pre-contract area which can possibly have disastrous consequences if you are not careful.

Disputes in property and conveyancing do not often find their way into the Law Reports, but there are two areas of conveyancing practice — one recent (2015 in the High Court, Chancery Division) and the other not so recent (November 2013, which went to the Court of Appeal) — which apply to common aspects of pre-contract searches and enquiries and which are therefore worth looking at. I’ll deal with the former in this article and the latter next month.

It won’t have escaped your attention that your boss’s continuing professional development (CPD) obligations have changed quite dramatically over the past couple of years. From a mandatory 16 hours per year, the minimum annual learning requirement for solicitors has been reduced to zero, and CPD has been replaced by “continuing competence”. When the rules for your boss have been relaxed, you may question the importance of CPD for yourself. CPD, however, remains one of the biggest opportunities for all Legal Secretaries and PAs.

Taking a set amount of CPD every year increases your skill set, gives you more content for your CV and probably will enhance your earning power. But there’s also the more straightforward pleasures of being able to understand more about the background of your job and reviving your interest in your work when you’re feeling a bit jaded. 

Whether you work for a big firm or a small one, you’ve probably noticed a renewal of interest in money laundering issues on the part of your principals in recent months. The Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) has made money laundering one of its key priorities this year, and has already carried out a number of inspections of money laundering procedures in bigger firms, not always it appears with results considered satisfactory. The SRA’s initiative will be followed later this year by new money laundering regulations in the UK, which will create additional responsibilities on solicitors to find out who is in control of suspect companies or trusts, and to prevent lawyers (among others) being used to facilitate terrorist financing. All in all, this is a good time to refresh your memory on the basic principles of the money laundering rules, and where necessary to ask for further training and guidance.