Jack Zinda:
Welcome to The Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host.
Kevin Tully:
Hi, I'm Kevin Tully, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zinda Law Group. Today we're going to be talking about how to manage and grow a virtual team of employees. Joining me today is Zinda Law Group's CEO and founding partner, Jack Zinda. Jack, thanks for braving the icy Texas roadways to be here.
Jack Zinda:
No problem, man. Good to see you, Kevin. Yeah, it has been... Used to be unusually cold weather, but it's two years in a row we've reached into the teens and I think this morning it was nine with the wind chill.
Kevin Tully:
Wow.
Jack Zinda:
For Texans, especially us in Austin, it is really, really cold.
Kevin Tully:
Well, fortunately not as bad as last year with the snowmageddon stuff.
Jack Zinda:
Yes. We've got power. There has not been any pipes that have burst, so we are in good shape so far.
Kevin Tully:
All right. Well, speaking of flashing back to last year, I think around this time, many of us were thinking about just coming out of quarantine, and obviously with the pandemic came this whole world of remote and virtual work, and obviously a lot has been written about it. There's been a lot of commentary on it. I think what we'll focus in on today is how it's affected the legal industry. If you would, take me through how you were thinking about virtual work at Zinda Law Group in 2022.
Jack Zinda:
Yeah. That's a great question. Well, first, I want to take everyone back to when COVID first struck. I remember distinctly as the virus was spreading around the world and there started to be potential lockdowns that our firm, which had been 95% in person, there may have been two or three people that were working remote at the time, I sat down with my chief IT person and said, "Okay, we need to come up with a plan for us to consider going remote until this blows over." For a firm that was almost 100% in person, it was pretty intimidating. What we said is, "Okay, let's do a dry run of it and we'll see how it goes. We'll do one day remote, and if everything works well, we will move to being prepared for it being full time."
Jack Zinda:
We had an all hands meeting, everybody in the office back when that was okay. Everyone's crowded around a conference room and we said, "Okay, we're going to do this dry run of us all going remote." Well, little did we know that dry run was going to be permanent because COVID really sped up. The test run ended up being... We had to go remote actually a day earlier than we planned the test run. I told my IT guy, "Hey, here's some money, go buy whatever computers you need, printers you need, and just drop them off in people's driveways so we can make sure that we're able to work come tomorrow." Because a lot of our employees actually had big desktops, so we had him going around, dropping those off. It was very chaotic and it was not the ideal way that I would go from in person to virtual if I had to do it again.
Kevin Tully:
Right. Yeah, I think a lot of people can share that sentiment. What were your biggest concerns? What were the things that you were discussing in that conference room that day?
Jack Zinda:
Well, and I think for most attorneys and business owners... The first thing about lawyers, we tend to be late adopters and we tend to like tradition and we have a hard time envisioning things different than the way they have always been. I think this came as a really big shock to most law firms. I think a lot of the concerns that we had and that other lawyers have is one, productivity, are my people going to be working? Are they going to be sitting around watching TV all day and not doing their job? I think that's one of the biggest fears people have.
Jack Zinda:
Number two, how's communication going to work? How am I going to talk to people?
Jack Zinda:
Three, if you like using a lot of written documents like I do, even though I'm very into technology, I still like to read things on paper, how am I going to get these documents? How am I going to get prepared for a hearing or a deposition? The physical world that we're dealing with, phone calls, how's communication going to work with the outside world. I think it really boils down to infrastructure, productivity, and culture are the three big buckets that I think most people are concerned about when they think about going to remote. I know that was some really major concerns that we had.
Kevin Tully:
Right. Around productivity, I think at the heart of that, there's some trust involved. How did you establish trust with your employees in this new world of being remote?
Jack Zinda:
That's a great point because it comes down to, when you say productivity, you're really asking, do I think my people are going to be lazy and not work if they're at home? Which a lot of studies have shown that people are actually more productive working at home, but that's not everybody, that's the law of averages. One thing we developed, and we had this pre-COVID, is every person in the firm has a number. They have a target that they are responsible for. Then there's usually two or three other numbers that measure how much of whatever that task is they're accomplishing. If we're talking about, for example, a pre-litigation paralegal, it might be preparing demands, or a litigation paralegal might be scheduling depositions.
Jack Zinda:
The other thing that we do is we put people in teams, small teams of four to six, preferably at the four number, so you're working with a group of people that you're accountable to. If you're in a team of 25, it's easy to hide or just be another person that maybe isn't carrying their fair share of the weight. When you're in a team of four, it's really tough to hide because your teammates are counting on you, and if you're not doing your job it's going to affect their performance and their ability to do their job.
Jack Zinda:
I do think it comes down to a little bit, are you a glass half full or glass half empty when it comes to human nature. I think generally most people want to do a good job, they want to be successful, and if they're in our line of work of helping people, they want to do a great job for the clients. A lot of it may come down to are you hiring the right person. One thing I joked around with, with my chief of staff was, people can slack off just as easily at the office as they can at home. There's no shortage of people not working in the office as they are at their home base.
Kevin Tully:
Sure. The person who's taking a few extra laps around the office, grabbing snacks, doing all that kind of stuff is just a different way to kill some time.
Jack Zinda:
Exactly, exactly. I think one tip that you can use if you're really concerned about productivity, or I'd recommend you to do, is to make sure everybody has an objective data point that measures the success of their role, and that you have three or four data points beneath that called lead indicators, that measure productivity. For example, our intake team is 100% remote, but we measure how many calls have they taken during the day. Then, what was the length of those calls. How many intakes did they take. What was the batting average, the percentage of intakes that turned into initial client meetings. Then we have their manager get feedback from the attorneys on the quality of the intake team. Those data points tell you the whole story. If you have one intake specialist doing one call and another doing 30, you can tell there's a difference in productivity levels.
Kevin Tully:
When it comes to managing the projects that then yield these results, these KPIs that you're checking in on, what approaches or what tools did you use with the team either before or after going remote to help keep everybody on the same page?
Jack Zinda:
I think first you have to really explain is, what is the purpose of these tools and how are they being used? I think you want to treat everybody like they're an equal member of the team and treat them like an adult. First is coach them up and make sure they understand what these tools are saying and why they're being put into place. For example, back to that intake specialist example, you might say, "Hey, on average, our firm gets 100 phone calls a day. You're one of three people, so you need to take at least one third of those calls, or your teammates are going to have to take more calls than they're able to." Then they understand, "Okay, that makes sense."
Jack Zinda:
Then you want to give them access to that data and you don't necessarily have to have a lot of fancy technology to do it. If you're not firm that is really into a lot of software programs or applications that automate this, you can just have a spreadsheet. You can ask the person to self-report and then do a verification process once a month. For example, you say, "Okay, you report how many calls you took." Then once a month, the manager spot checks that to make sure that it lines up roughly with what you're hearing from the person. I think it's coaching, making them understand, and get them to buy in to what you're doing on the numbers side of things.
Kevin Tully:
This podcast is presented by Zinda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zinda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015.
Kevin Tully:
To learn more about partnering with Zinda Law Group, please email us at Referrals@ZindaLaw.com. We'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zinda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case.
Kevin Tully:
It sounds like we're going real heavy on communication up front, making sure everybody understands. Talk to me about communication with virtual employees. I know there's a lot of different forms of communication, which ones do you prefer when it comes to those important conversations?
Jack Zinda:
I think you've got to do video conferencing. Our teams are set up, like we said before, in teams of four. Every day, there is a daily huddle at the beginning of the day that lasts five to 10 minutes. Now this is critical for my lawyer friends. If your daily huddle lasts an hour, you're doing it wrong and you're going to kill your team's productivity. We actually had to coach a lot of the attorneys on this because we have 15 different teams of attorneys that work in groups of four. It's usually two attorneys and two paralegals. We looked up and we asked, "Okay, how are the daily huddles going?" Somebody said, "Well, man, they're just taking a long time and we're not getting the day started until an hour into the day." I said, "Well, then you're, you're doing it wrong. The daily huddle should be a five to 10 minute check in."
Jack Zinda:
It's taken from a lot of great books, Scaling Up is one, Traction is another. It's a common business technique where you just get everybody together. You're trying to make sure is everyone engaged. Is everyone able to work today. Do they have any distractions that are going to keep them from working. What's the top three things we're trying to accomplish as a team today. It's not designed to go back and look and say, "What did you accomplish yesterday? What didn't you get done?" Go over every case you have. It's just making sure everyone's there and engaged. That has to be in a video conference setting, in my personal opinion, because there's a big difference between seeing someone face to face, eye to eye, than having them in a phone call where they could be on outlook, they could be distracted and all of those things.
Jack Zinda:
I also think there's a big psychological component that we underestimate. I think something about our brains connects with visual different than audio. I noticed about six months into the pandemic, I hadn't met with my team in person in six months, but in my memories, they had been there in person. I didn't have a memory of them not being there because all of the meetings were done in a video conference setting. I think if it was over the phone, it would not be the same thing.
Kevin Tully:
Interesting. What did you do, if anything, to combat what people have referred to as Zoom burnout?
Jack Zinda:
I think one, you've got to balance things like virtual happy hours with the cost benefit of those. I think those are great, but I know some employees got tired of those pretty quickly when that was an issue. I think now that travel is becoming more commonplace... I know this is being recorded right at the tail end of Omicron burning out, but prior to that, we were having people come back to the office once a quarter for in-person meetings, paying for their travel back. For attorneys, it was a little more often. Having a regular get together where you're in person, the day to day Zoom fatigue issue that you're speaking of, one is we encourage the attorneys to get printers that we would pay for. That's another, maybe we could talk a little bit about, is the hardware and infrastructure.
Jack Zinda:
I personally like to read a lot of my documents in writing. Well, I like to read a lot of them in physical paper. I have a hard time reading a 50 page document on a computer screen. There's some studies that back that up because when you're looking at a computer screen, it's refreshing thousands of times a second. It's not actually a static image. I encourage attorneys to read things offline. Look at physical documents.
Jack Zinda:
Two, I think you can overkill on the video conferencing if you're on video calls 10, 12 hours a day. I think there's a couple tactics that you can do on that front.
Kevin Tully:
I think another great advantage to printing is the ability to put pen to paper. I notice that you often like to mark up your physical copies of things as you're going through and reading. I think that tangible connection, I think helps internalize the information more.
Jack Zinda:
100%. I think a lot of times, trying to do everything on your computer can slow you down, especially certain types of tasks. For example, when we are signing up a client remotely, we tell the attorneys to have printed copies of all the documents they're discussing with the clients when they're going over the contract with them on the phone or a Zoom conference, so they can be present, and they're physically going through it as if they were sitting across the table from them.
Kevin Tully:
In addition to a printer, what else would you recommend for attorneys who are working at home, in terms of equipment or tools at the desk?
Jack Zinda:
That's a great question. I think first, as the owner of the law firm or the decision maker at the law firm, I think you have to ask why you are going remote and are you prepared to make the investments to make your team successful. Because I see a lot of law firms struggle with remote employees because they're not prepared to do the things necessary to be successful. One of those is making sure that your team has a good hardware and software setup. I think a lot of people just think, "Okay, go remote, and you'll just work from home. You figure it out, paralegal or attorney." Instead, you need to sit in their shoes and you need to make a list of all the things you think that they're going to need to be successful as a lawyer or a paralegal or member of your team.
Jack Zinda:
First off, you want to make sure they have a good setup with screens. Everyone in our firm has two screens. That's so they can be reviewing a document while they're maybe doing a conference call. When we had everyone go remote, we had to say, "Okay, we're going to take our screens from the office and send them to people or are we going to keep them, buy them new ones?" I know with a lot of lawyers, we can be paranoid of, "Okay, if we send our team a bunch of hardware, are we going to get it back if they switch jobs?" That hasn't been an issue with us. Back to that idea, if you give people the benefit of the doubt, I think if you hope for the... If you have high expectations, people typically live up to those, especially on things like that.
Jack Zinda:
The next thing is you want to have a docking station set up for them to use a laptop. I think a laptop is really critical because they can take it back and forth to the home base if they need to communicate. The docking station will hook up to the computer monitors, the printer, the mouse, all of the things that you're going to use in your home office, just by plugging it in.
Jack Zinda:
The next thing that you're going to want to consider is how are we going to get supplies to them on a regular basis, and do some sort of touch base on their hardware and software needs. Some of our team members have printers, some of them don't. We do that on a team by team basis, depending on what they want. Overall, one of the big things that I think you need to do is overly communicate on what the person needs to be more productive. I see a lot of business owners and law firms shoot themselves in the foot by saving a few hundred dollars on hardware or software. Then they're getting in on the back end with overtime costs, productivity. If you could buy something that would save each of your lawyers an hour of productivity a day, that's worth a lot of money in just a month. I see a lot of firms not get that. They'll say, "Well, we can't afford two monitors," which would be $400. Meanwhile, the attorney's taking three times as long to do something because they don't have those types of tools.
Kevin Tully:
Right. What concerns did you have about data security with everyone taking computers home? Being a law firm, obviously privacy is really important for our clients and their information, as well as any work product that we're producing. What concerns or tools did you use to mitigate those concerns?
Jack Zinda:
Oh my gosh, we had so many concerns about that because I just was having these images of people downloading stuff onto Gmail or saving it in Dropbox and it somehow on their family computer, and all sorts of problems. The first thing we did was we made sure to communicate to folks, "This is a work computer. It is not your personal computer. You have no expectation of privacy on anything you save on this computer." That's important, not to play Big Brother, but just so everyone's aware, this is not your personal computer and you cannot use it for personal stuff. That one area helps protect some security because people understand, "Okay, this can only be used for certain things."
Jack Zinda:
Number two, you have to make sure your IT department, this is a very simple tool, has access to all of the hardware and has the ability to shut them down remotely. There's some cool tools where you can have it to where if it's not logged in after a certain amount of time, it would automatically turn off and the user couldn't have access to it anymore. For example, if it got stolen out of an employee's car, at the same time you want to make sure your IT person can access and shut it down if they need to.
Jack Zinda:
The next piece is we use a virtual desktop system, which is really cool, I find it super helpful, that essentially it's like all of the applications go through a website portal. You open Word, it looks just like Word, but it's not actually on your computer. It's in the cloud through a virtual desktop that you have complete control over. It prevents the employees from saving things on their local machine. Once again, I'm not coming at it from a perspective of them doing something malicious. It's more of, are they going to do something, not the most intelligent thing, that doesn't protect our client security. In Texas, for example, one HIPAA violation I think is a $10,000 fine. If you're dealing with medical records, you've got to be really careful in security and those things. I know Dropbox now has HIPAA compliance and a lot of the other cloud servers have these cool features that allow you to have that protection in place.
Kevin Tully:
Great. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about culture, that's a big one that comes up often when this topic is being discussed. We'll take it piece by piece. I think oftentimes the first part, or one of the key parts of culture is hiring. What has hiring been like in the virtual world?
Jack Zinda:
It's crazy because we hired, I think 15 people, that we never met in person, during COVID, which was a huge leap for us. I mean, we used to spend a lot of money flying people in for interviews and all of our staff and paralegals were actually in office all the time. That was a big leap of faith. Once again, back to in the interview hiring process, you want to vet people for, are they prepared to work remotely by themselves. There's a couple of approaches you can take to that. One is past is prologue, so you can see what are their experiences doing that. If you're hiring a paralegal or someone in an administrative position, I would really look for people that have experience working remote in the past because a lot of times people underestimate what it's going to be like. That's key.
Jack Zinda:
The second is, you need to ask them about what their home office set up would be when they work remotely, to make sure they have access to the right sorts of things.
Jack Zinda:
Then, when you're trying to figure out if they're a good culture fit, I would really talk through typical questions that you would do to establish, do they meet your culture. Which means number one, you have to know what your culture is and what it isn't.
Jack Zinda:
Then number two, how would they interact with people on a remote basis. One thing we tell folks is "Listen, video conferencing is not an option at our firm. If you're the type of person that's going to be a challenge, for some reason, you probably won't be able to work here." You need people that are going to communicate more than others so they're comfortable asking questions and those sorts of things. Then once they are an employee or working at the firm, you want to make sure you're very intentional about setting up interactions with other people in the organization because you can imagine if you're a new associate and you haven't met two thirds of the people at the firm, it's very intimidating to just send a message to them to say hi, or to meet someone. Opposed to if you're in office, you would just see them in the hallway and introduce yourself.
Kevin Tully:
Right. Yeah. For the existing employees, how did you approach maintaining the culture of the firm in the remote world?
Jack Zinda:
One, we did a lot of things I think all firms are doing. We did remote happy hours and social events.
Jack Zinda:
Number two is, we set up channels in our chat software called Teams, which I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with. It's just like Slack, that was focused around non-work related things. Life events, celebrations, things like that. We did a lot of virtual lunches where we would put disparate groups of people together in a Zoom meeting to either talk about a certain topic, like a continuing education, talk about how the firm's going, or just for fun so they're mixing and matching. One key theme you're seeing here is you want to get groups of two to four together in video conferences with people they don't always interact with. That starts creating this idea of, "Oh, I recognize this person. They're not just a name on a piece of paper."
Jack Zinda:
I think also, doing regular surveys. We just started engaging with a software program called Culture Amp, which does regular engagement surveys of the team members. I think it's really easy to not understand if someone's not happy at their job because you're not seeing them every day. You're not reading their body language. I think doing things like that is really, really important. I also think it's important to encourage people to be honest about how they're feeling. If you have a culture where people do not feel like they can say if they're not happy or upset, or they're missing a piece of hardware that's taking them forever to do their job, you're not going to get that feedback and they're just going to resign. Which is terrible.
Kevin Tully:
Talk a little bit about The Wire. I think that's been something that's been a cool feature of keeping the culture going.
Jack Zinda:
Yeah. We have two things we do every week is, we have The Wire, which is a email that goes out that celebrates internal successes, anniversaries, birthdays. Every week one of the employees or attorneys does a, "What you didn't know about me," and goes through their biography a little bit. That's been really cool to see background on people that's not related to their job. Do they like to go mountain climbing, hiking? Where did they go to college? Things like that.
Jack Zinda:
The other thing we just started doing, which has been really neat, is we do a culture award, which is a $100 bonus that employees give to each other. It has to be based on someone living up to one of our core values and the same person can't get it twice until everybody has received it once. For example, the receptionist might give it to a paralegal who helped them out. Then the next week the paralegal gets to pick who gets the next award for that, and it has to be in a different department. That's been really cool because now you have people doing nice things for each other and it's interesting to see how that's worked out.
Kevin Tully:
Yeah. I love that. It's another way to break apart the silos that form when people work together with the same team every day. I think celebrating wins is really something that is hard to do in the virtual world, so to find an outlet for it like that is really important. We're quick to call somebody when something's wrong and ask for help, but it's rare that you get a random call, someone saying, "Hey, we're celebrating that this thing went well." I think that's a great idea.
Jack Zinda:
One thing just before I forget, if you are a leader in your organization, say you're the head partner or one of the senior trial lawyers or in any part of leadership, I think it's really important that you're approachable. This is going to sound silly, but I use emojis like crazy, which I personally don't like using them, but when I'm talking to people, I notice if I put a smiley face at the end, they know I'm not mad. I'm just saying, can you give me this document? Because you have to understand if you don't interact with someone a lot in person and you're in a position of leadership, it may be interpreted in the worst possible messaging possible. I use the haha, I use the cool glasses guy, I use the smiley face, the laughing guy. I think that's important so people know the tone that is coming across there.
Kevin Tully:
It does seem silly, but it is really important. I think, I mean, even with people that I communicate with often in my personal life, any form of communication that's short written text has the ability to be taken the wrong way often. Those emojis actually, I think, show something additional that's valuable to the conversation, as silly as it is.
Jack Zinda:
Yeah. I completely agree. Another thing that we just started doing that I think is really helpful is something called Skip Meetings. This is where if you're a large organization, I would say defined by more than five people, say it's 10 or 12, you might have a meeting with someone that you don't directly work with. Let's say I'm the partner at the firm and there's an attorney that works for me and they have a paralegal. Once a quarter, I may make a purposeful meeting with that paralegal just to check in and see how they're doing. It's not a quarterly review, like a performance review. It's just a touch base. How are things with them personally? How are things with them professionally? How are they enjoying their job. You as the leader start getting a really good sense of the vibe of the organization outside of your direct reports.
Kevin Tully:
Yeah. I've heard you refer to this as a Listening Tour. Explain why you call it that.
Jack Zinda:
I mean, because I don't... I like to talk, that's why I'm doing my own podcast. It's to remind me that it's to listen. I didn't come up with this idea, but you've got to be quiet, encourage people to have a conversation with you, and you need to be opening to hearing whatever it is they're saying, even if you disagree with it strongly.
Kevin Tully:
Nice.
Jack Zinda:
You want to get their unvarnished true opinion.
Kevin Tully:
We should make you a Jack Zinda 2022 Listening Tour concert t-shirt with all of the stops on the back.
Jack Zinda:
I love that. That's great.
Kevin Tully:
Big picture, just tell me pros and cons, what do you see as the benefits of work remote and what have been the challenges, just as a takeaway.
Jack Zinda:
Yeah. I want to make it clear, this is not for everyone. I don't think this is necessarily a value judgment one way or the other if you should do something or not do something. For us, the pros have been, we've been able to hire really great people all over the country. We have employees in Oregon and Florida and California now, so that's been great, especially with the tough job market where it's a very competitive space. We're in Austin, Texas, which is one of the most competitive markets to hire people. It was pre all the tech companies coming in. Now it's even more competitive.
Jack Zinda:
The second piece is it's allowed us to keep our overhead lower for office space. Even if you want all of your team members in the same city, if they're coming in on different days, you don't need as much office space or as big of a footprint.
Jack Zinda:
The third is it's allowed us to hire more people with family issues that it would make it difficult for them to commute every day. Someone has a young child and they're splitting home care duties with their other spouse or significant other. Now they can be at home all day, have lunch with their kids. It allows you to get people that you wouldn't normally be able to get. Then it's forced us to really think through how do we measure performance of someone outside of how long they're sitting at their desk every day.
Kevin Tully:
Right.
Jack Zinda:
Some of the challenges and cons, I do think it is much more challenging to maintain your culture if you are remote. A lot of the things that just happen when you're in an office together, you have to be purposeful and have a plan to make sure those occur, like the video conferencing, like the interactions, those things. I wouldn't underestimate how challenging that can be.
Jack Zinda:
Number two, no matter how hard you try, there's going to be people that aren't performing at the level you want because you're not seeing their performance regularly. We've gotten really good at preventing that, but that still is a challenge.
Jack Zinda:
Three, I think sometimes the hardware stuff can be a challenge, to make sure you're getting your equipment to the right folks in the right places.
Jack Zinda:
Overall, it has been a net positive to us. I've just been so impressed by some of the people we've been able to hire since we went remote that I think we would not have been able to hire beforehand.
Kevin Tully:
That's great. Any other points you want to hit on before we start to wrap up?
Jack Zinda:
No, I think if I just had to leave you with a few extra thoughts, I'd say, ask why three times before doing this. Why am I doing it, until you get to the core reason, have a plan, and then take what someone else has done and make it your own and then modify and make it better over time.
Jack Zinda:
If you want any advice or help on this, you can reach out to me directly. Happy to talk through it, give you our checklist, our SOPs, put you in contact with our IT guy to help talk through the technical issues. Because even if you're a small team, it can be very doable if you just have a plan behind it.
Kevin Tully:
Last question, and then we'll get you out of here. I know you are in the office almost every single day. I'm curious on a personal level, how was working from home for you?
Jack Zinda:
It did not work for me personally. I just like to change locations. I think I could have gotten used to it, but I had the option to come in. I like to get out of my house and make that where I spend time with the family. It's a good mental shift.
Jack Zinda:
Also, because I deal with so much paper in all the things I do, it's easier to print here, and I live close to the office. I think if a gun to my head, I could have made it work and started enjoying it, but I decided to go this route.
Kevin Tully:
I think that's the biggest challenge for myself and others I've talked to is that you don't have that separation of work and home anymore. You start to feel like you're living in your office or vice versa. Were there things that you did when you were at home to help break that up a little bit? Did you have any tips that you'd leave people who are working from home with, in order to separate the day with a workout or just get outside, or just anything that breathes some life into the day a little bit?
Jack Zinda:
Yeah. I think one is, this is going to kind sound silly, is get dressed for work. I think that's helpful mentally.
Jack Zinda:
I think two, having a clear separation between where's your workspace and where's your personal space, if you have the room to do it. If you're in an apartment or something, it could even be this section of the apartment is for work, the rest is not.
Jack Zinda:
I think I like to start the day by doing a little bit of physical activity. Going for a walk that simulates you coming into the office and then coming in, "Okay, now I'm zoned in."
Jack Zinda:
Making sure that your family knows, "When I'm in this space, I'm off limits, just like I was at work." I know that was a challenge for a lot of people was making it clear, "Okay, when I'm here, you can't come find me." Some of our attorneys would go to their upstairs office and they would have to tell their kids, "Listen, you can't come up here during the day because I'm working." That creates a weird dynamic where you can't just focus on work at the time, so I think that can really help.
Kevin Tully:
Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much for sharing all of that information, all those tips. Any last parting words for the audience.
Jack Zinda:
No. Thanks. This has been great. If you want to get in contact with me, feel free to email me at jack@zindalaw.com. Happy to answer any questions you have either about this or any cases you want to talk about. Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin Tully:
Great. Thanks so much, Jack.
Jack Zinda:
No problem, man.
Kevin Tully:
Bye.
Jack Zinda:
Have a good week. Bye.
Kevin Tully:
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.