Forget about New Year's resolutions for increasing productivity in your law practice. You make 'em and then break 'em.

Instead, take a look at how you organize your information and use your time. Consider areas that are working well and those that could use some improvement. Develop a plan for improvement in those target areas. Here are some productivity tips to get you on your way:

1. Plan your projects.

Apply project management techniques from the business environment to legal work. Cases and transactions are projects that involve many tasks and subtasks, scheduling of work and staff, and monitoring of progress. Project management is simply thinking through a complex matter in advance, breaking it down into smaller tasks and subtasks, assigning interim deadlines and holding people accountable. Have a written plan for each matter listing the next action to be completed, and review your plans on a weekly basis to help you determine the priorities for the coming week.

2. Consider "do" dates, not just "due" dates.

Legal work tends to be deadline driven. Lawyers have ticklers to remind them how much time is left before a filing deadline or a closing date. We tend to look at due dates for our deliverables rather than figuring out when to actually do the work. Instead of recording just the deadline date in your calendar, review your project plans and existing commitments, and determine when you will actually do the work.

3. Focus on your work.

We often come to the end of a day wondering how it is we could have worked so hard and accomplished so little of what we had intended to do. One way to accomplish priorities is the techniques of timeblocking. Schedule a few one-hour blocks of time during the day when you can concentrate on work. Eliminate or at least try to minimize interruptions during those times. Make yourself unavailable during those periods don't pick up the phone, resist the urge to check your email, and put a note on your door asking visitors to come back in an hour. Honor this time as an appointment with yourself. If an emergency arises, your secretary will let you know. After the period of focus, check your voice mail and email.

4. Don't check your email all the time.

Many lawyers feel they must check their blackberries all the time and provide near instant response to emails. No wonder they complain of email overload. While it's a great productivity tool, email when not managed properly is also a drain on your ability to concentrate. Even Microsoft has dubbed the flipping back and forth between focused concentration on work and checking email "continuous partial attention."

Rather than being chained to email, allow yourself to focus on a project for an hour as described above and then turn to your email. You will get more done in a day and record more time on your timesheets as you capture both the time spent in focused work and the time spent in reviewing and responding to emails.

5. Process your incoming information.

Clutter is generally the result of indecision. This is true of the paper buildup in your office as well as the number of emails retained in your electronic inbox. When you pick up a piece of paper or open your inbox, make decisions on the incoming information. If you don't need it, toss it or delete it. If you want to save it, send it to the matter file or move it to a folder. If you delegate it to someone else, forward it to them and make a note in your calendar for follow-up. If it requires action on your part, move it out of the inbox (paper or electronic) into a tickler file or action folder for follow-up. Make a note on your calendar for when you will do the task.

6. Work effectively with your secretary.

Make your secretary an essential part of your team. Provide the context of your work and let him or her know when you will be out of the office. Have a brief weekly meeting where you let your secretary know what's coming up for the week, and he or she can remind you of pending matters.

7. Delegate.

Delegation allows you to leverage the time and skill of others and frees you to work on matters that only you can handle. Review the tasks and subtasks in your project plans. Ask yourself the questions posed by management guru Peter Drucker: What am I doing that only I can do? What am I doing that can be done by somebody else? In answering the second question, determine what tasks can be appropriately delegated to others and make those assignments.

8. Communicate clearly.

Whenever I ask the question in workshops as to whether lawyers are good communicators, very few hands, if any, go up. This is true whether the audience is associates, partners, firm administrators or legal secretaries. Unclear communications wastes time. Think through what you intend to say in advance. Your communication is only clear when it is understood by the receiver the way you intended it to be understood. Since you may not have been clear on your expectations, ask your listeners to communicate back to you what they heard and understood.

9. Maintain a balance between work and other parts of your life.

Try to schedule time for family and other personal needs. Working longer and harder beyond a certain tipping point increases stress, which can be counterproductive. A well-balanced life can lead to greater productivity as greater satisfaction outside of work can lead to sharper focus in the office.

10. Laugh heartily and often.

Laughter is one of the great stress reducers and medical research has demonstrated that laughter is good for us. Take your work very seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously. Try to see humor in situations whenever possible.

Consider applying these productivity techniques to your practice in 2007. Stay with them to determine if they work for you, try to make them part of your daily routine and get more done with less stress.

Irwin Karp is a productivity consultant and an attorney. He presents practical time management seminars for lawyers at bar association CLE programs and at law firms around the country. Irwin's in-house customized workshops for law firms and practice groups include project management, overcoming email overload, delegation and communications skills, information management and time management. He also coaches individual attorneys in improving productivity in their practices. He can be reached at (916) 446-6846 or by email at ikarp@productivetime.com.