Enhancing Efficiency: Kanban Boards for Legal Workflow Management with John Grant

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who needs a tool to visualize the work of your team? In this podcast episode, Jim and Tyson interview John Grant about implementing the Kanban methodology in legal practices.

John provides some insight on what the Kanban methodology is and why it is such a great thing to add to law firms. Kanban boards are used in the project management space and can be used as a tool to outline work. It is often used in scrum meetings among teams to break down goals. For example, if a team is working on a project to streamline the intake process, a Kanban board can be used to visualize how that process can go using columns and cards. They are meant to allow users to see workflows and identify areas where there is a roadblock. It can be customized to the likeness of any team!

John shares some of the templates he has created that can help law firms succeed. One is a litigation workflow, which can be used to help outline a case. There is a column for intake and research, one for strategy, one for mediation/negotiation and then one for the trial process. This lays out the whole case in front of you which when visualized can help see the whole picture. The transactional template is similar but might not include a trial phase.

John provides a few examples of different types of Kanban boards. One of them is BusinessMap, which is great for large firms due to the amount of users that can utilize it at once. KanbanZone is another tool that is great for lawyers as there are functionalities that work well for the type of work lawyers do. Choose a Kanban board that works for your firm to maximize its great benefits!

Listen in to learn more from John Grant!

Jim's Hack: Read the book “10 X is Better than 2 X”, by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. There is a concept in the book about how we ease ourselves out of the day to day practice of the firm by using free days.

John’s Tip: Make policies explicit. It is not just about what the policy is and what I want you to do, but getting to the why behind the policy. 

Tyson's Tip: Use sticky notes to start putting stuff on the walls as a starting ground.

Episode Highlights:

• 2:59 The Kanban methodology and its application in law firms
• 7:36 The benefits of using visual Kanban boards to manage tasks
• 12:51 Recommendations for tools like BusinessMap and Kanban Zone 
• 15:46 Best practices for setting up a Kanban board for litigation

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Transcripts: Enhancing Efficiency: Kanban Boards for Legal Workflow Management with John Grant

Jim Hacking (00:00.974)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.378)
And I'm Tyson Mutrex. What's up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking (00:07.366)
What are you chomping on? You got some gum?

Tyson (00:09.735)
protein bar. It's a no-cow dipped chocolate donut protein bar.

Jim Hacking (00:11.021)
Oh, very good.

Jim Hacking (00:16.134)
I meant to tell you that, you know, I know you're big on vegan. We went to the four seasons now, the kitchen that they're, they're tearing out their whole kitchen. It was a Gerard Kraft kitchen, and it's going to become a Gordon Ramsey kitchen. But Amani got some seafood with vegan, uh, squash noodles. They were so freaking good. It was so good. It tasted like they used, um, what are they use? Almonds or some kind of cashew milk or something that tasted really good.

Tyson (00:45.338)
You man, I'll tell you like people, people knock vegans. I get it. It's fun. That's why, but I've had better food as a vegan than I ever had as a, as a non-vegan. It is just night and day. Cause people have to get really creative. They have to get really, like, and this comes from like a steak person, man. I was a steak person. So I, it's, I'm way healthier because of it too. But anyways, let's get on with our guest today. We've got

John Grant, who is the founder of Agile Attorney Consulting and the Agile Attorney Community of Practice. He's a certified process improvement expert who helps law firms and legal teams bust through their workflow bottlenecks to create practices that are more profitable, scalable, and sustainable, usually without adding a headcount or investing in expensive technology. You can learn more at his website, agileattorney.com, or by looking for at.

J.E. Grant III or various permutations of the Agile Attorney on social media. I don't normally do the full one, but I thought that last part was important. So John, welcome to the show.

John E. Grant (01:50.873)
Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. Sorry for throwing big words into my bio. I forgot that I wrote it that way.

Tyson (01:57.211)
It doesn't matter how simple the bios, I will screw it up every time. So all good.

John E. Grant (02:01.499)
No worries.

Jim Hacking (02:02.578)
John, walk us through how you got to here today. So how, what's your experience? Why did you do this? What's going on?

John E. Grant (02:08.678)
Yeah, I'll give you the quick bio, which is I come from a family of lawyers. I, of course, wanted nothing to do with becoming a lawyer as I sort of ended my undergrad education, wound up in the technology industry, had this great experience with kind of one of the great, maybe less heard of success stories of the…

the late 90s and early 2000s, which was I got on early with Getty Images, or actually a company that was a predecessor to Getty. We were disruptive innovators, right? We used technology to create better client experiences, customer experiences, and disrupted and then consolidated the whole dang industry around ourselves. And I think everyone, you know, you see Getty go by all the time today.

And then I got a wild hair and went to law school anyway. Went into practice, actually went back, was in-house at Getty for a brief amount of time for a number of years, not quite a decade, but I had my own IP boutique practice focused mostly on copyright trademark stuff. And then eventually learned that I was able to use a lot of the things that I learned in my technology career, and most of that was in operations in the tech career.

to apply to my law practice and I learned that I like doing that stuff, working on the practice more than I liked working in the practice. So I hung a shingle as a consultant a decade ago and for the most part I've been doing it ever since.

Tyson (03:42.822)
So I think you and I, I think we will get along really, really well. I think we would hang out and build a talk like dorky system stuff quite a bit. I would really enjoy it. You're big into Kanban method. And the first time I ever saw a Kanban board, I didn't know what was called a Kanban board. It was 2011. It was, I'll tell you the exact day. It was March 4th, 2011. And it was the birth of our first…

John E. Grant (03:52.539)
I'm all for it.

John E. Grant (04:02.54)
Right.

John E. Grant (04:06.046)
Okay. Ooh.

Tyson (04:12.318)
son, first child. And I remember just kind of stumbling through the hallways and looking up and seeing they had this really cool board. I had these different columns and I'm thinking, wow, that's cool. What is this? This is a really neat way of getting things done. And then I don't remember what I Googled it, but I finally figured it was called a Kanban board. It was the coolest thing. And we use it. We use Kanbans really heavily in our firm.

John E. Grant (04:24.086)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (04:41.632)
Nice.

Tyson (04:41.85)
I wonder what drew you to it though.

John E. Grant (04:44.97)
Yeah, so I came to, and Kanban Kanban, I've learned it as Kanban. I don't think it really matters. I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know what the right way to say it is. It comes from Japan. And I first, you know, I maybe had encountered them without knowing it, but the place where I first learned about Kanban boards in the context of sort of project management process improvement was when I started,

doing more and more around the Scrum methodology. And I won't deep dive, but there's, you know, a few different high level methods. And what's interesting is a lot of them use ComDOM boards. It's a really effective tool. So there's lean and lean manufacturing, and that's probably the place where the hospital where your son was born got it. There's been a big push, you know, through the sort of late nineties and two thousands to do lean things in healthcare settings.

Where I encountered it was through the Agile lens. And again, I initially came into the Agile methodology through Scrum and Scrum is a tool that uses a lot of Kanban boards for project management. And, you know, and initially that was my thought, right? As I was doing more and more of this work with lawyers, I thought, well, hey, this Scrum is really interesting. It's transforming the technology industry.

Is there something in this for lawyers? And the answer is yes, although not in the way that I thought. And so I tried for a couple of years and had paying clients, some of whom are still with me, I should add, that were trying to do Scrum on their legal practices. And it eventually broke down. And one of the things that is true about the Scrum methodology is that it's really well-suited when you have a team that can be dedicated to a single project.

And that team, if you're starting to do multiple projects, scrum starts to break down. And in the tech world, when they're talking about multi-projects, they're talking about three or four or seven. And of course in a law firm, that's like an extreme multi-project environment, right? If each case is a project, you're dealing with dozens, maybe as many as hundreds per lawyer, hopefully not quite that many, but it depends on the practice, right? That's not unmanageable for certain practices.

John E. Grant (07:08.158)
Um, and so scrum really did start to break down, but it was through scrum that I learned about this thing called the Kanban methodology. And that, you know, I think the reason that I reached out and was like, Hey, I, we should do an episode together is that you did one of your Saturday, you know, sort of snack size episodes and you were talking about your Kanban board. And I was like, Oh, that's great. But that's just step one. And like, I would love to come on your show and talk about what are the other parts of the Kanban methodology.

that are really useful for lawyers because it is sort of a methodology in and of itself at this point.

Jim Hacking (07:44.41)
Well, giddy up, let's do it. So tell us what was missing from Tyson's little bite-sized portions. Where do lawyers need to take Kanban?

John E. Grant (07:45.995)
Yeah, okay.

John E. Grant (07:53.787)
Yeah, so there are kind of five components at a high level to the methodology, and the one that is almost always the starting point for people, although it doesn't have to be, is make the work visible. And usually that's make the work visible using a Kanban board. And Tyson, I think probably part of what you get from it, and I'd love to hear what you say, is when you're a knowledge worker, when your craft is something that is…

inherently hard to see, right? It lives either as ones and zeros on our devices or in the gray matter between our ears. We don't get a lot of physical, you know, visual sense of the work that we're doing. And the Kanban board is a visual fiction, right? It lets you in the form of the columns on the board representing maybe different stages of your workflow or stages of your process and then the cards on your board representing

Depending on the level you're working at, the cards can represent matters, which are relatively big projects. The cards can represent tasks, which are relatively small projects. It can be somewhere in between. There's no one way to do it. But there's something really magical about making the work visible. And again, I'd love to hear, Tyson, as a Kanban board user, how's that been for you?

Tyson (09:13.126)
Yeah, so we are, ours, we do have some based on tasks, some based on project. We have, so our, our actual trial calendar is on a Kanban board. It's divided by month. Okay. So it has different cases. We also have each team has what we call a big board. It has every case on it to show where it is in each, each phase. Uh, and then we also have like where we are when it comes to actual tasks. Um, and they, these are, some are divided by litigation. Some are divided by pre litigation. It depends on.

John E. Grant (09:24.566)
Right on. Yeah.

John E. Grant (09:33.56)
Yeah.

Tyson (09:42.034)
you know, what team is working on it. And, but then also on top of that though, with what you're talking about, you take different colors, right? So that can mean different things. So there's different tags or there's different dates on there. And you can add all these different elements to it that you can look at it. Okay, boom. I see that case is, I mean, let me use it. I'll use one on the trial calendar. Okay, I know that, okay, that one's set for trial in this month, but we're still in written discovery.

John E. Grant (09:49.43)
Yeah.

Tyson (10:10.258)
Um, that means we've got some work to do, right? And then the trade actually has the date, the specific date on it. So I can look at it just visually right there and know exactly where we are with that file and a split second. So that's, I mean, that's just, just a few examples as to how we use it.

John E. Grant (10:21.773)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (10:25.298)
Yeah, no, and I love that. And it's, you know, when I'm working with new clients, a lot of what I'll, the place where I'll usually start is with that big board, right? So basically it's got a high level workflow that represents the, the typical flow for the matters that you handle.

And then yeah, color is great. You know, if you've got a few different matter types inside of that, right? If you're a divorce firm, you might have one for divorce with kids, a different color for divorce without kids, a different color for modifications. Right. And then what's great about that is you can take a step back and visually get a sense of, oh, what's my mix in my practice. Right. And you can run a report and you can get a percentage and that's one way to process information, but there's something about that visual pathway that just really seems to hit home in a different way.

than the more analytic, right, thinking fast and slow, the system to slow pathway, it's different. So that's great.

Jim Hacking (11:21.337)
So I'm…

way behind you guys when it comes to using Kanban. And I did buy the big ass calendar from Jesse, I forget his last name, but it's huge. And I've got all my calendar on there for the year and I got different colored stickers. This is like the first time I've ever done anything like this. But last night my wife asked me about some weekend and I just, I sat there and I thought and I could visualize the whole thing and I knew exactly what was happening that weekend because

John E. Grant (11:40.183)
Mm-hmm.

John E. Grant (11:48.119)
Yeah. Totally.

Jim Hacking (11:53.065)
in a virtual world or with a team that's sort of spread over.

John E. Grant (11:56.446)
Yeah, so I mean, I don't know, Tyson, I don't know what tool you're using for your firm. Vinny, tell me.

Tyson (12:04.946)
So we use, we're in the Zoho universe. So, but so for our case management system, we've got Filevine. And what we did was with what you were talking about is we didn't like that the tasks were hidden, right? They were kind of, you have to get the tasks. Like you can go and look at all the tasks, but like, it's just like a lot, a bunch of tasks, but like on a Kanban board or Kanban, I'm at the chain. I can't, I'm not gonna change. I'm saying Kanban. Okay. Yeah. I can see them all on a, and you can see.

John E. Grant (12:08.299)
Got it. Okay.

John E. Grant (12:12.267)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (12:18.359)
Mm-hmm.

John E. Grant (12:26.486)
Yeah, either way. No, you'd say it either way. Truly, there's not a right way.

Tyson (12:31.87)
Like, okay, who's it assigned to? Like someone's way behind because all of their tasks are like, so yeah. So we use Zoho to manage our tasks.

John E. Grant (12:35.486)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (12:39.414)
Got it. Yeah, yeah. So, and that's the thing, right? So I would say pre-pandemic, I was maybe a little bit too dogmatic in the sense that I really liked to start people with a physical board. So whiteboard, draw some columns, cases become sticky notes and run it that way. And the thing I like about…

using a whiteboard and sticky notes is that there, the user adoption is really easy, right? There's no learning curve. Everyone knows how to use those tools. Of course, in the pandemic hit, and no one can be in the office at the same place at the same time. And so all of the clients that I was working with, if they hadn't already started to migrate to online Kanban boards, then they did it real quick. I find, and you know, this is…

again, maybe being a little bit, pedantic's not the right word, but I don't wanna be like too snobbish about it. There are some tools that have Kanban boards that aren't good at promoting the Kanban methodology. And then there are other tools that do both, right? That are Kanban boards that do the Kanban methodology. The ones that are reasonably accessible and easy to get started with are Trello and Asana and…

I run into a lot of law firms like, I'm already paying for Office 365, so I'm just gonna use Microsoft Planner. And that's fine. Like for getting started, it's great. It, you know, I encourage people, use the tools you have. Let's add complexity as you can articulate a need for complexity. But pretty soon with those tools, you're gonna break down in terms of where you can go with the method, if you care about going with the method. Just making the work visible is incredibly powerful.

So I'm not saying anyone has to go the next steps, but probably a good segue. Well, and I should say the tools that I like, there's two that are my go-tos. One of them is called Business Map. It is maybe a little bit better suited for larger firms. One of the things about Business Map is their default license is 15 users. And so smaller firms find that to be a little bit of a reach. If you've already got 10 or 12, no big deal. But if you only…

John E. Grant (14:48.994)
you know, a three or five person team, then buying a 15 user license seems like a lot. The other tool I really like is called Kanban Zone. And part of what I like about them is that they've worked a lot with me to add features and functionality that are useful for lawyers. And I've actually worked with them. We've got some great templates on their tool that are good, you know, get you started for basic legal workflows. So the thing about the methodology that I like about those tools,

is when you get into these other components. So you've made the work visible, you got a board, now what? And one of the things that I'm trying to do when I work with a team that's adopting Kanban is to get work to flow better. So one of the things about the board and Tyson you alluded to it a minute ago, it lets you see where work is stuck and it allows you to be more intentional as a business owner, as a process manager.

to go in and try to figure out why is this work stuck? What things can I try to do to get it unstuck? And so the real focus of the Kanban methodology is to make sure that work is flowing in a smooth and predictable way. Sometimes that's also a fast way, but as you know, right, we can't control the speed of a lot of parts of the legal process. And so I try to say,

while speed is nice, smooth and predictable is better. In fact, you know, there's the thing you'll hear from military folks sometimes that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I liked that a lot, right? I had a personal trainer for a while that was a former army ranger, and that was his mantra all the time, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And it's true, right? Because if you go too fast too quickly, you're gonna…

pull a muscle if you're in the gym or you're gonna sort of move fast and break things which is not really what you're trying to do when you're handling someone's legal case. So establishing flow is really sort of the next the next piece to the methodology and it you know that can manifest itself in a lot of different ways. There's sort of two places that I find can be really impactful. One of them yeah of course yeah yeah.

Tyson (17:08.766)
So can we, before we get to that, we'll leave that as a cliffhanger for a second and let Jim ask you about that one. I do, I don't want to get too far down the path before we kind of step back a second. And can you tell people maybe best practices on the actual setup of the board? Let's just start with a really basic for people that have never done it before. So can you kind of give them a basic understanding of the way it should be structured and the way maybe you think it should be, because I'm sure that, you know, 10 people might have different opinions.

John E. Grant (17:25.998)
Sure.

Yeah.

Tyson (17:38.038)
on how it should be structured. But can you give maybe the most basic structure?

John E. Grant (17:38.516)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (17:41.93)
Yeah. Sure. Go ahead, Jim.

Jim Hacking (17:44.39)
And then I'm going to have a hypothetical project and you can maybe walk us like, because we bought a building a year and a half ago. This would have been very helpful to have. And I thought we could throw that in as a hypothetical to your method.

John E. Grant (17:52.61)
Hahaha.

Yeah, yeah, there's a whole genre of Kanban for construction projects, which is not my jam, but yeah, it's a big thing. So Tyson, your question, I think… So the templates that I've built that are part of the Kanban zone ecosystem now, and I'm happy to do it for anybody else, there's really two high level ones. One is more for litigation workflow and one is more for

John E. Grant (18:25.662)
When you're just getting started, I think the easiest and probably best way to start your litigation board is just follow the rules of civil procedure or criminal procedure if that's where you are, right? And so there's an intake column, there's maybe an initial research or whatever wrapping your head around the case is, strategy.

Then there's a pleadings, there's maybe written discovery. A lot of teams I work with will split written discovery and oral discovery, again, depending on what their particular matter type is. Experts are on there too, if that's something you deal with. Coming out of that, you've got your post discovery motions, usually MSJ, sometimes there's a mediation negotiation phase that happens in there. And then you're talking about trial prep, trial and post trial.

And so pretty high level buckets at first. As you get more advanced with it, you might start pulling some of those buckets apart and saying, okay, well, we're in pretrial, but really pretrial has three or four or five different sub phases the way that we deal with it. And so you can sort of build those in. But I wouldn't, I usually say don't go to that level of detail too quickly, right? There's some magic in just getting started and then add complexity when the thing that you're using,

asks for complexity. If you're on the transactional side, it's kind of similar, right? There's an intake, there's a initial strategy. Usually there's a drafting, an internal quality control, a client approval, negotiation, execution, and then post-signing wrap-up, whatever it happens to be. And I think each of those can be columns on the board. And again, for most transactional practices, that covers the basics.

Jim Hacking (20:14.115)
All right, so.

I threw out a hypothetical, but that was probably too construction based. I have a different one for you. So let's, let's say, cause this is actually a true thing. Let's say that July 1st, my senior attorney, his wife is kind of is on a sabbatical and they're going to go live in France for a year. So we have to think of everything that we need to do to make that work, all the different aspects of it. And then like, we're going to have to have the whole lead up to when he's gone. I mean, he's going to work for us. We don't know yet part-time quarter time, halftime, whatever.

John E. Grant (20:19.298)
Sure. OK.

John E. Grant (20:31.34)
Love it.

John E. Grant (20:36.12)
Yeah.

Jim Hacking (20:45.813)
So how would you analyze that?

John E. Grant (20:48.214)
Yeah, so that's interesting because that's a project in and of itself, right? That's not like you managing the work that is your client work through your law practice. That's a project. And so for that, I would actually say, let's build a task level board, not a project level board. And so the project itself is, I don't know what the guy's name is, you know, Jim. It's great. Andrew. Andrew works from France for a year. And.

Jim Hacking (21:10.297)
Andrew.

John E. Grant (21:16.602)
And so you call it Project Blue with an EU. And then, right, Andre, love it. Yeah, Project Andre. So in that setup, what you're gonna do is set up your board. So the basic Kanban board is really just three columns. It's to do, doing, and done, or ready, doing, and done. And what you would probably start with is fill that to do column.

Jim Hacking (21:21.986)
Yeah, we were going to call it Project Andre, because that's French for Andre.

John E. Grant (21:44.918)
with the brain dump of all the things that you think you've got to figure out. And then once you've filled it, I would probably add some columns to the left. So I would say, I'd maybe add a column that is this week, I would add a column that is next month or this month, and then beyond that, a column that is like soonish, right? Doesn't have to be set in stone, but what you're gonna do then is

you've now basically got a ready for work now, you've got a ready for work sometime this week, ready for work later this month, and you're going to take all those tasks that you created, all that brain dump that you made, and you're gonna prioritize it. What is the order of events? What are the things that need to happen today? Is there a predecessor, successor relationship between these things? And then you're going to,

the two of you or whoever on your team is responsible for figuring this stuff out, you're going to manage it through the in progress column, right? So you're going to pull work from ready. You're going to bring it into working. Um, and then you're going to work on just that one thing until it's all the way to done. Right? So the board I described a minute ago, uh, you know, for, for a matter level board, what that really is, is a

breakout of the in progress column and it's saying there's lots of phases to in progress. The board I just described for you is really a breakout of the ready column saying okay well there's we got to build sort of a funnel that is able to get work into my active attention span, right, my finite capacity and we want it to come in more or less the right order, right? Probably doesn't have to be perfect but you can sort of sort that out.

And then you can put those two concepts together. So you might say, okay, you know, in terms of my working column for Project Andre, there's gonna be an initial drafting or creating the policy or giving you an email about the software that they're gonna need, whatever it happens to be. And then there's gonna be a Jim review and approve column. And so there's like an initial work and then there's an approval and then there's a done.

John E. Grant (24:06.49)
And the nice thing about that, and this actually is a great segue into one of the concepts I was going to talk about a minute ago, is you want to limit the number of balls that you throw into the air on that project at any one time. Because if you just say, okay, we got to do all the things, then you don't know where to start, you don't know where to finish, if there's something like that.

well, okay, before we do any of this, we gotta figure out what VPN provider are we gonna use in Paris so that we can get into our network systems, right? Whatever it happens to be. But if that's the first thing that needs to happen, you wanna maximize your learning about the project by doing that thing first, because that's gonna have a cascade through on all the rest of the work. And so the concept that I was gonna talk about a minute ago is to limit work in process.

to limit the number of balls that you're juggling at any one time, because you want to get some things to done before you start a new thing in whatever your workflow happens to be.

Tyson (25:13.53)
I think that's great because I was going to ask you about that specific thing. So I'm glad you covered that. Um, we are getting close to time, but I've got more questions. I want to ask you, um, there is. Yeah. The, the, so I got really big into a world with that email and I believe many of the concepts. One of the things that he talks about in his book, Cal Newport talks about in the book is like you, you're doing everything like.

John E. Grant (25:22.626)
Sure, we can always come back and do a part two if you want to.

John E. Grant (25:30.4)
Yeah.

Tyson (25:40.306)
like in one place, right? Like you're not jumping from place to place. And so what I really like about Cain Band and something that we've been really, really working on over the last nine months is everything's in the task. So the notes in the task. So if you're having conversations about the note or the task inside the task, like so you're doing the work in the task. It is, so any tips or advice on how people can do things like that? Cause like that part's really important. It's gonna, it saves so much time.

John E. Grant (25:51.435)
Yes.

John E. Grant (26:07.382)
Yeah, I think that's a great point. So, and I love that book too, right? And the email inbox is a black hole of productivity, right? It's just not, you know, whatever, the hyperactive hive mind thing that he talks about in that book.

And then everyone's like, oh, well, I'll put it in Slack or I'll put it in Teams and I'll get the thread and that'll work and it's no better. In fact, it can be even worse because the interruption capabilities of those tools are really, really high. And so I think where Cal Newport goes in that book and what certainly works for me and my clients is that the card becomes the Slack channel, right? So all of the communication relative to that project, that matter lives in the card.

and you don't have this other place and this other interruption that is coming in. And the different systems have different ways of signaling like, hey, this card that you're an owner of or you're a watcher of has an update and you should go pay attention to it at some point. But again, one of the things I like about Business Map and Kanban Zone is they both let you control how often those communications pop up for you. So you can say, oh, I want this to happen in the app or I wanna get an email digest or.

or whatever it is. And so it really allows you, and this is related to limited work in process, right? And this gets into the deep work stuff from Cal Newport 2. Monotasking is far and away the most efficient way to complete a chunk of work. And every time you have your attention span fractured, you invite all kinds of trouble. And so if you can use the Kanban board and the Kanban card to…

become that deep workplace where you're monotasking on that project. It's like, oh yeah, hey, I need to get something from Tyson on that. I'm going to at mention Tyson inside of the card. And then Tyson's got settings in, you know, in your version of the thing that's like, yeah, okay, great. Show me all of my at mentions once a day or twice a day, and I'll go triage and deal with them that way.

Tyson (28:09.318)
Yeah, and if the right platform is, if you have the right platform, you can do, you can create a subtask within that, that way, which is another way. Yeah. Which is another way. Yeah. And so I, I am at the stop there. Uh, we, we had the, we're getting close to time. So we're, you and I are going to continue, continue conversations. Uh, this is, this has been fun. I mean, the time just flew, but, um, I'm going to wrap things up before I do. I want to remind everyone to, if you're interested in joining the guild, we'd love to have you go to maxlawguild.com. It's a.

John E. Grant (28:15.378)
For sure. Yeah, yeah. And they almost all do that.

John E. Grant (28:23.694)
Sure.

John E. Grant (28:27.455)
Yeah, I love it.

Tyson (28:39.166)
great place with a lot of great people. If you got something from this episode, which I'm pretty sure you probably did, then give us a five-star review. It'd be fantastic. We would absolutely love it. And if you're not in the big Facebook group on Facebook, go to search Max Malor on Facebook and you'll be able to find us. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking (29:01.286)
There are a lot of us talking in the Guild about the book 10x is easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. One of our prior guests just shared on it and Becca did a podcast on it. It's a tremendous book, which is not necessarily my hack. My hack comes out of the book. And it's this concept of how we ease ourselves out of.

the day-to-day practice of the firm. This is something that a lot of people have a lot of hard times with. And one of the concepts that Dan Sullivan talks a lot about is free days. And I always thought that the great benefit of free days was that you come back rejuvenated, you get time away, you get to think, and that's all true. But another benefit of the free day that I hadn't really thought about is that when you're gone, people have to figure shit out.

Right? So when you're gone there, so them exercising that muscle of starting to figure things out on your own. And it's almost like when your kids get old enough to be left alone without a babysitter, like maybe the first time you go over to the neighbors for an hour, then the second time you go out to dinner with your spouse or your significant other, then the next time maybe you go for a short weekend away, like, and sort of easing into that.

experience. I think that the analogy comes true too with, you know, sometimes people just want to like, I'm going to be out of here and I'm going to delegate and I'm going to give all this stuff, but I think that the activity of being away has another value, which I hadn't really thought of, which is this idea that people then start to figure things out.

Tyson (30:42.162)
I like that a lot. And that there, you know, he, uh, Cal Newport does talk about it in the book a little bit about like when you create that friction, which is, which is good, but very good Jimbo. Uh, all right, John, we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack. Could be a book, could be a podcast, could be a quote, you name it. Uh, what you got for us.

John E. Grant (30:59.274)
Yeah, I'll segue on that, which is one, because one of the things that I didn't get to is this idea from the methodology around making policies explicit.

and being really clear, not just about what the policy is and what I want you to do, but getting to what's the why behind the policy. So I've got a template that I use with a lot of my clients that I use, but the key part of it is that before we draft a policy, or sometimes after we draft it, but the first part of the policy is always, why are we doing it this way? And I think if, Jim, to the point of your hack, if you engage people around the why, then they're more likely,

if they don't do things the exact way you would have done it, you've got a better chance that they're going to get close enough in terms of meeting the purpose of the thing. And so, as you leave instructions, make sure there's a why statement in there, including to your clients. Give them a why. Why do you need this piece of homework? Why do we need this thing? I think you'll get much better work and sometimes faster work if you said it that way.

Jim Hacking (32:02.822)
That's awesome.

Tyson (32:04.286)
Love it. Good advice. All right, for my tip of the week is, this relates to what John was talking about earlier. If you just want to start simple and start putting stuff on the walls, Jay Muir recommended this to me a while ago, and I think it's really great. If you just go to Amazon and search like whiteboard roll or something like that, like there's a bunch of different, like instead of like having to pay for like a, you know, expensive thing you put on the wall or a whiteboard, you can buy these whiteboard rolls. And we actually did this at our house where like you, we just take a black line and just mark.

Create the columns and you can put your sticky notes, you know down the line as you as you need to go So Jim for your project you can do that just use sticky notes. It's really simple So if you want to start basic, that's a really basic easy way cheap way. I'm looking at a roll right now It's like, you know $17 for eight feet, but the one we have is like way bigger It's like 50 feet and it was like $20 So you can get a lot of rolls of whiteboard paper. So and it just sticks It's just static electricity just sticks to the wall. So really handy but

All right, John, thank you so much. Uh, a lot of fun, really enjoyed this. Um, I can't, can't wait to keep the conversation going. So thank you so much.

John E. Grant (33:05.974)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great, all right, thanks.