Are you productive or just busy?

Roman Koch, Commercial Legal Counsel EMEA at ManpowerGroup, challenges lawyers to rethink their work habits and shares practical tips to shift from being busy to truly productive.

If you ask any lawyer how they’re doing with their work, a typical, honest response will be:

“Being busy feels like you’re doing the job. It gives the illusion of importance.”

“I’m swamped.”
“My inbox is full.”
“I’ve got back-to-back meetings all day.”

I’d be dishonest if I said I am any different sometimes.

But let me ask you this: Are you truly productive, or just constantly busy?
Being busy feels like you’re doing the job. It gives the illusion of importance. But productivity? That’s doing things that bring value.

Let’s break it down:

Busy is reacting to every email instantly. That might make you seem responsive, but if you receive 40–60 emails per day, you can spend your entire day in your inbox and not actually do anything.

Productive is setting specific times to process emails, using templates (check out Quick Parts in Outlook – very useful!), applying rules, and organising your inbox using folders that reflect your workstreams. Most importantly, it’s deciding what’s important, what’s not, what’s urgent, and what can wait.

Busy is attending every meeting, even if you have no clue what the topic is or there’s no agenda.

Productive is asking for the agenda in advance and deciding which meetings actually require your presence.

Busy is multitasking during calls (if any of you is without this sin, feel free to throw the first stone).

Productive is giving full attention to one task at a time.

So, how can you shift from being busy to being productive? Thousands of books have been written about it, but I like these simple methods:

Audit your time: Track your activities for a week. Identify activities that consume time without adding value or can be automated instead of being done manually. Or you can save time that you spend on looking for information/clauses/repeatable texts (each can may take you a few minutes, but these few minutes every day multiply to hours within a month) instead of building your own playbook?

Create processes: Implement small, manageable routines, like dedicating the first 15 minutes of your workday to prioritising tasks, that build into sustainable systems. I could write much more about it, but no one has explained it better than James Clear in “Atomic Habits”.

Prioritise tasks: Use a method like the Eisenhower Matrix:
Urgent and important? Do them now.
Important but not urgent? Schedule them.
Urgent but not important? Delegate them.
Neither? Eliminate (this might be the most difficult to find, but I believe that everyone can find some examples in their work).

Use technology: leverage tools to automate routine tasks. You don’t need cutting-edge legal tech to start, just learn how to use what you already have, like Microsoft 365 (if you spend most of the day working with contracts like myself, being proficient in MS Word is extremely helpful) and Copilot.

Reflect: Take just five minutes at the end of each week to assess what you planned, what you accomplished and what merely kept you occupied.

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