Category: jobs

career, culture, jobs, medical, mens health, relationships, self improvement, society

Signs of Getting Old

bruceandholly
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
  1. When every time you make eye-contact with someone, they offer you their seat.
  2. When you celebrate every birthday with another tablet.
  3. When you eat less but put on weight. Like the 70’s rock band who decided to reform, looking like they’d just walked off a building site.

Things to Do When you are getting old.

  1. Make a will. It goes without saying.
  2. Make that extra effort to keep in touch with friends and family – especially the younger generation.
  3. Make a Living Will or Advance Direction, so you are in control of your own destiny, when it’s time to say goodbye.

Things not to do.

If you love your job and are at the top of your game, whatever you do, don’t retire, even if you’ve reached state pension age. Yes – take your company pension. You’ve worked for it and paid in to it. But don’t let it stop you working. And you don’t have to. Go freelance if you need to. You may also discover that your earning potential has never been higher. Because you will be getting your pension – PLUS – what you get working. And if you are past state retirement age, you won’t be paying any NI. What a great tax-break that is! So let someone else walk up and down a golf-course or kill time on a bowling green.

business, career, jobs, Law, property, real estate, self improvement, society

Conveyancing – How to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

bruceandholly

Conveyancing – Four Ways to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

Conveyancing is piecework.  Forget hourly rates.  In a competitive legal market, residential clients want to be able to compare quotes.  And professional rules now require transparency when it comes to pricing, so that prospective clients can see at a glance what they are going to have to pay.  But whenever you quote a prospective client, you need to be able to work within budget.  If you overrun that budget because you under-quoted or did not appreciate the extent of the work-tough!  You’ll be doing some free work. That’s not the client’s fault.  Unless you can genuinely say that additional complications cropped up which no one could have ever previously foreseen or because of something your client didn’t tell you.  So it’s all about packing in as much personal productivity as is possible for each working hour of your day.  Here are some tips:

  • Always dictate-dictate-dictate your work.  Never try to hand-type everything.  It’s just too much hard work.  Maybe like me, you lost your secretarial support more years ago than you can even remember.  Never mind.  There is Microsoft voice dictation.  If you’re working on a computer which is Windows 10 or above, you’ll find voice dictation somewhere.  Just go to ‘settings’ and ‘ease of access’.  Dictating your work can be annoying to those around you, particularly if you have to keep repeating the same phrase until your voice recognition gets it right.  Sometimes it never gets it right.  If I say the word ‘comma’, it will tell me to ‘call my mum’.  If I say ‘draft’ as in document, I will always get the draught which blows in from an open window.  So why do I use voice dictation?  Because even with its faults, it’s still three times quicker than trying to type everything out longhand.  Because even if you can touch type, you can’t type as fast as you can speak.  So by using voice dictation I can triple my chargeable output.
  • Standardise-standardise-standardise.  Take a tip from Henry Ford.  Install a conveyor belt.  Metaphorically speaking of course.  Try to create your own all-purpose templates, which you can easily and quickly populate before sending out.
  • Front-load your work, so that you can do as much as possible in one shot.  Don’t wait for the other party solicitor to send across to you their title documentation, download it yourself and save a week.  Never issue documentation in draft if the you can send out something which is a engrossment-ready.
  • Finally, never compromise on the quality of your work or the service which you provide to your client.  Make sure that everything is right first time, the moment it is sent out.  Don’t rely on your client to pick up your mistakes.  Take the trouble to organise your electronic file so that everything is correctly labelled and stored in its correct folder, so that you can find anything in an instant instead of having to trawl through the whole file.  It also makes it easier if a colleague has to look after your file in your absence.
business, career, emotional intelligence, interview, jobs, self improvement

You’re Not Earning Enough!

bruceandholly

Here are some tips to get a pay rise:

  1. If you don’t ask. You won’t get. But it’s got to be done in the right way. Remember that it’s the company which holds all the cards. They don’t have a mortgage to pay.
  2. Never ‘demand’! Ask the boss to ‘consider’? That way everybody saves face. Whatever the outcome.
  3.  Are you hitting your work-targets? Exceed them if you can. Then that pay-rise will be difficult to refuse.
  4. Know what the market is paying for your work and what your colleagues are being paid. Can’t find out? Then BLUFF!
  5. For more information and real-life examples on how to gold-plate your job, read ‘Pass Your Exam; Get That Job, and Build a Career‘. Possibly the best investment you will ever make. j