Time is not an excuse for lawyers not to blog
I hear it all the time. “I’m a busy lawyer, I don’t have time to blog.” “You have no idea how busy our lawyers are, it’s my job as a marketing professional in our law firm to get our blog done for the lawyers so they don’t have to spend time blogging.”
It’s all bunk. And it’s no excuse.
As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write in their just released business bestseller, Rework, ‘No time is not an excuse.’
When you want something bad enough, you make the time — regardless of your obligations. The truth is most people don’t want it bad bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time. Don’t let yourself off the hook with the excuse of time. Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses. It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true.
Besides, the perfect time never arrives. You’re always too young or old or busy or broke or something else. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they’ll never happen.
I work with busy lawyers every day at LexBlog. They’re leading lawyers in their niche or locale. They’re not recent grads. They’re involved on civic boards and other associations. They’ve got kids. They’ve got other obligations.
But these lawyers have decided that for professional and business development reasons, they’re going to blog. They want to continue to grow their network and influence. More than one lawyer has told me they’re going to blog because they are a national leader in their niche and they’re not going to forfeit their position.
So I’m not buying the no time excuse. I’ve seen busier lawyers than you who have drawn a line in the sand and decided to blog. If you don’t want to blog because you’re afraid to try something new, are afraid to engage others to build business relationships, or believe blogging is beneath a person of your stature, admit it. But don’t use the no time excuse.
If you’re working in legal marketing and think you are doing your lawyers a favor by blogging for them or cutting and pasting their ‘newsletter like’ content into a blog to save the lawyer’s time, you’re not. The lawyers are losing the opportunity to engage their target audience. Their blog will not work well for business development. Heck, you’ve created a bigger time suck for you and the lawyers because you’re both going to be working on other forms of business development because the blog won’t be working like you hoped it would.
There’s many a lawyer in this country, who after mastering the art of blogging (including the use of a RSS reader), spending 4 to 6 hours a month blogging. And they’re experiencing professional and business development doing so.
You have the time.