Better time management can reduce long hours in the office spent meeting your billable time goal. Here are a selection of time management best practices:

Keep track of time spent on all tasks (billable and non-billable): You need to know where you spend your time — billable and non-billable. You can see which are the unproductive time wasters and concentrate on your productive tasks. Today there are technological tools that will highlight time wasting activities.

Prioritize tasks: Time management is partly developing the ability to discern what needs to be done from the rest and then doing it — promptly.

Create a To-Do list and sort your tasks into four categories:

• Important and Urgent: Do these First — they are the most important work to be done today.
• Important but not Urgent: Make room for these... they are longer term goals; schedule them into your day after the important and urgent tasks.
• Urgent but not Important: These are Time Sinks… schedule them low in priority.
• Neither Important nor Urgent: Put on the Never Never list — they are not taking you toward any of your goals.

Ask assigning partner for a billable hours goal for a task (keep assignments on budget): When someone assigns a task, ask “How much time do you want me to put into this before we sit down for a review?” You both establish a block of time and a deadline for the task and avoid “project creep.”

Break complex tasks into smaller, manageable bites: Break bigger tasks into bite-sized chunks and allocate those to your time schedule.