Most lawyers on the partnership track have tried time blocking. You carve out the slots, and then a real deadline arrives and the block gets sacrificed. The problem isn’t your discipline. It’s that most people are time blocking the wrong things: treating their diary like a to-do list with timestamps rather than a deliberate design for the kind of partner they’re trying to become.
In a recent group coaching session with lawyers on the partnership track, one had BD and junior team check-ins locked in weekly. One had planning blocks she kept using for other things. One’s only real non-negotiable was exercise. All three were working hard. None of their diaries reflected their career intentions. This episode gives you the framework to change that.
In this episode you will learn:
- The four categories that belong in every partnership-track diary: team investment, BD, planning, and white space, and why each one earns its place
- Why including personal commitments in your planning block isn’t a distraction, it’s a decision-making tool
- The reactive work trap: why the urgent stuff always finds its own space, and what that means for how you protect everything else
- How to stop building your calendar entirely around other people’s needs, and start treating your own development time as a client deadline
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
If you want structured support to build a diary that actually reflects your career intentions, we have three resources inside the Progress To Partner Academy. Our How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward course helps you clarify your priorities and build a plan that holds. The Default Diary exercise takes you through designing a weekly structure that protects what matters. And the Perfect Day exercise is a practical way of working out what you want your working life to look like before you start filling your calendar.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
Most professionals on partnership track have tried time blocking. You carve out slots for business development, for planning, for the work that matters to your career rather than just your clients. And then a real deadline arrives, or a partner calls, or an email lands that feels urgent, and the block gets sacrificed. Again.
The problem isn’t your discipline. And it isn’t the system. The problem is that most people are time blocking the wrong things. They’re treating their diary like a to-do list with timestamps, rather than a deliberate design for the kind of future partner, they’re trying to become. Today, we’re going to fix that.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss a new episode.
Right. Let’s talk about what actually belongs in a non-negotiable diary.
In a recent group coaching session I ran with a group of professionals on the partnership track, I asked all three of them a simple question: what’s in your diary every week, no matter what? One said business development time and a check-in with his junior team. Another said she’d blocked time for planning but kept using it for other things. The third said her only real non-negotiable was exercise, and she knew that wasn’t enough.
What struck me about that conversation was not that any of them were lazy or unserious. All three were working extremely hard. The issue was that their diaries reflected their reactive workload rather than their career intentions. Every urgent thing got space. The important things kept getting bumped.
Here’s the reframe that changes this. A partner’s job is not the same as a senior associate’s or senior managers job. A partner’s job has two core components that a senior associate’s typically doesn’t: building the team beneath them, and winning work. If those two things aren’t protected in your diary now, you’re not building a practice, you’re just billing hours at a senior level. And you can’t demonstrate partner readiness if there’s no evidence you’re doing partner-level things.
So what are the non-negotiables? Let me give you the framework I use.
The first category is team investment. This is your check-in with the people you’re developing, however informally. It doesn’t need to be long. Even fifteen minutes a week with a key team member, where you ask what they’re working on, whether they have enough, and what they want to learn, builds something over time. The delegate in my session who had a five-year relationship with a junior fee earner didn’t achieve that by accident. He’d built regular touchpoints into his week and held them. Put it in the diary. Then guarded it.
The second category is business development. Not “when I have a quiet moment,” because that moment doesn’t come. A fixed slot, weekly if possible, where you are doing one specific BD activity. It could be following up on a contact, writing an article, preparing for a speaking opportunity. The content matters less than the consistency. One of the participants in my session had been putting this in his diary since our first session together, and it was already becoming habitual. That’s the point. You’re not building a pipeline in a day. You’re building a habit that builds over time.
The third category is planning time. And this is where most people go wrong, because they think planning time means planning work. It doesn’t. It means planning your week in full, including personal commitments, so that when something new arrives, you can see clearly whether it really is an emergency or whether it just feels like one. One of the participants in my session had recently started including personal tasks in her planning block, things like scheduling a medical appointment or sorting her kids’ passports, alongside her professional priorities. Her point was that her brain carries those things regardless, and if they’re not on the plan, they leak into her focus during work time. Getting everything onto one list, then blocking time for it, meant she could actually make decisions about what was urgent rather than reacting to whatever felt loudest.
The fourth category is white space. This is the one people resist most. The idea of leaving slots unfilled feels wasteful, especially in a profession where time really does cost money. But if every hour is either planned or billable, you have no capacity for the genuine emergency when it lands. And it will land. For many professionals the phone ringing with something urgent is not a surprise, it’s a feature of the job. Particularly if you sell a distressed purchase like litigation or insolvency. If you have no white space, that feature becomes a crisis every time. Build the white space in deliberately, and it stops being a problem.
Now, a word on what is not a non-negotiable. The reactive stuff. The email that arrived this morning. The request that feels urgent because someone used capital letters. Those things will always find their way into your day. You do not need to protect space for them, because they protect their own space. What needs protecting is everything else.
One more thing. The professionals in my session who were struggling most with their diaries had a common habit: they were building their calendar entirely around other people’s needs and then wondering why they felt out of control. Your diary is not a public resource. Protecting time for your own development, your team, and your BD isn’t selfishness. It’s the job of a future partner.
A non-negotiable diary isn’t about having perfect discipline. It’s about being honest with yourself about what you need to protect in order to become the partner you want to be, and then treating those things with the same seriousness you’d treat a client deadline.
If you want help building this kind of intentional structure, we have three resources in the Progress To Partner Academy that I’d point you towards. The first is our How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward course, which helps you get clear on your priorities and build a plan that actually holds. The second is our Default Diary exercise, which takes you through exactly how to design a weekly structure that protects the things that matter. And the third is our Perfect Day exercise, which is a powerful way of working out what you actually want your working life to look like before you start filling your calendar.
I’ve put links to all three directly in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my books, Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast.
Your action for this week: open your diary and look at next week. Find the BD time, the team investment time, and the planning slot. If they’re not there, put them in now, before anything else fills those spaces.
If you have enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode.
Thanks for listening!
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