What do Back to the Future, a law firm intake team drowning in leads, and the time I tried to “just work harder” have in common?
None of them work without systems, focus and maybe even 1.21 gigawatts…
Here’s my favorite thought experiment to figure out how to build systems and focus. Ask yourself the following.
“If you had to create 10x as much work as you do now, how would you do it? And if you could only do 1/10th of the output you do now, what would you do differently?”
Because here’s the fun little secret nobody tells you at law school graduation: your calendar will happily accept infinite slop. It’ll take every case, every “quick question,” every “can you just…,” and then it’ll still have the audacity to be like, “Cool, so are we doing dinner with your family or not?”
This 10x & 1/10th thought experiment is the closest thing I’ve found to a DeLorean for your firm. No time travel…no 88MPH…no REALLY awkward conversations with your mom. Just clarity and freedom.
The Shift: Stop Asking “How Do I Do More?” and Start Asking “What Has to Change?”
Most law firm owners hear “10x” and immediately picture: longer hours, more caffeine, and the slow transformation into an email goblin who can’t feel joy anymore.
But 10x doesn’t mean you personally do 10x. It means the system handles 10x.
If you had to take 10x the cases next month, you wouldn’t “try harder.” You’d be forced to do the stuff you’ve been avoiding: tighten intake, document workflows, automate updates, delegate, hire, and stop being the human router for every decision.
And the 1/10th question is the brutal best friend version of that: if you could only do 10% of what you do now, you’d instantly protect the highest-value work and torch the rest. That’s not laziness. That’s leadership.
Proof It Works: The “We’d Be Dead” Scenario That Saves You
One of my favorite exercises with owners is basically: “Okay, pretend you got hit by a bus. Not like… permanently (please). But you’re out for 30 days. What breaks first?”
When someone actually takes that seriously, they usually find 5–10 tasks they’re personally doing that should never be “owner-only” in the first place. When we fix those, the results aren’t subtle.
Example outcomes I’ve seen (and done myself): an owner goes from answering “urgent” staff questions all day to doing two scheduled 30-minute open office hour blocks, and suddenly they get about 6–8 hours back per week.
Another one: intake follow-up gets systemized and response time drops from “whenever we can” to under 15 minutes during business hours, and signed cases jump by roughly 15–25% without spending more on marketing.
Turns out speed + consistency beats heroic vibes. Every time.
The Trap: “Nobody Can Do It Like Me”
Lawyers love this one. Admiral Ackbar loves this one. Heck, I love this one.
“Nobody can do it like me.” “I’ll just do it myself, it’s faster.”
“If I delegate it, it won’t be perfect.”
Cool. Also: that’s how you end up owning a firm that looks successful from the outside and feels like a prison from the inside.
And let’s be honest, half the time “nobody can do it like me” is code for “I’ve never trained anyone and I don’t have a process, I just have anxiety and a high pain tolerance.” (I’m in this too.)
You want to know where I REALLY learned this? Conversations about chores with my wife.
We read Fair Play, we doled out the cards…heck we did a podcast episode about how much we enjoy each other (and it’s true, we do).
But since the move to San Antonio, we have increasingly covered for each other as random move related things popped up. When she covers my tasks, I can send a breakdown. For example, I had made a VERY rough diagram for my housekeepers about where dishes go, so things got put back where I expected to find them.
When she delegates to me, though, she cannot Vulcan Mind Meld her brain to mine. Plus, her law professor brain is better than mine, so it would be like at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy where it takes multiple people to absorb the energy.
If you want 10x capacity, you need less “Batman doing everything in Gotham” and more “Batman builds the Bat-family.”
Practical Moves: How to Actually Implement 10x / 1/10th This Week
Run the 10x drill on ONE bottleneck. Pick the thing that would collapse first (intake, calendaring, document drafting, client updates). Ask: “If this had to handle 10x volume by May 1, what breaks?” Write the first 10 breakpoints you see. Fix the top 2. Do the 1/10th calendar purge (yes, it will hurt). Look at last week. Circle the 10% of activities that actually create revenue, reduce risk, or move the firm forward. Everything else becomes: delete, delegate, automate, defer or my personal favorite – DROP.
Create an “Owner Only” list with a cap of 5. If more than 5 things are truly owner-only, you don’t have a role, you have a dependency problem. So yes, own the trust account, keep the high level referral source relationships, make all the hiring decisions…but that’s 3/5 right there.
Systemize your “repeat offenders.” Any task you’ll do more than 10 times gets a checklist. Not a novel. A checklist. You don’t need Dr Strange to make a world changing spell just for you when 5 boxes on a google doc will suffice.
Install a decision filter for your team. Before anyone asks you something, they answer: “What’s the goal? What are 2 options? What do you recommend?” This one move alone can cut your interruptions in half. Seriously, when you’re billing $1000 an hour every minute is about $16 a minute…don’t ask me if we get twisty bottom or clicky top pens…(and if you got the Scrubs reference from that sentence you are my kind of person).
Wrap: Use the DeLorean Questions to Find Your Real Job Again
The point of this isn’t to become a productivity robot who can crank out 10x work while feeling nothing. (That’s not a life. That’s a sci-fi drama even I would not watch.)
The point is that these two questions force you to stop optimizing the wrong stuff. They drag you out of the weeds and back into the role you actually own: leader, architect, decision-maker… human being who eats lunch without having to scarf it down in 3 minutes without chewing.
So if you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or quietly miserable… don’t “push through.” Do the thought experiment. The answers are usually obvious. They’re just inconvenient. Like Marty McFly learning that messing with time has consequences, except in your case, the consequences are mostly “you finally get a vacation.”
Next week we’re going to go deep on When “The Plan” Stops Working.
Until then, take 10 minutes, write down your top 10 recurring tasks, and label each one: owner-only, delegate, automate, or delete.