Easy Money – working smarter, not harder

Posted bystenoimperiumPosted inCourt Reporting, Legal ServicesTags:, , , , , , , , ,

Are you constantly working for hard earned dollars or are you working towards easy money?

As we grow up we’re taught, “you need to work hard.”

You need to get paid for your time.

You need to clock in. 

You need to clock out. 

You need to get paid for the time that you’re spending. 

And that’s how your value is created. 

That’s how you believe your value is measured. 

And that’s how you will be rewarded in life.

Then, when we hear easy money referenced, it’s often made out to be a bad thing. 

Too often we see people in society who are just grinding away in their 9-to-5 jobs. 

And they actually value their own worth in, “How much time can I put in? How much work can I do?” 

They don’t think nearly enough about leverage. 

Most of their time is spent in the immediate day‑to‑day work.

But they should be spending more time thinking about how to make things better, and thinking about leverage.

Leveraging their time and energy by finding people to help get the results that they want, in an efficient manner, so they don’t have to be hustling every day.

Whether in work or life, most of us strive to accomplish more in less time. Wouldn’t it be nice to do in a few hours what it used to take you half a day? By concentrating and minimizing distractions, you can.

The chances are that you are not taking full advantage of the cutting-edge technology available to you. There are now several options in our market to consider. 

Here are 3 ways court reporters can stop the hamster wheel spin cycle of working hard and leverage your time to work smarter.

CONTROL & MINIMIZE DISTRACTIONS

In order to work smarter, you must control your surroundings and minimize distractions. Make sure to hide that cell phone! One study found that having your phone present, even if you are not using it, can make you perform 20% worse than if it was out of sight.

One of the most impressive (and user-friendly) tools is a collaborative SaaS cloud-based software known as CoverCrow. Their platform helps you keep your job alerts lean and mean by focusing on only the jobs in which you would be interested. You set your own customized job alerts using advanced filters so you only get notices for the specific types of jobs you want to take and allows you to focus on the jobs that make more money.

It helps keep you off social media sites like Facebook altogether, which is a big black hole that sucks your time. CoverCrow allows you to check in with your live availability and current GPS location, letting agencies know that you are available for the next job and also locates jobs close to you while you’re out in the field, giving you that ability to take more jobs during the day and reduces wasted travel time. Or you can set the alerts to notify you for in-person jobs only, eliminating travel time altogether.

DELEGATE

Mastering the art of delegation is an essential skill for high-earning court reporters. Even the biggest control freaks, perfectionists, and micromanagers can find this difficult, but find ways to accomplish this. The key is understanding that the ability to delegate will make you more productive.  One study even showed that CEOs who delegate experience lower levels of decision fatigue, fewer instances of burnout, and generate 33% more revenue than those with low delegation skills.

Delegate the stressful task of scheduling by using niche industry tools like CoverCrow’s auto accept feature, which can schedule lucrative jobs for you while you’re on the record so you are always the first to respond and you don’t lose that perfect next assignment.

Building a team of scopists and proofreaders and delegating your most time-consuming tasks to them can free you up to take more high-income-earning jobs and stay on the record 5 days a week. Use the latest tool for court reporters, Stenovate, to not only find and hire the right team, but also manage your entire workload right on their platform.

DOUBLE DOWN!

The newest scintillating remote-work trend for white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, is to double their pay. This includes freelance and official court reporters alike. Their schtick is to “work two full-time jobs.” Like Fight Club, the first rule for these folks is “don’t tell anyone” and “don’t do too much work, either.”

Dual-jobsters, from freelance to official, bragged on Facebook groups that they earned over $50k more per year by being able to take multiple remote jobs per day from the comfort of their home or courthouse office using remote platforms such as Zoom.

CoverCrow spent a good part of last year programming in all the different certification requirements all over the United States to help take the guess work out of accepting remote jobs in other states. Agencies and reporters have the assurance that they are in compliance with each state’s certification requirements when they post jobs or find jobs on the CoverCrow platform.

As you jump in to 2022, I hope you take the time to think of ways to stop the cycle of working for hard-earned dollars and create systems and put people in the right seats that have you earning easier money.

Published by stenoimperium

We exist to facilitate the fortifying of the Stenography profession and ensure its survival for the next hundred years! As court reporters, we've handed the relationship role with our customers, or attorneys, over to the agencies and their sales reps.  This has done a lot of damage to our industry.  It has taken away our ability to have those relationships, the ability to be humanized and valued.  We've become a replaceable commodity. Merely saying we are the “Gold Standard” tells them that we’re the best, but there are alternatives.  Who we are though, is much, much more powerful than that!  We are the Responsible Charge.  “Responsible Charge” means responsibility for the direction, control, supervision, and possession of stenographic & transcription work, as the case may be, to assure that the work product has been critically examined and evaluated for compliance with appropriate professional standards by a licensee in the profession, and by sealing and signing the documents, the professional stenographer accepts responsibility for the stenographic or transcription work, respectively, represented by the documents and that applicable stenographic and professional standards have been met.  This designation exists in other professions, such as engineering, land surveying, public water works, landscape architects, land surveyors, fire preventionists, geologists, architects, and more.  In the case of professional engineers, the engineering association adopted a Responsible Charge position statement that says, “A professional engineer is only considered to be in responsible charge of an engineering work if the professional engineer makes independent professional decisions regarding the engineering work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional engineer’s physical presence at the location where the engineering work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the engineering work.” If we were to adopt a Responsible Charge position statement for our industry, we could start with a draft that looks something like this: "A professional court reporter, or stenographer, is only considered to be in responsible charge of court reporting work if the professional court reporter makes independent professional decisions regarding the court reporting work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional court reporter’s physical presence at the location where the court reporting work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the court reporting work.” Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator. In court reporting, our mission is “to bring justice to every litigant in the U.S.”  That purpose is shared by all involved in the litigation process – judges, attorneys, everyone.  Who we are is the Responsible Charge.  How we do that is by Protecting the Record.

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