'Buy Shoes on Wednesday': 10 tips on when best to accomplish everyday tasks

From 'Buy Shoes on Wednesday and Tweet at 4:00,' writer Mark Di Vincenzo shares the smartest times to tackle those items on your to-do list. (Hint: January is the best time to visit New York on a budget.)

9. When is the best time to call a lawyer?

Alex Domanski/Reuters
Holger Haerter (r.), former CFO of Porsche, arrives at his trial with his lawyer, Anne Wehnert (l.).

Di Vincenzo suggests calling lawyers in the afternoon – they often arrange sit-downs with clients or are in court during the morning. However, if you get in there early, Di Vincenzo says, 9 a.m. can also be a good time because even if the lawyer isn't there, they may start calling people back in the order in which they called, so you'll be at the top of the list.

9 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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