The Lawyer Mom’s Productivity Toolkit: 9 Smart Tools for Running a Business, Raising Kids, and Staying Visible is inspired by a conversation on The Billable Mom® Podcast, hosted by Cari B. Rincker, Esq., with Shahrina Ankhi-Krol, Founder and Managing Attorney of Ankhi-Krol Law in New York City.
In the episode, Shahrina talks candidly about growing a law practice while raising children, managing work without always having childcare, surviving the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and finding practical ways to keep both her family and her business moving forward.
What makes her advice refreshing is that it is not built around some elaborate five-hour morning routine or a color-coded system that requires more work to maintain than the work itself.
Her approach is much more realistic: put important things where you can see them, create habits your children can eventually participate in, use technology where it helps, and stop believing that everything you share professionally has to be polished into an advertisement.
For lawyer moms and other entrepreneurial mothers, those small systems can make an enormous difference.
Here are nine tools and ideas worth considering if you are trying to run a business, raise a family, stay productive, and still have a little energy left for yourself.
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Put the Family Schedule Somewhere Everyone Can See It
One of Shahrina’s simplest productivity tools is also one of the most practical: a weekly schedule board. Cari loves Skylight Digital Calendar from Amazon.
Yes, your appointments may already live in your phone.
That does not necessarily mean the rest of the household knows what is happening.
Shahrina explained that she keeps the important events for the week on a board where everyone can see them. With children involved in activities like piano, swimming, karate, math, school events, and all the surprise theme days that somehow appear on the calendar, having a visible schedule can reduce the amount of information one parent has to carry around mentally.
There is another benefit too.
Children watch what we do.
Shahrina noticed that when her children saw her writing important reminders on the board, they began doing it themselves. They could write down something they needed for school or make note of an upcoming activity.
That turns the board into more than an organizational product. It becomes a very simple way of teaching children to start managing their own responsibilities.
And every responsibility a child can eventually remember without Mom having to remember it for them is a small piece of mental labor returned.
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Give Today’s Priorities Their Own Space
Shahrina also uses a second board for daily reminders.
A small magnetic daily reminder board or Digital Touchscreen Calendar can be useful for the things that are too immediate to disappear inside a digital calendar.
Think:
Spirit wear today.
Bring the permission slip.
Piano at 4:30.
Call the pediatrician.
Return library books.
Client meeting moved to noon.
Pick up dry cleaning.
A weekly calendar tells everyone where the week is going. A daily board answers the much more urgent question: What are we supposed to remember today?
Place it somewhere impossible to ignore such as the refrigerator, mudroom, or wherever backpacks and keys live.
The point is not to create another complicated planning system.
It is to get information out of your head.
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Let Your Practice Management System Remember Things for You
A lawyer running a business should not have to personally remember every lead, intake follow-up, consultation, email, and prospective-client touchpoint.
That is where a platform like Lawmatics can become particularly valuable.
Lawmatics is designed for law firms and can help automate portions of the intake and client relationship process, including lead management, communications, scheduling, forms, and follow-up.
For a lawyer mom, automation is not simply about efficiency.
It is about reducing mental inventory.
Every routine business process that can happen consistently without requiring you to stop what you are doing and manually initiate it is one fewer thing competing with the school calendar, client work, household responsibilities, and everything else demanding attention.
This is especially important as a practice grows.
The systems that work when you have a handful of clients may become impossible once inquiries increase and your schedule becomes more complex.
Your technology should grow with the business instead of requiring the business owner to hold the entire operation together from memory.
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Create a Simple Place to Capture the Things You Will Otherwise Forget
Sometimes the problem is not scheduling something.
It is remembering the thought long enough to do anything about it.
A reusable smart notebook can be helpful for lawyers and business owners who still prefer writing things down but do not want piles of notebooks accumulating around the office.
Use it for:
- Content ideas
- Follow-up reminders
- Questions for your team
- Podcast notes
- Client-safe task reminders
- Business ideas
- Household to-dos
There is something about physically writing down an idea that can make it easier to process than immediately opening another app.
The key is having one reliable capture place instead of writing a brilliant idea on the back of an envelope and discovering it three months later.
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Make It Easier to Create Video Without Turning It Into a Production
One of the most useful points Shahrina makes in the episode is that social media became easier once she stopped treating every piece of content like it needed to be a major production.
She admits that getting comfortable on camera took practice.
The early videos may feel awkward.
Do them anyway.
Eventually, recording five seconds of yourself walking somewhere, sharing a quick observation, or talking about something relevant to your audience becomes much easier.
A compact phone tripod with a Bluetooth remote can make that process even simpler.
Keep one in your office or work bag. When you have an idea, set the phone down and record it.
You do not need a production crew.
You do not need professional lighting every time.
You do not need choreography.
You need a phone, a message, and the willingness to press record.
The barrier to consistent content is often not lack of ideas. It is making the process feel so elaborate that you never start.
- Improve the Lighting Without Building a Studio
While authentic content does not need to look like a television commercial, being able to see your face clearly certainly helps.
A small rechargeable clip-on video light can be useful for Zoom calls, quick Instagram videos, travel, hotel rooms, darker offices, or those days when you finally have ten minutes to record something and the natural lighting refuses to cooperate.
This is particularly useful because it does not require building a permanent content studio.
Keep it nearby.
Clip it to your phone when you need it.
Take it off when you do not.
Done.
That is exactly the kind of content system busy business owners are more likely to use consistently.
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Remember That Social Media Is Supposed to Be Social
Shahrina makes another important observation in the episode: people on social media are not necessarily waiting for your next advertisement.
They want to know who you are.
She talks about sharing something as simple as a photo of the strawberry moon and asking followers whether they had seen it.
That post had nothing to do with trademark law.
And that was perfectly fine.
For lawyers in particular, there can be a temptation to make every post educational, authoritative, polished, and professional.
But clients are also choosing people.
They notice your personality.
Your humor.
Your interests.
The way you communicate.
Whether they feel comfortable with you.
A portable phone power bank charger may seem like an unremarkable addition to a productivity list, but it becomes surprisingly useful if your phone is your camera, calendar, email, social media tool, navigation system, and business lifeline.
Keep it charged in your work bag so that creating content or communicating with your audience does not end because your phone reaches 4 percent battery halfway through the day.
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Find the Content You Need for the Season You Are In
When Cari asked Shahrina about books, podcasts, or other recommendations, Shahrina made an interesting point.
She does not believe one person’s favorite resource is automatically going to be the right resource for everyone else.
Instead, she searches for what she needs at that particular moment.
If she wants motivation, she listens to motivational content.
If she is feeling anxious, she looks for discussions about managing anxiety.
If she needs encouragement, she finds something that speaks to that.
That is a useful reminder in a world where everyone seems to have a mandatory list of ten books you supposedly need to read before you can become successful.
You do not need to consume everything.
You need the resource that helps with the problem you actually have today.
A pair of comfortable wireless earbuds can make that kind of learning easier to fit into an already full schedule. Listen to a podcast while walking, commuting, getting ready, folding laundry, or doing another task that does not require your full concentration.
Professional and personal growth do not always require finding an extra uninterrupted hour.
Sometimes they happen in the pockets of time you already have.
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And Yes, Sometimes a Good Concealer Counts as a Productivity Tool
Shahrina’s most delightfully practical product recommendation may also be the most relatable.
A good concealer.
Specifically, she mentioned Tarte Amazonian Clay concealer as one of her favorites for quickly covering up and getting out the door.
Not every tool that helps a working mom has to integrate with a calendar or save 47 minutes a week.
Sometimes you had a terrible night’s sleep, someone needed you at 2:00 a.m., you have a meeting at 9:00, and you would simply prefer not to look as tired as you feel.
That counts too.
Keep the products that make getting ready easier somewhere accessible instead of maintaining a complicated routine you never have time to complete.
The goal is not perfection.
It is feeling put together enough to walk into whatever the day requires.
The Real Productivity Hack Is Creating Systems Other People Can Participate In
One theme running through Shahrina’s advice is that productivity should not mean Mom becoming increasingly efficient at doing everything herself.
The better goal is creating systems that reduce how much she personally has to carry.
Put the calendar where the children can see it.
Let them begin writing down their own reminders.
Automate routine communication in the law practice.
Make content creation simple enough that it can happen naturally.
Find resources that meet the need you actually have instead of consuming information simply because someone else recommended it.
And stop assuming every professional interaction needs to be perfectly polished.
The more complicated life becomes, the more valuable simple systems become.
Your Audience Does Not Need a Perfect Version of You
Shahrina’s social media advice may be just as important as her scheduling advice.
People want to know the person behind the business.
For lawyers, that can feel uncomfortable at first.
We are trained to be careful.
Prepared.
Professional.
Precise.
Social media often rewards something different: relatability.
That does not mean sharing every detail of your personal life. It means allowing your audience to see enough of your personality to understand who they would actually be hiring.
Talk about the business.
Share useful information.
But occasionally show them the moon you thought was beautiful.
Talk about the chaos of getting children to four different activities.
Share the ordinary moment.
The clients who eventually call may have been quietly paying attention for months.
Build the System That Works for Your Actual Life
There is no perfect productivity system for every lawyer mom.
Your children are different.
Your practice is different.
Your household is different.
Your energy is different.
Your season of life is different.
The goal is not copying someone else’s routine exactly.
Take what works.
Ignore what does not.
And keep looking for small ways to make the things you do every day just a little easier.
As Shahrina’s conversation on The Billable Mom® Podcast illustrates, sometimes the most sustainable systems are not sophisticated at all.
A board on the refrigerator.
A reminder you can see.
A five-second video.
A podcast playing in the background.
A business process that finally runs automatically.
Or a little concealer before you walk out the door.
Those seemingly small things can add up to something much more valuable: more time and mental space for the work and the people that actually matter.
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