Time Management Archives - Lawyers With Depression

My Desk, My Enemy: 6 Helpful Ways to Get Organized

I spend time – too much it – trying to keep my desk in check.

Like a taciturn child, it erupts with tantrums of disorganization. The fact that it’s a mess today seems unfair, as if a hole suddenly formed in the ceiling above me and dropped a cache of briefs, case opinions and half-used legal pads onto my workspace.

I shuffle the papers that lay before me. They look back at me. Ten minutes go by. I reshuffle everything all over again. Sound familiar?

Mind you, on the Clutter-o-Scale, my desk is only a 4 out of 10. If so, why the grief?

Some of my angst comes from having trouble finding things. But an equal measure comes from the sense that I should be more organized. We have made a religion out of organization in this country which has sprouted temples of crazed worship like The Container Store or Organize.com. Maybe this growth industry is in reaction to how much stuff/junk/information we like or have to obtain and perpetually reorganize. This mania has even spawned an inane reality T.V. show “Hoarders.”

Too many things compete for lawyers’ attention besides the usual culprits of returning phone calls, court appearances and last minute deadlines. When you add a messy desk to an already stressed-out life, well, it becomes the enemy.

Desks are the pedestals of our productivity. How we organize the stuff on them has a big effect on how well or if we get things done in a timely fashion. But just as important as these practical concerns is the impact it has on our mental health.

What is your Organizational Style?

According to Kelly Lynn Anders in her book The Organized Lawyer, “Not everyone prioritizes about what the eye needs to feel relaxed. Some ideas work for some and not for others. That’s why it’s important to know your type.” She identifies four types of organizers:

Stackers organize by topic in stacks. They are visual and tactile and like to give the appearance of order. The busier these people are, the more stacks they have.

Spreaders are visual like stackers, but must be able to see everything they’re working on.

Free Spirits keep very few personal belongings around the work area. They like new ideas and keep reports, books, articles and magazines near.

Pack Rats have emotional ties to things. They like the feeling of fullness around them and like to tell stories about what’s in the office.

Which type are you? She has a lot of useful suggestions, among them is color coding files. On her own desk, she keeps commonly used files close at hand. Because she identifies herself as a “stacker,” Anders avoids cabinets and other hidden spaces for her files. “The reason I don’t have a lot of hidden storage is stackers have a tendency to squirrel things away,” she said. Check out some of her other suggestions at her website.

A Contrarian Point of View

Einstein considered his cluttered desk a help rather than a hindrance to his prodigious creativity.

While we don’t have his brain’s elephantine computing power, it’s worth considering that your desk mess might not be so bad after all.

Dr. Jay Brand, a psychology professor, argues that a squeaky clean desk doesn’t always equate with a productive employee. It can actually hinder personal efficiency because a person’s desk is an extension of his/her mind. That’s because our human memory has a limited capacity, or finite ‘cells’ available for storage and since most people do multiple things at once they almost immediately ramp their working memory to capacity. They need a place to park some of the information from their working memory into the environment and what more logical place than their desks?

According to Dr. Brand, “these cluttered desks that people use to store information from their working memory are called ‘cognitive artifacts’, and they expand a person’s capacity to think and utilize the environment”. He argues that companies with clean desk policies waste time by requiring workers to clean up their cognitive artifacts every night and re-clutter them the next morning. He points out that everyone has a different working style and piles can be organized topically, chronologically, or according to an individual system. As long as the pile means something to the person who made it, it is effective.

I’ve known plenty lawyers in this group. But I ain’t one of them. Maybe it has to do with my own depression over the years. Or, as Kelly Anders suggests, it’s just my type that determines how I lay out the work space in front of me.

The Depressed Desk

When a lawyer has depression, motivation and organization are BIG problems. A lack of energy blunts motivation. We already know that it’s a good idea to keep our desk together, but there simply isn’t much neurochemical juice to get it done. But, time or a court’s scheduling order waits for no one. If we don’t keep the paperwork on the conveyor moving, we end up a casualty of our work days and add to the stress/anxiety/depression mix.

In her book Get it Done When You’re Depressed, Julie Fast writes:

“Many people equate depression with the inability to work. In reality, the problem is often the inability to feel like working. People who are depressed assume that their lack of motivation is a sign of weakness, and if they could just buck up a bit, they would be more productive. But waiting until you feel like doing something is the single biggest mistake you can make when you’re depressed and need to get things done.”

Yes, we need to start working in spite of our desire not to. Dr. John Preston, in the same book, elaborates further:

“Depressed people find it very hard to ignite this self-generated action due, in large part, to decreased metabolic functioning in the frontal lobes of their brain, which are responsible for initiating behavior. So if a person waits a long time and not only not accomplish the non-rewarding tasks but also miss out on the big projects that can bring big rewards.”

So it appears that folks who aren’t depressed and are motivated people have ramped up brain metabolism. I’m envious. Yet, there is something we can do about it. As I’ve written about before, consistent exercise helps boost the happy chemicals in our brains, jacks up metabolism and improves our motivation and focus. Moving is motivating.

We must outfox depression. It would have us do nothing. So we must do something. When I apply this simple wisdom to my day, I’m always pleasantly surprised at how my feelings catch up with my doing and how my doing affects my feelings.

My experience during bogged down moods, was that I’d get most things done, but it would take lots of energy. When I’d come home from work, I’d be spent.

Six Simple Solutions

I agree with an observation made by Leo Babauta on his blog Zen Habits: “The most important thing to remember is that you must have a system in place, and you must teach yourself to follow the system. Otherwise, you just clean your desk, and it gets messy again”.

Here are a couple of tried and true tips that have helped me:

1. Get rid of all those pens. Only keep three or four. More than that, and there’s too much ink in your work space. If you love pen, keep your stash at home. I often troll the pen aisle at Office Max — strange, but true. So I know how difficult it is to part with them.

2. Take home any books that you don’t use on a regular basis. It’s just more clutter and keeps you from easily putting your hands on the important stuff you need to do your job.

3. Hide cords – these are like a floating octopi with tenticles that seemingly go everywhere. Use twist-ties or coil your cords up.

4. Only keep on your desk what you need for that day. Then section off your desk and workspace so that everything has a specific space.

5. Have a dump day. Take everything off your desk and out of your drawer and then put it in a big pile. Then, sort through what is garbage and what you really need throughout the workday.

6. Schedule a date and time to clean your desk. Ideally, at the end of a workday. Weather permitting, do it on Friday’s around 4 so that I start my Monday fresh.

Nobody’s Perfect

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfectionism is demoralizing — Harriet Braiker, Ph.D.

Nobody’s perfect – that’s why we have erasers. Yet nowhere on this sweet blue orb are there more people driven to perfection than attorneys.

It’s really not surprising, after all. We work with laws, rules and regulations: ancient tomes, incantations and idealizations about how our society expects folks to behave. When one acts outside the proscribed rules, one’s in violation, negligent or culpable. When this happens, people turn to a lawyer and expect him or her to get the job done – and flawlessly.

It’s easy to calm our fears with the wilted wisdom, “Well, everybody makes mistakes.” But things can and do go terribly wrong when we make mistakes – and we can and do make them. Things can go quickly awry despite our best efforts and work.

Lawyers are on edge because they feel if they’re not perfect, they’ll fall over the edge. Besides the inner stress, there is the outer pressure to keep a calm and cool façade lest our clients and colleagues lose faith in us.

I’m a perfectionist to the core. In a sense, it’s great because I take pride in my craft as a lawyer. I love the look and feel of good work well done. I can take it too far though – I can get so keyed up about churning out a masterpiece that I lose perspective; I lose sense of the possibly that the judge and his clerk might skip over seventy-five percent of my brilliant delineations of a statute’s historic origins, that the seventh draft of a motion isn’t always much better than the fourth and that there’s real value in not deliberating too much, but simply getting things done.

In a great piece in the A.B.A. Journal entitled, Three Deadly Ps: Perfectionism, Procrastination, and Paralysis, Rebecca Nerison, Ph.D. maps out why too many cracks at perfection can lead to procrastination and then paralysis, a veritable seizing up of our work motor:

Procrastination is an occupational hazard for lawyers. Procrastination robs lawyers of peace of mind. It’s difficult to feel happy, healthy, and successful when you are forever putting off what needs to be done. We procrastinate when we feel anxious about a task, when we’re bored with it, or when we’re tired. In any event, procrastination is about avoidance. Avoidance allows us to temporarily escape the fear, boredom, or fatigue we anticipate as we contemplate the task. We are immediately relieved from the unpleasant feeling. We get to feel good instead of bad.

A dilatory dodge of our work just leads to more problems down the road. We need to take stock and see perfectionism for what it is: avoidance behaviors that rob us of energy and a sense of competency that comes from getting things done. My psychologist, a wizard of the human psyche, once observed that it’s critically important to observe ourselves engaging in healthy behavior. We build a sort of healthy resume of concrete things we do on a daily basis so that we can confidently say to ourselves, “I’m a person who get things done.” Just as procrastination is a vicious circle, not procrastinating is a healthy one.

We really need to let perfection go and let our humanity seep into our daily work; a humanity that while imperfect, is full of good humor, irony and outright silliness.

When we ignore this essential truth, we press down too hard on the gas pedal and our – and our secretary’s lives – are made miserable. Anne Lamott, author of the wonderful book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith wrote:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun.

What would the opposite of perfect be? Maybe just human – and that’s humbling. When we try to be perfect, we are too locked into a view of ourselves as the center of the Universe.

We’re not gods, but in reality vulnerable creatures.

I wonder if God has a sense of humor. How could he not given this goofy planet. Even Jesus knew how to party when he turned water into wine at a wedding.

We lose perspective with depression – we forget to play. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., once observed:

Most of us have to learn to take better care of ourselves. One way is by spending more time in play. The perfectionist, the depressive, the person who thinks he doesn’t deserve to feel pleasure, believes that he’d better never let his guard down, always busy, always productive. But it’s a joyless if all we care about is getting the work done. Something as simple as playing catch with the dog for a few minutes after work connects us with a part of ourselves we can lose only too easily – the child who can laugh, who can enjoy silliness, mindless physical activity. Tomfoolery is just as much a part of life as our lamentable laments. It’s uncomplicated, mischievous good fun that puts us into contact with our ageless inner child who wants to come out and play. He or she is there – if you just look inside. We need to open that door; we need to let some fresh air in.

William James once wrote “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

So kick off those Oxford and Manolo Blahnik shoes . . . and start to rumba.

It’s About Time

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we’ve rushed through life trying to save – Will Rogers

Time is the enemy of our synapse challenged world. This beast is always just a step behind us; we keep losing ground as it nips at our heels and bears its sharp fangs. We tap on the brakes to try and slow down, but even the vacations and weekends aren’t always terribly relaxing. We attempt to break apart our days into manageable segments or, as the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Measure out our lives with coffee spoons.”

We often experience time as a force outside of ourselves; as if the clicking clock on the wall or Timex on our wrist had its own personhood that nags at us: “Do this not that, wait, what about that other that?” There is the visceral sensation that everything – everything – must be done NOW. We spin like a top trying to take it all in. We labor to manage our time while our nervous systems overload, toasted to a crisp in the microwave of our modern times.

No doubt most folk dream of chucking it all; of hopping on a Jumbo 747 to Italy to sip Chianti in a verdant field near a Tuscan village – hence the popularity of the best-selling book and movie, “Eat, Pray, Love.” But most of us will never go aerial; we soldier on and muddle our way through our lives as best we can. This becomes all the more a sticky wicket when life’s engine seizes up in the throes of a murky anxiety and/or depression. Trying to stop this pain moves to the top of our priority list; we hammer away at it, but sometimes it just won’t relent.

We feel that we must figure out our sorrow and mind-bending stress before time runs out and we find ourselves in a real pickle: “If only I didn’t feel stressed and depressed, I could get all this shit done!”

In his book, You Can Feel Better Again, Richard Carlson, Ph.D., writes:

When you feel down, depressed, or blue, there is a strong tendency to try to figure out why you are feeling the way you do and to try to do something about it. The worse you feel, the stronger the urge. Many times, particularly with regard to a ‘depressed’ person, this need to escape from the way you are feeling is ‘urgent’. One of the tricks to overcoming depression, or even extended low moods, is to learn to relax when you feel down – having faith that the low period will pass if you are able to leave it alone and do nothing. The important point to remember is: The factor that keeps you feeling down is your reaction to the ‘urgency’ you feel.’

I love this psychological approach: I had never thought of my reaction to my depression as “urgent”, but so often it is. Depression’s five alarm pain can burn down even our best laid plans. We think that the way to stop this unruly visitor is to squash it, when we might be better served by waiting it out.

Today, walking up a leafy sidewalk thinking about past fall memories, I said to myself, “I accept where I am right now.” And I really meant it. It calmed me. I accepted all that lay in front of me today. This gave me a sense of peace and rootedness. I somehow felt a kinship with the blowing trees who so timelessly anchor themselves in the rich brown soil.

Take time for yourself today. Take time to appreciate your daily bread – moment by moment – because it’s the only loaf of time you’ve got. There is much to be appreciated beyond depression’s grasp or the clatter of our anxiety. Depression, stress and anxiety do not last forever; there are gaps – some shorter or longer – between these turbulent emotional states. Learn to see that this is so.

Sometimes, I catch myself. I sense that I have let hours whizz by without having paid attention to neither my life nor a scintilla of the dear people and events that surround me. I had lived too much in my head. We all need to step out of the limitations of our own thoughts and through the portal of all the rich possibilities and blessings that lay both within and without in the time we’ve been given.

Goals, Depression & Work

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving — Oliver Wendell Holmes.

There are different concerns at different stages of one’s depression journey. Lawyers who are in the throes of it, perhaps for the first time, need education about what depression is, understanding, medication, support and psychotherapy. After they’ve started to feel better, they’ll need to turn their focus to their livelihood and how they’ll work at it in a way, hopefully, which takes into account their mental health so as prevent and/or mitigate any future depression. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., author of the best-selling book, Undoing Depression, has this interesting insight about depressives in the workplace:

“Sometimes when I have spoken to business organizations, I have surprised them by advocating for hiring the depressed; but aside from taking more sick days than others, depressed people can be the best employees. We’re [Dr. O’Connor has long struggled with depression] good at being responsible. We are good soldiers, honest and industrious. We have high standards and want to do any job well. We have too much guilt to pad our hours or take home office supplies. Treat us decently, and we’ll be grateful and loyal. Unfortunately for the depressed individual, however, we discount these virtues and have a difficult time enjoying the world of work.”

I think that’s a great insight because overcompensating, even if it makes us miserable, can make us great workers. God knows lawyers have high standards. In essence, many of these people don’t fundamentally value themselves. They may fervently chase other measures of success – money, power and status. Yet, inside, they often feel broken, sad, stressed or depressed. Here’s what Dr. O’Connor said in an interview I had with in New York City about a depressive’s need to value him/herself:

We tend to think of lawyers as colossal egos bent on being Masters of the Universe; and there probably a good chunk of those people out there — who I never could stand anyway. But, in my experience, there are many accomplished lawyers who suffer from depression who are of different ilk; “good soldiers” who bust their asses and don’t give themselves much, if any, credit.

I was doing a walk-a-talk with a friend of mine [a real non-lawyer type] recently in Central Park in New York City. I stopped to munch on some peanuts that were a real disappointment. He was baffled when I told him I didn’t feel that I’d accomplished much in my professional life. “You were just named to that that publication, ‘The Best Lawyers in America’. For Christ’s sake, count your blessings!”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take credit. It was because I couldn’t — I just didn’t know how to. And, as Dr. O’Connor said, not taking credit doesn’t often have much to do with our professional success, but it has a lot to do with our satisfaction with our jobs.

There are emotional bridges that connect us to various aspects of ourselves and our environment. For depressives, there often isn’t an east-bound bridge connecting their good work to their emotional selves. Others may slap them on the back and plaques may parade across their office wall. No matter, there’s still a disconnection; a sense that their accomplishments were an accident or a recent run of Lady Luck. They often have a sense that they’ll be found out; that all of their success is a put-on. They think they’re imposters who truly don’t deserve such accolades – especially from any genuine place inside of them. No matter how distorted this vision is, they’ll insist that it’s true till the cows come home. I know because I’ve banged these drums a few times over the years.

Then there’s the other bridge pointing west-bound. It connects their goof-ups, mistakes and bad decisions to themselves. You see, lawyers have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for bad things and an underdeveloped sense of ownership for the good stuff they do. This take on life isn’t about taking responsibility for our mistakes. Rather, it’s the toxic self-impugning; the inner critic run amok spraying bullets from an AK-47 at our self-esteem.

I’ve come to learn that feeling a sense of satisfaction and pride in my work because of my efforts is a skill that I have to work at – and I’ve come a long way. One of the ways I’ve chosen to do this is by setting goals. For many years, like all lawyers, I swam upstream into the time currents of my day. I didn’t have to set goals about when to get things done because the Court, my firm and other various incendiary devices did that for me. Finishing a set of interrogatories or successfully arguing a Summary Judgment motion, wasn’t a goal that I set for myself – it was simply another deadline in a litany of other deadlines.

Setting goals for ourselves that we’ve personally reflected upon is important step for those who wish to recover from depression. It counters the sense of hopelessness and the confusing lack of direction characteristic of a depressive’s attempts to navigate through life. Goals give us a Garmin for our game.

Even though setting goals would be a healthy thing for someone with depression to work at, they often don’t. Again, Dr. O’Connor:

“Depressed people, pessimistic [a hallmark of lawyers thinking style] and lacking confidence, tend to avoid setting goals as a way to protect themselves from disappointment. They don’t realize that the absence of goals leads to a completely different and frequently worse set of problems. Even if you miss your target, you grow and benefit from the practice of productive activity. But depressed people, who don’t trust their ability to adapt to bad news and hence avoid setting conscious goals, find lives that lack direction. Your goal becomes just getting through another day. In the depths of depression, that may be all you can manage, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.”

Or, as the great Indian Chief Seneca once wrote: “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”

Setting simple, realistic and concrete goals improve both our performance of the activity and our actual experience of it. My Catholic take on it from Mother Teresa helps me put this in the context of my part-time faith: “We can’t do great things; only small things with great love.”

Work isn’t just about what is thrown at us by our jobs. It’s also about the passion we bring to it. In this vein, it’s not just the immediate task before us that hooks us, but how we’ve set it up in our own minds. Again, Dr. O’Connor:

“Making a commitment [to a goal] focuses our attention on where we want to go and helps us focus our thinking on getting there. People feel happier as they progress toward their goals; they have a sense of involvement, they feel productive and useful, and they give themselves ego strokes for being good and industrious. Because we’re so adaptable, however, those good feelings don’t necessarily last once we’ve got to where we are going. We have to make a deliberate effort to savor and appreciate our achievements.”

The key words are deliberate effort. The word “deliberate” comes from the Latin word “deliberates” which means to weigh carefully. It requires us to reflect on our course of action and think about what actually works and what doesn’t for us on the job.

In my experience, depressives are often lacking the goal-setting skills they need to be happy and content in their work lives. What’s the consequence of not setting goals is a sense of meaninglessness; ennui that won’t go away. Depressed lawyers have an inner dialogue that goes something like this: “I have all this paperwork to get to today, but I have to be in court all morning. And . . . oh shit!! I forgot to call the judge back on that motion.” And so it goes as these worrisome thoughts pour out of our noggins. We’re just jumping around putting out fires and surviving our days. Is it really any wonder that we draw little or no satisfaction from our work with this approach?

When I talk to depressed lawyers about this and suggest that they think about their goals and what they really want to achieve, you would have thought that I asked them to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge: “Are you kidding? You want me to spend time thinking about my goals? When the hell do I have time to do that? I have no time during work and then when I get home I either want to (a) forget about my day and enjoy my family, (b) pass out on the couch and forget about everything in front of the T.V. or (c) do anything that doesn’t involve thinking about my job.

There’s no problem in using these ways to decompress after a day’s warfare at the office. But if these activities, albeit pleasurable, avoid the important questions raised by work, and our connection to it, we may to rebalance the tires.

In my next blog, I will address some practical ways lawyers can set goals and draw pleasure from accomplishing them in their everyday work lives.

Another Way For Lawyers to Think About Time Management

Law students, lawyers and judges are always pursuing time. Watches on our wrists act more like compasses than time keepers as they point us in directions we must march. A search on Amazon for “Time Management” books resulted in 632 titles. The wizards of time who penned these templates for success cover familiar ground: organization, prioritization and scheduling.

Yet much about the practice of law is fear driven: dire consequences will follow should we fail to get things done. Perhaps that’s why there are over six hundred books on the subject, many purchased by lawyers, and scores of articles on the topic for lawyers on the run.

“That’s just the way things are” is the legal profession’s anthem to the status quo of fear driven law. Time management isn’t embraced so much as an empowering experience, but more as a life preserver. I’m not going to offer any “solutions” to time management, at least in the traditional sense. If you need the more “how to” remedies, check out these books: “Time Management In an Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day” and “The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management.” Here are some helpful articles on time management for lawyers: “How to Use Effective Time Management” and “Do You Have Time? A Few Thoughts about Time Management for Attorneys.” There is also a website devoted to time management for lawyers called “Time Management for Lawyers.” On the site you’ll find plenty of articles on this topic.

We often don’t think of time management as a reflection of our self-worth, but it is. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, M.D., author of The Road Less Travelled, once wrote: “Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”

How much, we must ask, do lawyers value themselves as they slug through the ten hours a day or more they spend at their jobs? If it’s primarily about the money, the danger is that they can become defined by the almighty $ and all it can buy. That’s dispiriting and depressing, yet so often a reality for lawyers. By frittering away their days not fully and passionately engaged in what they are doing, lawyers are devaluing the totality of who they are.

Lawyers lose the perspective that all of us only have 1440 minutes in a day and when they’re gone, baby they’re really gone. As the novelist Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” We all have financial obligations of one sort of another. But if we funnel all of our energy and time into meeting this one aspect of reality, sorrow will surely follow. At the end of our lives, do we want to look back and think that our lives have been spent managing our time to gain more status, power and money? To do so doesn’t necessarily make us “bad” people. I would suggest that it reflects a lifetime of little awareness; an inability or difficulty to separate the trivial from the truly important events of our lives. Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

Getting things done moves us through our days. But, we have to make time to savor these experiences both large and small. Making the resolution to do so is a noble. But the degree to which we adhere to this goal often waxes and wanes – as do our earnest plans to watch less T.V., eat better and exercise after our morning coffee. The waning could because we are discouraged, tell ourselves that we’re not particularly well disciplined or some other plausible excuse.

I have come to believe that the reason we don’t savor our legal experiences is because we have defined success too narrowly. We tend to buy into the clearly defined and conventional ideas of success offered up by the legal establishment. For too many lawyers this involves waiting for successful moments to happen and trudging through their days. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes warned, “Many people die with the music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”

Living the music in you involves learning to be more process than product driven; as equally concerned with the journey as the destination.

We shouldn’t think of time management as just a good skill to develop, but also as something we are going to do because we value ourselves. Many “how to” books on time management fail to make us better at managing our affairs because some lawyers don’t like what they’re required to do to keep their jobs. How then do you “manage” work that you’re not crazy about doing in the first place?

To be honest, I don’t think you can over the long haul. Whether we recognize it or not, there will be a steep price for us to pay if we go down this path. We can’t keep doing things over a long period of time driven by fear and anxiety with impunity. The bill always comes due. Our bodies and minds keep a tally of how we have treated them. If we have ignored their carnal needs for love, affection, rest, exercise and purpose, in a sense we have betrayed them. The result is often exhaustion, stress related illnesses, anxiety disorders and depression.

Let’s begin anew. A New Year is around the corner. Let’s start to think of time management as not just something to make us more productive, but as a way to learn to take care of ourselves. Built into our time management must be time for ourselves. I created my own personalized “Self-Care Tool Kit”. Each of you should have one of these in your emotional garage. When I felt helpless in my depression, I would pull out my lists of things I could act on to help me feel better. Acting on these things was also a way to demonstrate to myself that I wasn’t helpless, a common cognitive distortion with depression.

Try not to think about time management as getting things done so much as getting you going. It can be enormously difficult for people with depression to finish projects. In my experience, however, it is even more difficult for them to begin. They often have a sense of being lost and not knowing how to start a task. I would sit at my desk and look out the window waiting for the angels to move my fingers on my keyboard. I viewed all tasks as an all or nothing proposition – another cognitive whammy that depression throws at us. Against the steep benchmark of getting everything done during a depression, I would do nothing.

I learned to retool my approach. The only thing that worked was to become very concrete and deliberate about work. I began to pay attention and make an inventory of what did and didn’t help me get things done. Sitting at my desk pounding out a brief for three hours didn’t work when I first experienced depression. Working on the same brief for a half hour, stopping to return two phone calls and then a 10 minute coffee break did. This sounds simplistic, but it’s a testament to how small changes in our behavior can change the character of our days.

Make a list of ways in which you currently work. What are the obstacles? Some of those problems are pragmatic; some of them are more existential. See time management as another way to value yourself. You’re going to manage your time because you need to practice valuing yourself.

“Time” Management

Graduates of law school shouldn’t be given diplomas – they should be handed crash helmets. Our lives as lawyers can be bruising indeed. It’s not only the emotional charge of situations that we are asked to face; it’s the sheer volume of them. We are always running – running to beat time. The humorist Will Rogers captured the irony of this approach to time when he wrote: “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

As a profession, we are obsessed with the slicing, dicing and crunching of the seconds, minutes and hours were allotted in this life. In a recent search on Amazon, I found 26,864 books on time management alone. Yes, it is true that our working moments as lawyers have a monetary dimension. That’s just a fact of the profession. But for us to have fulfilling lives, time must mean more than that.

We have impoverished ourselves by seeing time only as a commodity to be used and profited from. There is a deep sadness in many lawyers over the use and quality of their time. They resent that their jobs take too much of their time, that they can’t spend more of it with their families and things they enjoy doing. One survey asked lawyers to, “List the most significant fears you have about your practice as a lawyer. Sixty-four percent said they fear spending too much time practicing law and not enough time living.

Too often there is a mindless, driven quality to our lives. Such a way of being is nothing short of deadening. The great psychologist, Rollo May put it succinctly when he wrote:

“The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time. . . . The less alive a person is – “alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life – the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.”

Try this day not to work so compulsively – to chase time. Value it not just as a day of work to be endured, but for the qualitiy of the moments that you have been given to live. Be humble and mindful of the love you bring to your work and how you use it. As Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

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