Tag: organization

The Link Between Disorganization, Depression and Anxiety

Although it appears to be a mundane sort of thing, I find disorganization and chaos to be one of the biggest problems reported by depressed and anxious individuals. Emotional baggage has a way of building up and then expressing itself in an outward display of turmoil — as if a tornado had let loose in your brain and your surroundings.

The symptoms of feeling overwhelmed and not wanting to face the day often stem from not knowing where to start or not wanting to face the mountain of tasks that lay ahead.  I have found folks to be so bogged down with even the everyday task of leaving the house on time that their entire day is a mess before they ever get started. By 8 am they are frazzled.

There are screaming children, pets that need walking, work begins at a certain time, the laundry isn’t done, and available clothing is something picked out of the bin from the week before that didn’t make it to the dry cleaner.  Stress chemicals are running rampant, and irritability and panic set in as well as resentment of the household, job, family and everything else.

What is worse is that typically if disorganization is a problem at home it is a problem at work as well. A cluttered desk, half-finished tasks, and unmet deadlines are the career version of the problem and are also with you all day.

Does your automobile look like a homeless person’s shopping cart?  If so, none of your major environments is peaceful. There is nothing pleasant about your surroundings, and this is a major stressor.

The problem is not that you have too much to do or work full time, it is that you have not found a routine and effective organizational plan, or you found one but are not consistent in following the plan.

Running around willy-nilly, being chronically late, never being able to find things, and having a dirty or sloppy house are stressful conditions and contribute to the anxiety depression cycle. Things scattered about affect your ability to concentrate, and irritability sets in if not outright anger.

Simply put, the stress chemicals from disorganization eat up the good chemicals needed for mood stabilization. With that process in effect, you feel depressed and overwhelmed.

Look around your house. It should be your sanctuary, not a hell-hole screaming your name to come clean it.  The house and time management issues are all about the planning and execution of a schedule and routine. If something is not getting done or is causing you distress in the household it is because you have not found the right system for you.

Very simply, a place for everything and everything in its place is a good saying to live by. Think of the simplicity of that statement. Yet this is the biggest bug-a-boo I see, not knowing where you left your car keys, clothing, sports equipment, checkbook, you name it.

We often allow our emotional state to dictate these sorts of practical matters. “I am so depressed I don’t care what the house looks like.” “I am so nervous I can’t concentrate.” “I am so ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), I will never be able to organize myself.” It does not matter if you are depressed or anxious, your house and time need streamlining, and with that will come an improvement in your symptoms. You will feel an immediate shift just from the empowerment and taking control of your life. If you really are ADD then organization and time management are the very set of skills that you need.

Getting Started

To get started take an inventory of the areas where you need organizing. Maybe there is just one area out of control or maybe the entire place needs an overhaul. Either way, it can get done and not be overwhelming by breaking it down into sections and tasks. The major areas that cause disruption are your house, car, purse or wallet, finances, and paperwork.

I am now going to take you through a general plan that you can begin to institute immediately.

  1. Get out a pad of paper and look around. Jot down room by room what the major problems are such as laundry everywhere, kid’s toys, and paper clutter. Where are the major stressors?
  2. Now go to where these items would ideally reside. Is there enough room for them all to be put away at once? Do you need to get rid of some of it or do you need more space or better organization of it? If you have enough space, then it is probably more a problem of time management and routine. If there isn’t enough space, you may be keeping too much stuff or just not have the proper storage solutions.
  3. List all chores that require travel such as groceries and dry-cleaning. Can you do those on your way home from work? Can you do them all at once in order to be more efficient rather than make multiple trips?
  4. Think through your morning routine, this is usually where the day starts to go downhill. How much time do you need to get yourself ready? Pets? Kids? Breakfast? Pick up your house before you leave so as not to come home to a depressing mess. If you have a family, I suggest getting up 2 hours prior to when you need to leave or when they need to be out the door. This gives you time to get ready, get them up and ready, prepare and have breakfast as a family, and squeeze in a 30-minute walk or exercise of some sort. In order to do this, you will need to have already planned the night before for things such as:
  • Lunches
  • Clothing
  • Homework
  • Projects of your own
  • List of priorities for the day, knowing exactly where to focus your energies on any given day
  • Gas in the car

Now think through your evening routine. How do you get the above things done? Is there too much stuff in your evenings? Maybe the kids are in too many activities or you need help getting them around. Are you eating healthy food at night? Are you eating too late and not cleaning up because you are exhausted? Then you have to get up to a mess and again it’s all downhill from there. Remember you are in control of your schedule and your life, and sometimes too much is just too much. Even though you are trying to provide a quality of life by having many activities available for your family, it is not a quality of life if you are depressed and agitated and the house is a mess and you are eating takeout every night. Think about the memories you are creating.

Now you should have an idea of where the problem areas are and where your time is being utilized. Here are some general guidelines that will make a world of difference immediately if you put them to work for you.

House

  1. Keep dishes and plates put away all the time, fill dishwasher after every meal.
  2. Do a good cleaning once a week. Enlist the family, including children, to help especially in their own rooms. Many people feel guilty making their children learn chores but there is nothing to feel guilty about. They are simply participating in the household and will have to run their own households someday. If they learn now they will not have to struggle with these issues later.
  3. Keep money matters in one place as well as files for all your important papers and issues such as credit card information, taxes, medical, legal, travel, etc.… It is very nice to be able to put your hands right on something the minute you want it.
  4. A place for everything and everything in its place. It’s really that simple.
  5. Go with a schedule for cleaning, weekly daily, monthly and seasonally. Then stick to it.

Car

Does your car look like you live in it? This too is very stressful and carries chaos from your home into your driving. You will be more distracted and harried while driving if your car is a mess.

  1. Clean it out daily from anything you may have eaten, wrappers, coffee cups and work-related papers.
  2. Wipe console free of dust and grime with a wipe made for this to free your view of dirt.
  3. Take it to the car wash once a week if finances permit or at least every other week. Allow them to vacuum it and wipe it down.
  4. Each child riding in the car is responsible for his or her own seat area if old enough.
  5. Dog nose prints on window wiped off daily.

Purse/Wallet

Another war zone, filled with extra papers, bunched up money, cough drops, candy with dirt embedded in a wrapper, year-old receipts, hair items and cosmetics. This is a virtual dumping ground of things we collect daily. None of them should be here.

Go through all purses and wallets, and take out all junk. If you use multiple purses clean out one per day until they are all done.

Vacuum or wipe out purses as you go.

I know these things sound very simplistic and not the topic you might think to bring to a psychologist. But I really can’t tell you the number of times that I have seen clients experience great relief from their symptoms of depression, anxiety, and anger just from taking control of their life routines and belongings. It frees up your time for more constructive thinking, planning and daydreaming!

There are many books, as well as internet resources, pertaining to organization and time management. If this is an issue for you, begin reading one today! It’s never too soon to start, and you won’t believe how just 15 minutes a day dedicated to organizing your home can make you feel better fast!

About Audrey Sherman, Ph.D.

Sherman is a psychologist, speaker and author of the book Dysfunction Interrupted-How to Quickly Overcome Depression, Anxiety and Anger Starting Now. She has been working with individuals and families for over 20 years and her expertise is in helping others to overcome the emotional baggage that keeps them stuck in unhappy and unproductive relationships, jobs and more. She currently works with clients in person or via Skype or telephone. To learn more about Dr. Sherman, her book, and workshops you can visit her website, PsychSkills.com.

 

 

Living a Simpler Life Can Ease Lawyer Depression

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler ~Albert Einstein

I believe most of us want, no, crave, a simpler life.  Henry Thoreau, seeking to find out what was essential about life, retreated to a small cabin at Walden Pond and wrote,

Our life is fritted away be detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

complexLawyers know that their lives are too complex, confusing and stressful.  They feel it in their bones. This sense of things intrudes on their thoughts during a five-minute lunch between court appearances and an afternoon deposition. They think to themselves, “There’s got to be a better way to live my life”.  They yearn for more space, more time to digest their experiences.  However, without a greater simplicity, their lives are swallowed by a flurry of demands that never stop coming.

It’s not only the office that weighs attorneys down – it the consumerist culture they live in with everyone else.  In a piece in the Wall Street Journal “When Simplicity Is the Solution”, takes a sample of the dizzying array of choices buyers face everyday:

“Every facet of our lives, even entertainment and recreation, is complicated by an ever-widening array of choices delivered at a frantic pace.  Consider:

More than 800,000 apps in the Apple App Store

240-plus selections on the Cheesecake Factory menu, not including lunch or brunch specials

135 mascaras, 437 lotions and 1,992 fragrances at Sephora.com

Lawyers need to shed those habits that weigh them down and clutter their lives and spirits. As the author Hans Hofmann once wrote, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

http://www.dreamstime.com/-image4246184Some of the things that can be jettisoned are mundane: not reading the paper every morning, not responding to e-mails and text 24-7 or just allowing the sweet space of silence for ten minutes a day.  Then there are the bigger items to chuck: letting go of relationships that aren’t healthy, daily diets that increase our waist lines and poison our bodies and habitual ways of responding to stress that batters their brains.

One Day at a Time to a Simpler Life

What small things can we let go of in our daily lives to make it simpler?

1.      Keep your office clean and organized.  Check out the website and book The Organized Lawyer.

2.      Bring nature into your office – a small vase of fresh flowers helps or some green, leafy plants. A good tonic for a harried lawyer – the simplicity of nature.

3.      Live a Day of 5 – and only 5 – important things that you want to get done today.  Take a legal pad, a bold flair marker, write in big letters and allow copious amounts of space between items.  This practice has a way of focusing our efforts and keeping it simple.

4.      Get rid of needless noise in your office – keep your door shut, turn off the radio.

5.      Live from a place of abundance rather than scarcity.  So you think you are, said the Buddha.  Remind yourself that you have everything you need and enough time.

6.      Bring a healthy lunch and snacks to work rather than going out for a lunch at a busy and noisy restaurant.

7.      Take a 10 minute silence break in your day.

8.      Only check your e-mail 3 times per day during the morning, noon and at the end of the day.  Psychologists estimate that as much as ninety  percent of e-mail is junk.  As such, the chances of your missing something urgent aren’t great.  Try this for a week and see what happens.  It’s an eye-opener.

Living a Simpler Life over the Long Haul

1.      Using technology to make your life simpler – go paperless.  Check out the ScanSnap Document Scanner.

2.      Check out the blog Zen Habits – a site devoted to living a simpler life.

3.      Develop the wisdom that having more stuff in your life doesn’t equal more happiness.

4.      Practice walking outside in nature as much as you can.

5.      Clean your house and throw out everything you don’t need.

6.      Do something with your hands – some people love chopping wood, for example.  Volunteering for Habit for Humanity is another.

7.      Practice Mindfulness – check the best-selling book, The Mindful Way through Depression.

8.      Fasting – it’s amazing how much time and energy we fret away thinking about food.  A friend of mine took note that he had twelve eating opportunities in one average day.  Check out the Master Cleaner fast – I did it one weekend and found it easy and rejuvenating.

9.      Do free stuff for a day.  As the author Robert Brault wrote, “The best things in life are not only free, but the line is shorter.” 

Remember that the more you simplify, the less your day will be fragmented by nonsense.  Thoreau wrote:  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life.

Do you really need to live your life driven by choices that increase your preoccupation with complexity while fueling your depression?  You already know what it’s like to live a complicated life.  Try for a while to live a simpler one.  You don’t have to go to Walden Pond to do it.  You’re home and office can be a good place to start.  It’s that simple.

By Dan Lukasik

How Lawyers Can Get Things Done When Depressed

Getting things done at work is a top priority for any lawyer.  This is all the more so when a lawyer is suffering from clinical depression because it becomes harder and harder to be productive: stacks of paperwork become bigger stacks of paperwork, deadlines begin to feel like death sentences when they’re not completed and time is running out, and the e-mail box is overflowing like a sink onto a cold tiled floor.

The failure to fix the lack of productivity problem spirals folks out of control.  Not accomplishing things make’s their work problems –  like their overall life problems – seem, essentially, unsolvable. Depressed lawyer can’t seem to remember a time before their depressive episode(s) when they were on top of their game. Author Andrew Solomon writes:

When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely in the present moment, as in the world of a three-year old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly, and you’re certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.

A Tsunami of Self-Condemnation

When you combine lack of productivity and disorganization, you have a recipe for hating one’s self; a toxic self-condemnation that goes on throughout the day for the depressed lawyer: “I got nothing done this morning.  I feel useless and out of control.  I feel like crap.”  They feel incompetent in a profession that prizes competence because they blame themselves for not having the motivation to check things off their list of things they must get done.  What they fail to see, is not they’re inept or lazy.  They’re sick.

Depression creates a real fuzzy dullness in the brain that prevents anyone within its gravitational pull from getting much done; a psychic disorientation that feels like you’ve been kicked in the head by a horse. The reason is that there is actually decreased metabolic functioning in the frontal lobes of the brain, which are responsible for initiating behavior.  So even though we desire to press on the gas to get things done, our brains are running on vapors.

Well Done

Lawyers feel desperate to become unstuck – to get traction and get back on the path of productivity.  In the insightful book Get It Done When You’re Depressed, the authors are dead-on about the types of things depressives tell themselves when trying to get things done – and how this actually leads to things not getting done: (1) You have decided that there’s no use in starting if you don’t have the desire for the project, (2) you search for the feeling of wanting to get something done even when you know that lack of motivation is a normal symptom of depression and (3) you wait so long to get a good feeling about what you need to do that you never even get started.

Given this, how can we possibly get things done when depressed?  Is it even possible? The three points I took away from the book are:

  1. Keep working until you do feel even a small sense of accomplishment, and hold on to that as you finish a project.
  2. Work no matter what so you can go to bed with a sense of accomplishment.
  3. As you start to implement these ideas, remember to take it slow and have realistic expectations.
  4. Remember, depression doesn’t want to do anything and never will.  It’s an inert illness, not an active illness.  If you wait until you ‘feel like it’ to start something, you’ll wait forever.

Lawyers are perfectionist and set high expectations on themselves.  But that doesn’t work with depression; it only serves to fuel the illness because you cannot get everything done that you customarily had gotten done when not depressed.  So, be kind to yourself.

In a past blog, My Desk, My Enemy: 6 Helpful Ways to Get Organized, I wrote further about the nuts-and-bolt of how to get things done when depressed.  Check out the blog for practical things you can put to use in your law practice and life.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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