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Balancing Work & Family

What’s More Important: the quality of your eulogy or your résumé?

No one has ever said on their deathbed that they wished they had spent more time at work. Yet many of us spend most of our adult lives acting as if that won’t be true of our own deathbed experience. Given how fast-paced life seems in the moment, we are tempted to be somewhat shortsighted. Career is important, you need to pay the bills, and you want to advance in your career and make a difference. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem arises all too often when we stop being able to distinguish between what is good for our career and what is good for our lives and the lives of others around us. David Brooks gave a brief TED talk on this topic.

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Balanced Gratitude: Practice Reviewing Consolations & Desolations

Much has been written about the importance of gratitude for your mental well-being. Focusing on what you are grateful for is an excellent way to avoid negative cyclic thinking and to put struggles into a wider perspective. In addition to identifying areas of gratitude, it is also helpful to recognize areas of struggle. Not to dwell on them, but to acknowledge them, understand them, and process them so that they do not linger in the background as the wallpaper of your life.

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Work less and sleep more

In a productive and fast paced culture, a premium is placed on working hard and getting things done. So much so, that sleep can be seen as a liability. It is talked about as a badge of honor if someone regularly works 7 days a week or puts in 80-100 hours a week. Rarely do you hear someone brag about how they got all their work done in half the time and took a well-deserved nap. The conflict between valuing work and seeing sleep as a liability can be illustrated in the tempting proposition: Would you give up half of what you owned in order to be able to have the ability to be fully rested with only one hour of sleep each night?

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From the Device Squad: Remember Human Connection

One of our recurrent mantras at LCL is that it is important for law students and lawyers to remember and attend to their humanness, and to stay in touch with themselves apart from maintaining a professional role and public face.  Along with the need to carve out space among the call of work and the desktop computer, lawyers are of course also subject to becoming “addicted” to their smartphones. 

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The Storm at Home – Divorce can be a special challenge for lawyers

Divorce is always found at the top of the list of major life changes that cause significant stress, second only to the death of a spouse. Many people going through a divorce for the first time can often be taken off-guard by the overarching impact that it has on their daily life. Divorce impacts every area of one’s personal life (social supports, activities, relationships with mutual friends), affects one’s professional functioning (takes away time and resources that you would normally be spending on client matters), and produces long lasting mental and emotional changes (can produce a sense of shame, questions about the future, and elicit hopelessness and anxiety).

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Announcing SuperMom: A Support Group for Lawyers

SuperMom is a collaboration of Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers + WBA Mothers’ Forum.

Babies don’t care if you’re a lawyer. And unfortunately, some of your clients and all of your deadlines don’t care if you’re a mom.

On the bright side, at some point your kids might develop some appreciation for your profession. Until that happens, simultaneously fulfilling two demanding roles won’t be easy. But there will be help.

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Less Work, More Play

Most everyone has heard about the importance of a work-life balance. We have all heard that it is important to get good sleep, eat well, exercise, have good relationships, and have other interests outside of work. “If you have a well-balanced life, your life will be better.” We’ve heard the sentiment, yet many have not adopted a healthy balance. Why is this? At the heart of this resistance is fear. Fear of not producing, not working hard enough, not excelling in a profession that you worked so hard to be involved in.

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The Secret to Happiness (Part 1) – Contentment

There are countless suggestions for how to achieve happiness in this life. Some are great advice, while others not so much. The best advice for how to achieve and maintain happiness is often times the simplest. Contentment is a secret ingredient of happiness. The ability to feel content with what you have, the way things are in your life, and who you are as a person can lay the foundation for happiness.

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Associates need to know when – and how – to say no

(A version of this article was published in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly on January 14, 2016 here)

In the life of a new associate at a medium or large law firm, it is not uncommon to sacrifice time with friends and family in the need to work long hours each day, work into the evening or on weekends at times when looming deadlines approach, and work with multiple superiors (partners and senior associates). In addition to the challenge of learning new aspects of the law, managing your time in order to complete the volume of work assigned to you, and trying to maintain your personal life in some fashion, the challenge of saying “no” becomes one of the most common sources of stress among new associates.

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Tips for Practicing Good Sleep Hygiene

 

Getting regular, quality sleep is one of the most important factors in good physical and mental health. Our bodies need sleep in order to repair and refuel our energy. While many of us use caffeine and sugar to replace the energy we should have gotten from a good night’s sleep, nothing can replace the benefit of a night of quality sleep. And while it seems simple, regularly getting quality sleep is difficult to do. Any parent can tell you that a full night’s sleep is more of a fantasy than a reality. However, there are some practical tips (generally called Sleep Hygiene) that can help you improve your sleep experience.

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