Five Ways to Change Your Perspective
When you face situations you don’t enjoy or problems you can’t readily solve, it is helpful to shift your perspective. Shifting your perspective can allow you to focus on the good, elevate your mood and bring you to new creative solutions. You shift your perspective by thinking or doing something differently to change yourself, your situation or others. Here are five ways. 1. Think “I Get To” Instead of “I Have To” Sometimes when I am feeling overwhelmed by life’s responsibil
Flagging Incoming Court Emails in Outlook
Some of the most important and time-sensitive emails you receive are court e-filing notifications. Ensure these don’t get lost in an overflowing inbox by setting up a rule to flag these on arrival and even pop up an alert. Since these notifications are usually from the same email address every time for a particular court, they’re a perfect candidate for Microsoft Outlook Rules. Rules in Microsoft Outlook can automate the handling of routine emails based on the sender’s addres
Quick Tips To Get Organized
With so many different options for organizing your work and life — GTD, Kanban, BuJo, SMART, Agile — it’s easy to get stuck and let things continue as they are. Here’s the thing to remember: The perfect system is the one you use. If you want to eliminate the chaos from your life, you can’t wait for the perfect system to come along. So let’s start. Six Steps to Start Organizing 1. Start with just one problem area. Choose one single area to work on at a time. For example, all t
A Simple Way to Manage Your Day
If you only had one project board for your firm, it would be easy to manage your tasks. Just pull the top card from your backlog/to-do column into your in-progress column and get to work (as discussed in Part 2). In reality, most firms will have a dozen or more boards, one for each project or matter, and you may be responsible for some cards on each of those boards. Some cards are at the top of the backlog, some need to be prioritized into a backlog, some will take minutes, o
‘Balancing the Scales’: Have Women Lawyers’ Expectations Changed in the Past 50 Years?
“I’m in my 30s and I’m a single, childless associate who has no idea if I will be on partnership track. I have considered dropping out of the law entirely as I’m not sure if I can physically do this anymore. How can I communicate my needs to my firm without sounding like a whiny millennial?” This was one of the most poignant questions at a recent viewing of “Balancing the Scales,” a documentary about women lawyers in America. Filmmaker Sharon Rowen visited Las Vegas for a scr
Legal Jargon?
Get to the Point repeatedly lauds plain language and counsels lawyers to Keep It Simple. But is there ever a reason to purposely defy this maxim? I’m In the In Crowd “The BLO lawyer told me the tentative settlement had to be approved by the BCM.”* “The defense says PD is fully paid, but claimant maintains entitlement to LP and missing TD.”** Many of our clients talk and write like this. It’s embarrassing to have to ask for a translation. It looks like you don’t understand the
What’s Working for Your Practice? Everything – or Just You?
If you’re like most lawyers, you just never have enough time in your days and weeks to step back and take the long view of your practice — where it’s going, what’s working well, what’s barely working, and what’s constantly in breakdown. So, because you’re so busy, you live with the “barely,” throw a quick fix at the breakdowns and burn the midnight oil to move your work. If that kind of practice is OK with you, congratulations, and welcome to heart attack city. But if it’s no
