A Busy Friday

I agreed to judge a couple of sessions of my alma mater’s trial competition team try-outs this weekend. As a trial team alum, I have been asked the past few years to judge but my schedule never allowed me. I decided to do it this year.

I did one session this afternoon and was quite impressed with everyone. I look forward to tomorrow’s rounds. Being at the law school and dealing with the team brought back a lot of memories. Boy, was I naieve when I was at that point in life. I saw some of that in the students.

Little did I know when I was in their shoes that litigation is nothing like trial team. I always felt so confident during mock trials. That confidence all but disappeared the first time I questioned a witness for real. That was probably the point at which I realized I did not like “real” litigation. That was about 7 years ago!

Visiting the law school is bitter-sweet. I enjoy seeing my former professors, but I always question whether the choice to go was a mistake. In general, education is never a bad thing, but student loans hang around for a while.

Regardless, I’m always looking for a good excuse to visit my college town. My husband and I had our first “date” here (though we were not in college). I plan to stop at the local bakery on my way to campus. I’m already hungry thinking about it! We start early and there is a formal dance taking place at the hotel. The bass is thumping so it may take a while to fall asleep. I should probably turn in shortly. I apologize for any spelling errors. I can’t seem to find the spell-check on this mobile app! I’m so reliant on technology!

When Life Gets in the Way

The past few weeks have been incredibly busy and stressful at work.  I have found myself struggling to find time for the things that are truly important.  The result is that I become frustrated, withdrawn and angry.  I know this is not the best or most productive way to deal with such things, but when I continue to get work emails from my bosses during evening hours (including late Sunday) about things that are not pressing or even important, I want to hurl my phone across the room.  Luckily I have yet to do this.  I have, however, been taking very loud, deep breaths.

It is easy to take small steps towards a long-term life-changing goal.  It is much harder to take leaps that actually start real changes.  And I feel that my job is getting in the way of taking those leaps.  I’m not entirely certain how to deal with that yet, because I obviously can’t quit my job.  But I only have so much time in a day, and important and personal things are taking a back burner (including the laundry!).  I feel like I haven’t had the proper time to devote to taking pictures or writing.  I have not been happy with any of my recent projects.  I know that the point of posting every day is just simply to get as much practice as possible, whether writing or taking photos.  But since I’m doing this in an attempt to change my fate, I want to be able to take my blog posts seriously.  I don’t want to just throw something together just to say I did it.  I want to put forth something worthy of reading or viewing.

I think the best way to combat this is to start getting up earlier.  I have been struggling to get up early because it just means I have to go to work.  But perhaps if I look at it as just time for me and those things that are important maybe it will be easier to get up.  And if that’s the plan, I should start thinking about getting to bed!

Death to the Billable Hour

Is there anything worse than keeping track of your life in six-minute increments?  Putting off eating lunch or even going to the bathroom because you don’t want to miss out on precious minutes?  Ugh!  I hate the billable hour.  You would think it would be a great thing.  You can track your productivity and efficiency every minute of the day, right?  Wrong!  Because no one is productive and efficient all day every day.  And those off days really throw a wrench in my system.

Don’t get me wrong – the Type-A part of my personality loves documenting what I do during the day.  When I have a high billable day, I feel great.  But big billable days don’t necessarily equate to highly productive days.  I have found that some days I might cross seven things off my to-do list, which also feels great, but those seven things only took me two hours.  I still have 5.4 more hours to bill.  That feels terrible!

On the days that I am both productive and efficient, I find that I then have to spend anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour at the end of the day actually entering my time into our timekeeping software.  I’m not able to keep up with time entry as the work gets done, and having to stay extra just ruins my good feelings.

I have no fix for the billable hour.  I understand its purpose.  I just long for a job that focuses on results, and not how much or how little time it took me to complete the work.  If it’s good and it’s right, shouldn’t that be enough?

Ironically, I have been seriously thinking about starting my own practice.  I think I must be crazy, and I fear I just have a bad case of “the grass is greener on the other side.”  But then I think, if I have to continue doing this, shouldn’t I get to be my own boss, choose my own clients, actually have interaction with other humans during the day, and yes, reap the monetary rewards?  I think this is just a different manifestation of my frustration with my current path.  Clearly I have no idea what I want to do!  We’ll have to see what develops.

Inspiration and Motivation

I am going to continue to take advantage of The Daily Post suggestions because I know the day will come when I struggle to come up with an idea.  At that point I can pull from one of the ideas on my running list of topics.  Today’s topic is why did you start a blog?  I actually have two blogs, and the reasons for starting each are quite different…on the surface.  On a deeper level, the reasons really are the same: practice, experience, and exposure.

I have a photo blog that I started in order to share my pictures with friends and family, explore my photography skills, and make a conscious effort to find the beauty in the ordinary, everyday things I encounter.  I have aspirations of making photography a career (at least on a part-time basis), and I thought starting a blog would be a step in the right direction.

I started this blog mostly because I hate my career, but I’m tired of doing nothing but complaining about it.  I decided it was time to start taking active steps to do something about it (I guess, in part, that was also the motivation for the photo blog).  I have always loved to write, and I used to journal on a daily basis when I was younger.  I think journaling is an excellent way to de-stress and refocus.  It allows you to vent, wonder, dream, and think about your innermost secrets without worrying about fear of judgment (unless someone reads your journal, which totally sucks).

I suppose the main reason for starting this blog was to purge some of the negative thoughts and frustrations from my head and to take a positive, forward-moving approach at figuring out what I want to do “when I grow up.”  Part of me would love to be a writer (the part that isn’t a photographer 😉 ), but I don’t know what I would write about.  I’ve thought about writing fiction, but that’s no easy task to undertake.  But I figured if I started the blog and just wrote…about anything, about everything…maybe inspiration would strike.

So, ultimately, each of my blogs is about getting more experience with both crafts, developing, skills, and hoping that someone stumbles upon my pages and likes them well enough to read an entire post.  And if I’m really lucky, subscribe!

Unexpected News

As predicted, we did get snow overnight and I chose to stay home.  Around 10 am, my phone rang and I knew that it was my mom.  She almost always calls me whenever we have bad weather to make sure that I made it to work OK.  (Most days I’m still at home!).  It was indeed her, checking in on my commute.  The call then took an unexpected twist as she told me her employer announced today that the company would be closing.  The company was purchased (merged) a few years back and there had been talk then that her office would be closed.  Apparently that day will officially be here in about six months.

I can’t even imagine what she is feeling.  They are offering jobs to anyone who wants to move to the parent corp and severance to those who don’t.  However, my mom is pretty close to retirement age, and to pick up and move at this point in life has to be an overwhelming prospect.  It may be the best choice financially, though.

I’m trying not to feel stressed out, because I feel like I should try to remain calm for her.  She’s the one who deserves to be stressed out.  I hope that I can give her sound advice, although I have never been faced with such a big decision.  She’s lived in her current town since we moved there in 1982.  She has a strong social network.  I’m not sure how she would handle picking up and moving about 3 hours away.

I am anxious to talk to her and hear more about what she found out today.  Maybe a number of current employees will take the opportunity to move, making that option less like starting over.  Regardless of what she decides to do, it will mean big changes for the future.  Hopefully this will be an opportunity to focus on the positives of an unexpected challenge.

Sunday Night Blues

Sigh.  I am trying to keep a positive outlook for the upcoming week, but I’m already feeling trepidation.  It was really hard to drag myself out of bed last Monday and I am fearing the same thing in about 12 hours.  I received a handful of work emails over the weekend, which just increases my anxiety level (including one from an opposing counsel’s paralegal at 8:30 this morning).  If other people in my office want to work 24/7, good for them.  I don’t want that.  I want my work life separate from my personal life, and I don’t want to have to fret over whether my phone is notifying my in a timely fashion that I have work emails (which it did not do from about Friday evening on).

I have never understood those people who become so consumed by work that it permeates everything they do.  It’s as if they forgot (or perhaps never knew) how to relax.  My husband is also an attorney and we toss about the idea all the time of having our own practices.  He practices in areas conducive to hanging out your own shingle.  Me, not so much.  I think it would make the practice of law much less stressful.  I know that seems counterintuitive.  However, my sources of stress are two and contribute equally – the people I work for and my actual cases.  The attitude and approach of the people I work for are just as stressful as my actual practice (which is fueled by the people I work for…viscious cycle).  I keep telling myself if I worked for myself and selected my own cases I wouldn’t mind being a lawyer.  Then part of my brain keeps responding by reminding me that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

So, I sit here on the couch and watch the seconds click by as the clock swiftly approaches Monday.  I can’t slow down or stop time.  I don’t feel any better about the approaching week, but I’m going to give last week’s suggestion of identifying all the good things I have to look forward to this week another try.  I get to order our new laptop (which should be awesome for editing photos with 8 GB of memory and a 1 TB hard drive), I should get the book on my new Speedlite flash, I have  lunch plans with a friend on Friday, and I will be out of the office Friday afternoon for a deposition.  I also found out last Friday that the wife of one of the attorneys on the case is a photographer.  There’s another connection to the photography profession and I’m hoping she’d be open to giving some advice to an aspiring photographer.

I Survived Hump Day

I’m going to borrow the suggested topic from The Daily Post today.  It’s kind of in line with what I was feeling anyway.  When I first saw the topic, “Are you stressed?”, my immediate response was, “YES!!!”  (Deep breath).  I thought about putting aside the status report I was working on and writing my post right then.  I had so many stressors to blather on about!  As is typical for me, I decided I would finish what I was working on before I moved on to something else (be it my next status report or blogging).  I think that was the best choice because much to my surprise, my day turned around!  I would have wasted my daily post complaining about trivial nonsense that no one really wants to read about.

Instead, I get to write about how a five-minute phone call made a significant impact on my attitude towards my career.  It really irks me when people underestimate me or make wrong assumptions about me.  Yet today I realized that I do the same thing.  I was expecting a negative and angry reaction from opposing counsel when I asked to extend certain case management deadlines.  As it turned out, he was completely reasonable and understanding when I explained why I thought it needed to be extended.  Guess what?  Underestimating people and making assumptions can cause unneeded and unwarranted stress.

This case has seriously been the single largest source of stress for me since the beginning of December.  Some of it was warranted.  The majority of it was not.  Because I was too afraid of the reaction I would get if I was honest about my analysis of the case, I just sat and let my stress level rise rather than just pick up the phone.  I know what you are thinking.  How did you become a litigator if this is your attitude towards conflict?  Trust me.  I am aware of the irony.  That story, in conjunction with how I made it to law school in the first place, is best left for another day.

What I learned today is that it is still possible for people on opposite sides of a situation to behave amicably and, more importantly, reasonably, while still advocating for their clients.  It is so rare to find someone reasonable and open to dialog that I always expect the worst from my opponents.  I always expect someone to try to take advantage of candor, so I in turn end up acting like those I complain about.

My stress level seriously subsided after that phone call.  What also happened is that my faith in the profession was lifted just a tiny bit.  And that tiny lift was just the first step in embracing where I am right now in life, accepting what I do, and appreciating that it gives me the opportunity to pursue the interests that I love.

I’m glad I answered the phone instead of letting it go straight to voice mail.

Finding My Childhood Dreams

Last week I spent a good portion of Wednesday driving to and from a deposition and client meeting.  My Google map directions, while technically right on, did not account for road repaving and a blocked drive, and as a result I spent a good amount of time driving around somewhat lost.  The benefit of the detour and the trip in general was that I made it through almost my entire 6-disc CD changer.  It’s not often that I get to listen to that many CDs uninterrupted.

I was listening to the Carolina Liar CD…OK, I was belting out the songs as loud as I could as if I were performing with the band, when my thoughts started wandering back to when I was a kid and all the crazy ideas I had about what I was going to do when I grew up.  Not that I realized at the time that they were crazy.  I thought back to my earliest declaration of what I was going to do when I was a “grown-up.”  I can’t remember if it was veterinarian or writer.  Those two emerged at about the same time, and likely overlapped.  I loved animals and I loved to read (still do).  I always had a book with me.  I even tried writing some fictional stories.  As you can imagine, my 7- or 8-year-old self came up with some pretty laughable stuff.  I may even have it lying around here somewhere.  The point of my memory was that I was doing something to further my dreams even when I was that young.  Whatever happened to that?

As I got older, my career aspirations changed.  For a period of time I was going to be an actress/singer (hence the love of singing in the car).  However, I was (am) not exceptional at either.  Although I tried.  After all, in the 8th grade I was the female lead in the middle school play (which I may have a video of and would also likely evoke laughter).  I realized those were not viable options, and soon one of my best friends and I decided we would be lawyers.  I have no idea why.  We didn’t even discuss what kind of law we would practice.  I think we thought we would make a lot of money.  All I can say to my middle school self is, “HA!”

I really don’t have any memories of specific career aspirations after middle school.  I find this strange, considering I was getting closer to going to college and actually pursuing a career.  I started college without having any idea of what I wanted to do when I grew up (an event that was much closer to arrival than when I was 8).  I started with two potential majors, and made my decision based upon the location of the buildings where the majority of my classes would take place.  Brilliant, right?

The journey to law school is a story for another day.  The point of my musings in the car last week is that it’s not too late to find and resurrect those childhood dreams.  I don’t mean all of them (ie, singing and acting.  I am, after all, too old to try out for American Idol), but writing…yeah, that one I can still do.  Ironically (serendipitously?), after I returned home from my day of driving I saw the challenge to blog more in 2011, and I took that as a sign.  Maybe no one will read this, but that’s OK.  I’m still writing, and the act of doing something is enough.

Back to the Daily Grind

I’ve had a wonderful four days off, five days out of the office, and about a month of no full weeks in the office.  I am not looking forward to tomorrow.  I know I have plenty to do to keep me busy and make the day go by quickly (requirements for a Monday, right?), but extended time out of the office always makes feel sad when I have to go back.    I try to take the approach that it’s just a job, just a means to an end.  I mean, how many people really like what they do?  I should just suck it up and put on a happy face.

Then I think about the people I know who do like or even (gasp!) love their jobs. (Shockingly, none of them are my attorney colleagues).  Why can’t that be me?  Why is that too much to ask for?  For the longest time I didn’t know how to answer those questions because I didn’t know what job I could or wanted to do that would fit my happiness criteria.  Instead of lamenting, I started thinking about the things I could do over lunch or after work that would further my goal of finding a job I love.

I know such a huge life change doesn’t happen overnight.  I know I have to deal with contentious opposing counsel for a while longer.  I know I have to deal with the stress of litigation for a while longer.  Despite that, this week I have the following to look forward to: using my new work coffee pot, three new cases that will provide me with lots of billable time, a Friday trip out of the office that requires me merely to observe, and pay day!  Coming up with a list of things to look forward to each week should make the daily grind more bearable (I’m hoping!).

For the rest of you who have had some time off and feel the same way towards going back to work tomorrow, what are three things you have to look forward to this week?  Keep those in mind as you struggle to make it through the day, and before you know it, Friday will be here!

The Daily Post 2011 Challenge

I started this blog with a head full of ideas, and clearly the execution has fallen by the wayside.  I think The Daily Post challenge is a great idea and should be a good motivator for me to try to post something every day.  My intention is to embrace 2011 as a year for change and making things happen.  I have been unsatisfied in my career essentially since my graduation from law school.  This year I am going to immerse myself in things I love to do, and watch for opportunities to present themselves.

Happy New Year to all, and best of luck with your personal challenges.