Goldilocks Planning

Hey lawyers - A planning tip for you. 

I call this Goldilocks planning, and the purpose of it is to make sure that no matter how busy you are at work, no matter how slow you are at work, you still got some sort of plan for taking care of yourself. 

So the idea is that you're going to have one plan for self care when things are really busy. You're going to have another plan for when things are really slow, and then you're going to also have your plan for when things are in the middle, right, when things are steady, when they feel good, when they feel manageable. 

Now you probably already have that middle plan, but we usually don’t have a plan for the times when we're really busy, or the times when we're really slow. 

When you're really busy, you're using so much mental energy already, so much emotional energy, just to make it through the day and get all things done that you have to do. The trying to come up with a plan for taking care of yourself, it gets too overwhelming, right? And so you just don't do it. So I want you to make a decision in advance. 

What are my minimum non negotiables that I need to be doing, even when I'm busy, to take care of myself. Maybe that looks like a 10 minute walk a day, eight hours of sleep, making sure that I'm drinking water and eating three meals, and that's it. That's all I'm going to worry about doing. The rest of it can wait until things slow down.

When you have that in place already, when you get busy, you're not going to think about anything. You're just going to start implementing. 

At the other end of the spectrum, when we're thinking about when things are slow, I see people doing one of two things. The first is, they get some free time things are slow, and they think, oh, I need to make the best of this. I've got to use this wisely, right? Because that free time doesn't come around often, and then don’t choose to do anything bcause they are overwhelmed. 

Or second, they're so worried about not having enough work that they are just panicking, and they can't focus on doing anything for themselves, and end up sitting at the computer waiting for work to come in instead. I also want you to have a plan for these times. 

I want you to have a list of things that you could do, to take care of yourself that you wouldn't normally have time to do, things that you want, to try, things that you love doing, and just have that list as a backup, so that when you are a little bit slow, when you have that extra free time. You don't have to use all that mental energy trying to think of the best way to spend it right, you've already got a list of things you'd like to do.