#310: Ending Chaos in Your Law Practice

Ending Chaos in Your Law Practice

If you feel like you are managing chaos in your law practice, listen into this episode. I am sharing with you two of the most common mistakes that I see my clients making, that I see other lawyers making, and I even make them myself. So listen in and begin to learn how to manage the chaos in your practice.

Hi, I'm Dina Cataldo, a master coach and ex criminal prosecutor. I created Be a Better Lawyer Podcast for driven lawyers like you who want more from life than sitting behind a desk. You've been playing by other people's rules. Those rules have left you overwhelmed. Unfulfilled, and feeling like a hamster on a wheel. I've been there. I was doing everything people told me to do to be successful, working late nights, weekends, and trying to make everyone happy. So why wasn't I happy and I wanted more in life? When was I going to find time to find and pursue that? Well, I did, and I'm sharing with you my secrets to living a happier and more fulfilling life. This podcast gives you a lifetime of wisdom, mindset, principles, and bedrock strategies to give you unshakeable confidence, more time to pursue your goals, a powerful sense of purpose to uplevel your life and law practice and so much more.

These are things we were never taught in law school. This podcast bridges the gap between law, school and life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Hello my friend, how are you? So this week I am sharing with you the top two things that I see lawyers doing that are really causing them so much pain, causing them so much grief. And I don't want you to suffer with those two. Now, if you have been listening for a while, you may have heard about the Busy Lawyers Ultimate Time Management Guide that I created for you to give you the steps to take step by step by step in order to create a calendar that will help you manage the chaos. But here's the thing, just because I give you the steps doesn't mean that there's not a whole lot of mind management that comes in behind it to help you really strategize, implement, and become consistent.

And any skill that we want to create in our life requires consistency. It requires persistence. Even on those days where we just feel down and out, it requires us returning to the tools, returning to the mindset. And it's a constant reminder, right? This is part of what we are learning here on the planet, in case you haven't noticed, we learn something and then we relearn it and we relearn it, and we relearn it until it becomes more of a habit. But it doesn't mean that our brain shuts off and we don't have that primal brain that comes in and tells us all the things that we're doing wrong and that we can't do it. We just need to remind ourselves that that is old programming. And if you haven't downloaded the Busy Lawyer's Ultimate Time Management Guide, I highly recommend you do it. Go to dina cataldo.com/busy lawyer.

I'll also link to it in the show notes. But what I give you in that guide is the, it's what I teach my clients. It's what I use myself in order to create the life that I want. I just follow exactly that plan. And I do it every week. And I wasn't perfect at it. I'm still not perfect at it. But that doesn't matter because what it takes is just going to that skillset and implementing the skills time after time, after time. And the more you do it, the more you're gonna see the things that come up for you that are problems. And there's two particular issues that I see come up over and over again, and I wanna share them with you because they are the ones that can help you become more consistent, that can help you manage the chaos. And they are so fundamental, but our brain doesn't compute them for some reason, right?

Even my brain sometimes goes to these issues and I wanna share them with you. And the the, I'm gonna share the second issue first because I believe that it is fundamental that we understand this, which is we have been socialized to feel powerless. I don't know if you have really reflected on this. I didn't reflect on this until maybe about five years ago, and it really hasn't sunk in until the last, maybe three. But we are socialized to feel powerless as if we are less than our true nature, which is incredibly powerful. And we see those reflections in our society of people who have really blown us away, inspired us because they have embraced and they have really sat with that empowered version of themselves, the one that can really manage the chaos, the one that can go in and learn the skills to create these amazing lives, create these incredible gifts to our society.

And you know, off the top of my head, I'm thinking Oprah, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, those kinds of people that we see in our society and they just blow us away. And we're, we're just in awe of them. At least I am. There might be somebody different for you, but those people who inspire us are those people who have embraced their power and they have understood and broken away from that socialization of powerlessness, that lack of control. And because it, because it's so deeply socialized, we don't see it. We're blind to it. So lemme give you an example. When we are born, we're helpless. We need people to care for us. That's why we have parents, we have caregivers that we're fortunate enough to bring us up so that we've made it this far in our life. Yeah. But then we go into an educational system.

And that educational system is highly structured. We're told what to do, when to do it, when the due dates are, what the consequences are. If you don't comply with those due dates, what the consequences are if you don't get the A plus, right? We're given this step by step rubric of how to behave and how to manage our time. And that goes all the way through college. And it even goes into law school. And so we are taught do A and B, and you're gonna get C result, right? One plus one plus is equals two. And so if we're structured and socialized to be told what to do and when to do it and how to do it to get the result that we want, then we lose all semblance of empowerment. In fact, it, you know, this brings to mind when I was in my office early on in our careers, I would say at least the first 10 years of my career, we were disempowered in a lot of ways.

We were always required to go to somebody else in the food chain, right? <Laugh> to, to tell us what to do in terms of an offer, in terms of how to communicate with council. Like there were so many boundaries around how to communicate. And I think I got into like year eight or nine, and I, and I, I started to understand like, okay, I understand why they're doing it, but they are slowing down the process because they're not empowering their people to take action to negotiate because they're not giving the skillset that's required to negotiate to do the things that that need to be done. So it slows down the process tremendously to try to move a case, right? And we do that in our own businesses. I know a lot of my clients, they tell me like, I'm the bottleneck. I know I'm the bottleneck that I am creating this chaos because I need to have my hot little hand on every little file.

This makes a lot of sense because of the ways that we have been socialized that we need to do things a certain way. But not only that, that we need to be told how to do things in order for us to manage the chaos. I hear this time, and again, lawyers tell me, I wish I just had an assistant who would just tell me what to do and tell me the order to do it, and then I would do the thing. But even that is giving away all empowerment. Do you think the person you most admire is saying, Hey, can, can you think for me, can you strategize for me so that I don't have to think and then I'll just do the thing? No way. There's absolutely no way that they would be doing that. They haven't reached that level of success on accident.

Success leaves clues, and those people are understanding the concept of there's an old way of doing things. And that old way has not served me right? Maybe it got me to where I am, but I need to rethink things if I'm going to build my future. And you know, I'm gonna talk about Taylor Swift just because she's been on everybody's mind, I think. But I like to study her because she is brilliant, not only as a business woman, but as somebody who really thinks about her future and how she wants to create her future intentionally. And managing chaos is about intentionality. It's about managing your future and thinking about your future. Doing a calendar is just a miniature version of that, right? So we have a plan for the week that sets in motion how we are going to do things. And so then we are intentionally making decisions about what we do, what we don't do, what we delegate, what we don't delegate.

And those intentional choices create the weak, right? But look at it in that macrocosm of Taylor Swift, she's not handing over the strategy to somebody. She's not saying, here, here's what I wanna do with my life. Can you figure it out for me? Right? When we are kids, we're kind of told that, oh, you wanna be a lawyer? Here's how you do it. You go to school, you get good grades, you go to college, you take these different majors, it doesn't really matter what major you're in, you can still go to law school. And then you go to law school and then you're told this is how you do it. And here you gotta take the bar. The bar doesn't even really determine whether or not you're gonna be a good attorney. So all of these things that we're told here, you have to do this, you have to do this, are setting us up for frustration and feeling like our business or our practice, if you don't own your own law practice is chaotic.

So we are set up for failure, okay? I just wanna start there because so many of us think that there's something wrong with us, that we have done something wrong, that we don't know what we're doing, that we should know these skills by now. But our whole life has been designed to weaken us. And it's fascinating for me to observe how this has played out in my life. I'm still unraveling things that I learned that I need to unlearn. And that's okay. That's, that's the part of the evolution of our life. I believe that we're on this planet to evolve ourselves as much as possible until we leave the planet. And that's where we all, and we're all in different learning stages. And one of the things that can really harm us is believing the lie that we've been sold our whole life, which is we don't know what we're doing unless we're told what to do.

You know, if you watch the news, you see this playing out. I advise not to watch the news so much. It's not helpful. <Laugh>, we're told, be scared of this. Be scared of this. Be scared of this. Be scared of this. And how does that affect our nervous system? Well, we feel like there's chaos in the world and we're looking to other people to help us feel better. Can you tell me what to do in order for me to feel better? Where do I need to donate money? Where do I need to focus my attention? We're looking outside of us to focus our attention. Do you think the person you admire most is allowing others to tell them how to think and how to feel? 'cause That's what the news does. It tells us how to think and how to feel about certain events in this world, but it doesn't even tell us about other things happening in the world.

So fascinating, right? And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Bring your attention to it. Watch how you feel when you're watching the news or watching a television program. What are you being socialized in that moment to believe? Like little girls, we're socialized to believe there's gonna be a prince charming somewhere around the ages of 18 and 28 that's gonna sweep us off our feet and they're gonna take care of us. That is what we are socialized, right? It's just those things like throughout our lives, we're being socialized to believe these certain things about who we are, who we're meant to be, what we're capable of, and what we have control over. And there may be many things in our lives that we have zero control over, right? I'm to say most of them. But we do have the power to understand where our attention is going and where we're giving power away and not bringing attention to our lives and what we want, and being intentional about what we want.

I think Oprah said something like, she doesn't even watch the news, right? Is that person that you admire most giving her attention away to things that are not in service of her and the mission that they have? Because every one of us has a mission. Every one of us knows that there's something that we're meant here to do. Maybe we don't quite know how to articulate it yet. I didn't, I didn't for years and years. It wasn't until I found coaching that I really felt like I had a mission. I felt like I could help people, that I had overcome so many things, and now I could come into coaching and help people. Maybe for you, you've always known you wanted to be a certain kind of lawyer, and you always wanted to help those people. So are you making intentional choices about what's going on in your time right now so that you can further that intention?

Because if we're giving our attention away, and we're not ma learning how to manage the chaos, then we're not able to put our intention on that bigger picture, on that bigger mission that we all have. I am constantly adjusting my brain to recognize where am I taking in misinformation? Where am I putting my attention, where I'm just wasting that attention? I started, I started reading this book. I, I think I mentioned on one of the other episodes that I started this book club and I thought, oh, this will be so great. I'll, I'll read the books that I, I haven't read before. And honestly, I started reading one and I read it and I, you know, I like it. It was, it was fun to start reading it. And then I kept sitting with it. I'm like, why am I putting my attention on this book?

It's like the characters to me were just not likable, and I don't wanna spend my time with those people. <Laugh>. Like, for me, I didn't wanna spend time with those people. Everything we put into our head, whether it's the news or a podcast, or reading a book or whatever it is, watching a YouTube video, I, I like to ask myself, do I wanna spend time with this person? Do I like this energy? Is this somewhere I want to focus my attention? And I realized I didn't wanna focus my attention. So I flipped through it, and I read a little bit of the ending and I was like, yeah, I think this is a good decision. I don't need to read this book. I just thought it was fascinating. And if we don't give ourselves permission to stop and reassess every now and again, I, I mean, for me it feels like it's daily, like reassess, then we're stuck in that powerlessness.

So that's the, that's the first thing I want to really lay the foundation for you in this episode, is that it is normal to feel like you can't manage the chaos because we've been told we need somebody to manage us. But if you want to take your life and your practice to the next level, you've gotta break down those structures. You've gotta let that all go. And it's a process. I mean, that's what I work with my clients on. It's a process to break down those structures, to believe what your brain says is untrue, right? Because your brain is like, no, but it's true. This is chaos. I have no way of managing it. I don't know what I'm doing. But that is what you've been trained to think everybody tells us from birth to all the way through school. And heck, even if you're a young associate or you're just starting out in your law practice, everyone tells you, you don't know what you're doing.

You should do this, right? Everybody has an answer. Everybody's just so smart. But how come they can't manage their lives? It's important to notice these things. I know that, you know, I've had clients where we're, we're strategizing, we're brainstorming, we're thinking through bigger things they want to do in their practice. And they tell me, well, you know, the older partner in my office said that's a really bad idea and that I shouldn't do that, so I guess I shouldn't do it. And then when I coach them on it, I say, okay, well let's take a look at this. Like, why are you doing it? Why, why do you wanna do what they do? And they say, well, I don't wanna do what he said, but he knows best, you know best. And how can you begin to empower yourself? Well, one way is to start questioning every time you are fed something from somebody who claims that they are like the higher knowing person, right?

I know more than everybody else. Like, I just wanna share with you that we've gotta question all of that. We've gotta question everything, including our own brain, and begin to differentiate that voice that's empowered versus disempowered. You will know the difference in your body when you begin practicing this and questioning this. So, okay, that's the second mistake I see most often, right? Is really falling into allowing ourselves to fall into that disempowered voice. The one that says, I should know this by now. I'm not working hard enough. There's something wrong with me. I'm doing it wrong. Being mean to ourselves basically, and judging ourselves and telling ourselves that we gotta get our stuff together. Now, I don't disagree with learning a new skill, but that is very different from judging ourselves and telling ourselves we can't do it. So that is the foundation. The very nu the, the number one thing that I see my clients struggle with when it comes to part of the strategy I lay out in the busy lawyers guide is the part that inevitably is the one they end up skipping.

And there's a few that, you know, we gotta learn the practice of not skipping each step, right? Because our brain says different things to us. It says, oh no, I don't have time for that. I should just skip that and do this other thing instead. Or, oh, no, I know that. And then we skip ahead and we don't do that other step. Well, that's normal. We wanna learn how to manage our brains so that we notice that thought and we come back to it and we say, okay, I see where my brain is lying to me. I really do have time. It's actually gonna save me some time and heartache if I just figure this out right now. So let, let's do this. But that, that oftentimes is a matter of trial and error. You just learn over time. But this one step, it seems like this is a blind spot, and sometimes it's a blind spot for me too.

So if it's a blind spot for you, that's okay, right? You learn it and then you do it for a while and then you relearn it. <Laugh>. And I've done that before where my brain likes to say, oh, you can skip that step. You know how long this takes. Okay, so let me quickly give you an overview of where I'm going with this and what step this is. So when I teach time management and helping lawyers really learn how to manage what they feel like is total chaos in their practice, we, we don't start with this. This isn't the first concept I teach, because you need some foundation for it, I believe. And so our first couple sessions are not about time management, they're about mind management, because you need mind management before you can do this. But when we get to the time management portion of our sessions, this is what I lay out for them.

There's a very simple process, and I'll give you the first ones here. You can download the busy lawyers guide to get the rest of them, okay? But when you see them, it's gonna seem so simple, right? So the first step is just write down everything your brain tells you you need to do for the week. The second is to go through that list and then match times onto each of those items. But here's the part where people skip, which is when there is a project on your list, you need to break it down. You need to break it down because that is going to give you kind of the, the keys to making the shift you need for the week. And, and I'll give you a recent example of this. I had a client come to me and she had created her list. She'd even gone through, she'd highlighted like, prioritize, these are the things that need to get done the most this week.

So that was great, but then what she did is she took those items and then she just, she, she guessed the times, which is where you start, right? You have to guess to start somewhere. And then she put those items on her calendar. But what happened was, is she didn't break down the projects because her brain told her, oh, I already know how long this takes. But I guarantee you, I mean, I would say 90% of the time anyway, when we tell ourselves, oh, I know how long this takes. We are underestimating how long something takes. In fact, she was saying that she estimated one task on her calendar was two hours and ended up being four and a half hours. And she didn't realize that there were so many moving parts to the, the project. The reason she didn't realize there were so many moving parts is because she hadn't broken it down step by step by step.

And then she would've been able to see, oh, it's gonna take me more time than I thought. So I need to make more time, block more time on my calendar and not do these other things. And I've done this myself. In fact, I have, you know, calendared out. I think I've talked about this on the podcast. I've calendared out my, my quarter, and then I realized, oh, I didn't account for the amount of time that needed to take place for this particular project. I didn't realize it. And that's okay. We just need to take a step back and, and evaluate it and say, okay, how could I create a system for myself that I understand how long it's gonna take? And this is the system, right? And I skipped that for something right, in my weekly calendar. And so I didn't recognize, it took me like, I think a couple months for me to recognize, oh, this project is actually gonna take me more time.

But when we're so hard on ourselves and we tell ourselves I should know this by now, this is like, this is fundamental. Why don't I know this? And we're mean to ourselves. We block ourselves and then we don't do the calendar. Not because we can't do the calendar, but because we're believing the lie that there's something wrong with us. That we need somebody else to tell us what to do. And I want to share with you that you're that person. You are the person who gets to tell yourself what to do. That's why I love my calendar so much is because I look at it as such a tool, a beautiful tool for me to be able to tell myself what to do. And I do it from a place of calm because I'm planning ahead of time and I'm able to plan from that higher sense of intention, right?

That person who knows in that moment, okay, this week I'm gonna be really intentional and here's how I'm gonna do it. And then I plan my week. And then the job for me during the week is to recognize when I don't wanna do something and talk myself through the process of getting it done. That's a whole other episode. But I wanna share that with you because so many of us think that the calendar is the problem. We wanna look outside of us. Oh, nope, I need a better calendar. 'cause This calendar's not telling me what to do, right? It's very fascinating when you start looking at all the ways that we abdicate our power and we say, oh, nope, it's, it's this, it's that. It's no, it's just us. It's always us. And not in a way to blame us or be mean to us or anything like that.

It's just to recognize, oh, I actually have more power than my brain is telling me. Not because I am dumb or anything like that. It's because, oh, I was socialized this way. And so now it's up to me to just start to restructure it. Now that I know this about my socialization, now that I know this about my past history, I can come in and I can say, okay, this is the lie. I know I feel like this is chaos this week, but let's go in and let's start cleaning it up. Let me give you another example. So I had a client who was going through the same process, same second step, right? She has these projects, she's trying to estimate time for each of them. And she thought she broke it down and then estimated time accurately, but she still felt really overwhelmed even thinking about her week ahead.

So I asked her some more questions about this project that she said that was on her mind, that she was thinking about it. And when she thought about it, it created this feeling of overwhelm. And I asked her, how did you break it up? And she said, well, I broke it up into this and this piece. I said, okay, well let's go through it step by step. Tell me everything, everything you need to do for that project to be deemed complete by the date that you want it completed. And she just started listing everything out. There was just, there was actually quite a list, maybe 10 items where she had only listed maybe three or four of them in her calendar. And once she had that checklist for herself, we started going through it and she realized, oh, wait a minute. I didn't break this down quite the way I wanted it to.

This is actually gonna take 30 minutes. That's gonna be an hour. I haven't been able to get ahold of that client. I need to be able to get ahold of her. That might take X amount of time. I need to do this, that, and the other. All of these different things. And so she was able to see, okay, it's gonna take more time than I thought. So once we had that level of specificity in what needed to be completed for that project, the next question I always go to is, how do I make this easier? Her brain didn't go there naturally. None of our brains do. We have to direct our brain. So number one, we get really specific about all of those tasks that we need to complete to deem a project completed. And then what we do is we go in and we ask ourselves, how do I make this easier?

But if we don't do that, here's what happens. We don't delegate. We tell ourselves we need to do it because it's gonna go faster. And we tell ourselves we don't have enough time to get it all done and that we're gonna be up all night doing it. And we worry and we feel overwhelmed. But then guess what? Because we're worrying and because we feel overwhelmed, we are blocked from doing the work. We procrastinate. We find any distraction possible in order to take us away from this feeling, we numb out. So we've gotta notice that feeling of overwhelm and address it. Instead of numbing out, come back, make the list, that specific list for the project, and then go through that project and ask yourself, how do I make this easier? And what we found in this particular case was that she needed to call her her client.

And she was gonna call her client. The call was gonna be recorded, and then she was gonna type out all the interrogatories. And she hadn't thought about it being recorded. That was something that came out later. But I brought up, I said, how could you make this easier? And she didn't see it at first, but I asked her, would it be possible for you to get permission to record that particular call and then have your assistant type out the answers for the interrogatories? And she was like, I didn't even think about that, but yeah, I do. I could do that. And then we started, I started asking her more questions and she started recognizing, oh, it would be possible for her assistant to do that. Now her brain at first told her that she actually needed to do it 'cause it was gonna be much faster.

But when I questioned her some more, she recognized that her brain was lying to her. She changed the timeline on herself and she decided she needed to get it done sooner, right? Her brain was like, no, no, no, we need to get it sooner than the original timeline. And I said, well, you already said the timeline was Wednesday, but now your brain's telling you it's Tuesday. So let's check in on that. When do you, what? What's the issue here? And she said, I guess there isn't an issue. I guess my brain's just lying to me. And then she recognized it was something that she could delegate and that made her weak a lot easier. And it's so fascinating 'cause our brain ignores this, just ignores it. It's not a problem. It's just something that our brain does. My brain does it too. And every time I feel overwhelmed, I go back and I ask myself, okay, what step did I skip here?

And usually it's this one. It's the one where I need to break down the task into the smallest parts possible and then ask myself how long each of those individual tasks will take me. And then ask myself, how can I make this easier on myself? And when I ask myself that question, sometimes I eliminate steps. Sometimes I see where I could delegate. Sometimes I see where I don't even need to worry about it. It's already taken care of. So I want you to just know that if you are struggling to manage what feels like chaos in your practice, managing your time intentionally is going to create space for you. And doing the steps in that busy lawyer's guide is going to be of tremendous benefit. And specifically, if you are feeling overwhelmed about a project, even if you're not using the calendar that I, the calendar steps that I give you, you can just ask yourself in your project, like Project today, right?

You can look at what you have planned this week today and ask yourself, where do I feel overwhelmed? What do I think is creating overwhelm? It's always our thoughts, but what am I thinking about that feels overwhelming? And then go to that project and look at it, right? So if you're, you're thinking about a brief and you feel overwhelmed about it, take a moment, get out a piece of paper, take a breath, write down every single little step that you need to do in order to deem that project completed. Call a client. Write it out, edit it, read it, send it to somebody to review, file it. Do all of those things. Write it all down and estimate how long each step is going to take you. Really look at that and then ask yourself this next question, how do I make this easier?

Where can I delegate? Where can I eliminate? Where can I move the process along faster? Those are the things that will help you manage the chaos in your practice. And I completely understand, you know, I, you know, when I was a prosecutor, I felt this so much and I didn't have this tool. And so what I would do is I would just jump into projects. I would jump in, I would feel overwhelmed. I would feel tense. I would feel hurried. I would feel frazzled. I would stay up late at the office. I would come in on weekends. 'cause Everything I was doing didn't feel like it was enough. But if I had had this skill, oh my gosh, like especially early on in my practice, oh my gosh, right? Later on I had this skill. So it became so much easier. But early on in my practice, I didn't have this.

And this is what made the difference for me. This is why I was able to build a business on top of my law practice. It's because I learned to manage my mind around my calendar and get this completed in a way that felt good, where I actually had time to think and time for myself and to take care of myself. So I wanted to create this episode because I know so many lawyers are struggling with this. And I, it's not your fault. None of it is your fault. It is how we've been socialized. We, we don't have the skills going into our legal practice to manage our minds, to understand how a calendar works. Even if you have a trial practice, right? You can do this. And it's just so fascinating to me that we are not given these skills. Nobody talks about this. And you know, I could go on and on about this 'cause it just, it riles me up thinking about it.

This is something we should all be learning. Our lives would be so much easier. So go download that Busy Lawyer's Ultimate Time Management Guide. It's in the resources section on my website, but you can also go to dina cataldo.com/busy Lawyer. You can go to the show notes. And if you want to implement this, if you're like, yes, this is, she's speaking to me, she's speaking my language, book a call with me, go to dina cataldo.com/strategy session. We're gonna talk about exactly the plan that we will take to get you from where you are now to where you wanna go. We're gonna make it really intentional. We're gonna make you a plan like Taylor Swift's making for herself. Alright my friend, I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.