CBA Record January-February 2025

THE YOUNG LAWYERS SECTION

Open and Shut: Simple Routines to Bookend Your Day and Boost Your Mindset By Benjamin M. Levine

intense, and this grounding practice ensures I start with a calm, centered mindset. 4. Set one key goal for the day. Identifying a daily goal adds meaning to the day and gives me a metric for success. Whether it is task-oriented (e.g., completing an assignment) or intangible (e.g., connecting with a col league), it keeps me focused and inten tional. 5. Do a quick review of your email. Scanning emails for urgent items provides a practical launchpad into the workday and helps maintain an organized inbox. As your workday comes to an end, make sure you do what you can to wind down. Below is a helpful 5- to 10-minute routine I do every day before leaving work: 1. Enter and review your time. For billable hours, daily time entries are crucial. Logging my hours at the day’s end ensures accuracy and pro vides an opportunity to reflect on what I accomplished. 2. Review tomorrow’s calendar. Glancing at the next day’s schedule helps shift my focus away from today’s tasks and sets the stage for a smooth start the next morning. 3. Tidy up your workspace. Cleaning up, even for a short amount of time, signals the end of the workday. It also ensures I start the next day with a neat, organized environment. 4. Restart your computer. This step, though simple, is surpris ingly impactful. Restarting ensures that necessary IT updates are applied, critical for both security and perfor mance, and helps prevent technical issues. It also creates a natural moment of review, allowing me to assess where

B eing a new attorney is challeng ing, no matter the environment. The sprawling nature of the work demands effective project and relation ship management, requiring you to con stantly reorient yourself. A colleague once told me that being a lawyer is like reading 20 books at once—you must be able to put one down and pick it up later without missing a beat. Success often hinges on your ability to stay grounded and organized amid the chaos. This extends beyond work, because the mental demands of legal practice can spill into your personal life and affect your emotional well-being. In Big Law, the incentives and pressures to work longer and harder are ever-present. For me, establishing structured open ing and closing routines for my day has been essential to creating balance. These routines not only boost productivity through small, consistent habits but also help me set clear boundaries between work and personal life. They create mental triggers for starting and stopping work, allowing me to preserve my energy and focus. By sharing my routines, I hope to

inspire others to develop their own prac tices for wellness and efficiency. For roughly 20 minutes each morn ing, doing the following helps me get in the best mindset for starting the workday; these tips may help you, too: 1. Review your calendar. Knowing what is ahead helps set real istic expectations for the day. It allows me to mentally prepare for packed mornings or open afternoons, ensuring I am ready for each phase of the day. 2. Review your tasks for the day. While you can choose any system that works for you, I use an organizational system called “Getting Things Done” to help gather and organize all my upcoming tasks in one centralized location. Each morning, I review and organize these items into tasks for the day and file less-pressing items away for later. This quick process keeps me focused and ensures nothing impor tant falls through the cracks. 3. Practice mindfulness. A brief moment of prayer or medita tion helps me step back and see the bigger picture. Legal work can be

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