The Lawyer Life Podcast

Dealing with Chaotic Days - 2 Simple Tips for Better Long-Term Results

• Autumn Noble • Season 2 • Episode 35

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In this episode of the Lawyer Life Podcast, we discuss how to effectively manage chaotic days in legal practice. I will share two essential tips relating to the importance of intentional email management and recognizing self-soothing patterns that can lead to avoidance of necessary tasks. The conversation emphasizes the need to embrace emotional experiences rather than suppress them, promoting a healthier approach to stress and overwhelm in the legal profession.

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You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast, episode number 35, Dealing with Chaotic Days, two simple tips to get you better results. When we're checking email, can feel like only a few seconds here and there. And so it never seems like that big of a deal. But over time, our wasted effort and distracted attention adds up. Research has found that between checking email six times more than needed,

letting notifications interrupt us and taking the time to get back on track, we lose about 21 minutes per day. As attorneys billing by the minute, that time adds up.

Hello my friends and welcome to the Lawyer Life podcast. If you are an attorney that's tired of working for other people and feeling like your career and your time are completely out of your hands, you are in the right spot. I am Autumn Noble. I'm a practicing attorney as well as a life and career coach for lawyers. I have coached hundreds of women all over the world to transform their practice into something that resonates deeply with who they are and who they want to be.

I help my clients reclaim their power and establish their own space in the legal industry. We all know that women are leaving the legal industry at a rate that is much higher than our male counterparts. And I am here to reverse that trend. Whether you are looking to accelerate your success, make some minor adjustments in your practice, or leave law in whole or in part, I am here to help you do just that and learn from all of my experiences doing the same.

and supporting hundreds of women on their own unique journeys. I am so glad that you're here.

Autumn G Noble (01:47.224)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Lawyer Life podcast. With year -end fast approaching and the chaotic days that often accompany practicing law, I thought that it might make sense to take a moment today to talk about dealing with chaos and to provide you with two simple tips to help you show up with grace and create the best results. Before we dig into today's topic, I have a really big announcement that I have been waiting to share with all of you.

Many of you were able to take advantage of my seminar series, How to Lawyer for Real, where we met one day every week over the course of seven weeks. As attorneys, showing up at the same time every week for seven weeks is nearly impossible. And quite frankly, when I was practicing law full -time and working with my coach, I signed up for a similar kind of a seminar and wasn't able to make it to everything. So I wanted to revamp How to Lawyer for Real.

and offer it to you in an on -demand email series. So you can now enjoy all of the benefits and all of the lessons that we explored in How to Lawyer for Real and work through them at your own pace. These lessons are going to be delivered to your inbox once a week over the course of six weeks. You're going to get video lessons, readings, and workbooks targeted towards each of the topics that we unpacked in How to Lawyer for Real.

The program will teach you how to transform your legal practice, how to tackle partnership, how to change your brain to align with your goals, and how to build powerful relationships and transform the bad ones. Additionally, the program is going to teach you all that you need to know about overwhelm to dismantle it for good. In addition to all of those topics, every week you're going to get a custom tailored guided meditation addressing the topic of the week.

You will also get access to my Time Mastery Workshop program that's gonna teach you all of the time management and project management skills that I use every day and have taught hundreds of women all over the world. You will get a daily, weekly, and monthly habit tracker, as well as my annual billable hour planner. This one is brand new. I have yet to share it with anyone, but this is something that I used every single month in my practice.

Autumn G Noble (04:06.616)
to understand where I was with respect to my billable hour goals, my business development goals, and my personal goals, and anticipate the obstacles that were coming so that I always knew where I stood with respect to those plans. As if that weren't enough, you'll also get a copy of my ebook, The Lawyer Life Survival Guide, an intuitive career assessment, as well as a workbook on how to find...

and secure legal clients. There is so much packed into this program. I'm so excited for all of you to take advantage of it and have access to this information in a manner and timeframe that works for you. Head over to the Lawyer Life Collective, sign up for the How to Lawyer for Real email series, and get started today. I can't wait to see how this program impacts your life and impacts your career. Get out there and check it out.

Okay, back to the topic at hand for today. We all have had those days when we feel pulled in a million different directions. Your phone bursts to life with a cacophony of alerts and messages and phone calls, and you can no longer find the bottom of your inbox. Everything coming into your email feels like an emergency, and everything on your to -do list seems like an impossibility, as well as a concrete reminder of your inability to simply get it together.

As the demands of the day press down upon us with such Herculean force, it can be difficult to maintain composure and prevent the whole overwhelm meltdown. Especially as year end creeps up for many of us, client demands often ratchet up to an excruciating tone. Rather than providing you with unrealistic self -care remedies that don't have any place in the legal industry, I'm providing you with two very simple tips that can protect you from some of the most common pitfalls

many of us suffer from when it feels like everything is falling down around us. First, avoid the low -hanging fruit that often makes its way to the top of our priority list. The most common offender, your email inbox. If your email is not your number one priority, do not give it priority time or attention. Have you ever really considered how much time we spend sifting through every email every day?

Autumn G Noble (06:23.278)
When everything heats up at the same time and you have real priorities to attend to, we cannot give the majority of our time and attention to that black hole that is your inbox. And believe me, I know this is a hard one for many of us that feel physically and emotionally tethered to our phone at all times of the day. I am not suggesting that we stop responding to emails or stop checking it altogether.

Rather, what I am suggesting is that we find a workable place for email to coexist along our priorities for each day, but especially those days when it feels like everything is falling down around us. According to science, here are all of the reasons that it is so easy and tempting to obsess over emails. Number one, you simply dread getting behind on email. It's easy to imagine that if we don't maintain our inbox on a regular basis,

it is going to grow to such massive amounts that it is going to take over an entire day just to stay on top of. For that reason, many of us buy into this idea that we have to stay on top of it in order to prevent some type of chaos down the road. Two, distracting activities are easier than productive work activities. Distracting things like email is still generally mentally easier than a lot of the things that are probably waiting for us on our desks.

As humans, we tend to take the easiest path available to us, clicking through emails, even if it means we're not doing the work that is objectively a much higher priority. Three, you want to be conscientious, and I hear this a lot in coaching. It feels so much more conscientious to our bosses, to our clients, to reply to emails as soon as possible, especially when those emails come from people that we want to impress.

In that headspace, we convince ourselves that we need to respond within 15 minutes rather than a few hours later in order to be a good partner, a good teammate, or to impress the people on the other end of the line. However, that's not often how it actually plays out for us. When we're checking email all of the time, we're likely less productive to other things on our plates that might be more important to those people that we're trying to impress by burying ourselves in our inbox all day long.

Autumn G Noble (08:43.948)
And while I can certainly understand that it's more likely that we're going to impress our bosses or our clients if we respond quickly to everything, what I think is also possible is that when we take longer to respond to things, it demonstrates that we are important and have other important things on our plates. And theoretically, if that is the type of response that they get, they may be more likely to resolve easy problems on their own rather than coming to you

for everything knowing that you're gonna respond immediately and make their lives easier. So in turn, by continually responding right away, we create a monster that's always gonna be expecting that from us and detracting us from things that actually might make them happier with us in the long run. you fear missing out. It's easy to get caught up in this one because if we continually respond right away to emails,

it's less likely that we're going to quote unquote miss out on the good opportunities, or we're going to miss out on something that's really pertinent to something that we might be working on. Those reasons all drive us to glue our eyes to our email inbox all day long. Five, it's simply a habit. There's an extent to which checking email frequently can just be a habit. And in this day and age where we're constantly overstimulated,

not only with email, but social media and all these things going on on this little device that we carry with us all day long, it certainly can be nothing more than a habit that we need to break. Six, you check email during downtime as a way to avoid anxiety. For many of us in the legal profession, we live in a constant hurricane of stress and overwhelm. And once we move out of that,

and we have a little bit of downtime. That's when we open the door to stressed out rumination and all those worst case scenarios come barreling at us. So checking our email can help fill in those voids, prevent that anxiety, prevent that rumination, but it's not often a solution to the larger problem. Seven, you underestimate the hidden drain of email.

Autumn G Noble (10:55.414)
When we're checking email, can feel like only a few seconds here and there. And so it never seems like that big of a deal. But over time, our wasted effort and distracted attention adds up. Additionally, for every single email that we glance at, we're making decisions about whether or not we respond right away, whether or not we categorize it, whether or not this trumps other things that we're working on, which is cognitively draining. Eight, we are looking to self -soothe and seeking easy buttons.

How many times have you found yourself glued to your email an hour after something really stressful or frustrating happens? And suddenly you look up and you realize I've completely avoided and ignored what happened and I've just buried myself in email. It's so tempting for us to dive into our email rather than attend to the dumpster fires all around us because focusing on those emails, finishing those little five minute projects or those simple responses,

it gives us some type of a dopamine hit that feels so much better than whatever else is happening outside of that email inbox. Whatever your reason to obsess over your email, research has found that between checking email six times more than needed, letting notifications interrupt us and taking the time to get back on track, we lose about 21 minutes per day. As attorneys billing by the minute, that time adds up.

In preparing for today's podcast, I went back through some of my old writings about my own experience with chaos and practicing law, and I came across one story that I wanted to share today. On that particular day, I found myself slipping into an old pattern and having to regroup and employ many of the tools that I teach my clients. I had several large projects on my desk that day, and I wanted to focus all of my energies on them.

but I suddenly felt like there just wasn't enough time to get everything done. So that hopelessness was starting to sink in and I was just kind of sitting there staring and frozen, looking at my calendar, wondering how in the world am I going to figure out when I can get all this stuff done? As I was thinking about that, I found that my eyes kept drifting off to my email inboxes and tracking all of the new things that kept pouring in. Add to it the fact that at the time and,

Autumn G Noble (13:12.96)
I guess to this day, I maintain three different email addresses, one for my legal practice, one for my coaching practice, and one for my personal and nonprofit work. So a simple review of my emails to just see what's going on can easily spiral out of control and cost me precious time. On that particular day, there I was feeling really overwhelmed with my daily priorities. And now that overwhelm was like a rising tide of panic.

as I glance at each new message coming in, just piling on more overwhelmed and more wondering how in the world I was gonna get it all done. Then for every email, I felt the desire to jump on it and respond immediately. I wanted to answer all of the requests for support and help redirect my team on important projects. I wanted to check in with clients, but more importantly, I just wanted to get something done. In addition to those impulses,

I started to feel myself getting frustrated about some of the other emails in my inbox, ranting and raving and mentally berating my team or clients or bosses. And I just sat there fuming and kind of boiling over with all of these emotions. At the time, that was all making me feel pretty rotten and incredibly powerless. But despite all that, I stayed glued to my emails trying to salvage some type of productivity for the day.

And in doing so, I became aware that I was really kind of avoiding the bigger picture and chasing the endorphin rush of helping in those small ways in that moment by responding to simple emails and simple inquiries. Never mind that little foray was going to cost me even more later on as precious time ticked away where I was not focusing on the big projects that I knew I needed to attend to that day.

In that moment, I realized that staying on top of my email was not my number one priority for the day. It was not even in my top three priorities for the day. So in light of that, I decided just to set a timer and I agreed to check my email again in two hours. So then I closed the browser and I got back to work. Not only would those emails still be there two hours later when I finished my priority projects, but I had already scheduled time.

Autumn G Noble (15:31.864)
to triage my inbox for the day as I do every day and I recommend all of you do every day. But despite my prior planning, my email had become kind of a persuasive distraction in those moments of overwhelm and it pushed itself right to the top of the line. While it's certainly true that there's a lot of us that need to stay diligently on top of our email, that can often spiral out of control as we lose ourselves to that black pit. It is possible.

to stay on top of your email while remaining focused on the real priorities for the day. With all of that in mind, this brings me to tip number one for dealing with chaotic days. Never approach your email without a clear intention and stick to it. Treat it the same way you would a grocery store. Go in knowing what you want and exactly what you're looking for and then get the hell out before you lose a week's salary on ice cream and Doritos.

Approach your email with specific intentions to look for information relating to the project at hand or to make sure that some new priority demand has not crept to the front of the line without your awareness, in which case some triage may be in order. Beyond that, every other email in your inbox should be addressed at a later time, ideally time that you have set aside and scheduled to do just that. In going through this sifting process, I...

personally have always categorized my emails as it comes in based upon project or client. And then I block time for each project, at which time I revisit the latest emails and the project. But in those moments where I'm checking in with my email, I am just skimming and categorizing knowing that I've set aside time to come back to it later. My only intention in checking my email throughout the course of the day is to look for new emergencies and new priorities.

or information related to the subject at hand. Everything else gets categorized and the time gets scheduled to look at them later. Not only do I recommend making sure that you have some intention before you set your eyeballs upon your email, I also recommend that you set a timer to ensure that you don't inadvertently lose your day to all of the non -emergencies that suddenly appear on your screen.

Autumn G Noble (17:47.734)
And keep in mind that this isn't just operating from kind of fight or flight during a chaotic day. Part of this is biologically driven. It's our brain desperately seeking some type of feel good when everything is falling apart and we're kind of freaking out. It's our brain's way to try and self -soothe from the stress around us. For all of those reasons, we have to be very wary of our email. And I really recommend scheduling time later in the day

perhaps during the lunch hour or other times in the day when your energy is lower and you can just cruise through your email inbox, sort it, categorize it, determine its priority, but not allow yourself to do that throughout the course of your day. It is a surefire way to make a chaotic day that much worse because it's so easy to lose ourselves in our inboxes as opposed to doing the work that we really need to be focusing on.

This approach to handling our email is really about making the greatest impact with our time and energy during the day. I like to think about this approach as the difference between throwing a boulder into a pond and the ripples that it makes versus throwing a handful of pebbles into a pond and the small ripples that they make. Focusing on your priorities, which is not your email, is more like throwing that boulder into the pond with respect to your time.

your energy and your long -term career goals. Part of the reason this is so hard is that when we're in the midst of chaos and stress, our primitive brains kick in and it's seeking the feel good for sure, but it's also freaking out and seeing everything around us as a challenge to our safety and wellbeing. So it starts to tell us that the second you step away from the email, something bad is gonna happen. Someone's gonna be mad at you, you're gonna miss something really important.

So part of our work is to start understanding why it's so hard for us to disconnect from our email and then work to focus on our priorities and create a new habit around our email. In the same way that I did in the story that I related, we have to start disconnecting from our email and really put our energy into believing nothing bad is going to happen if I step away from my email for two hours, for one hour, whatever the time limit is you set. But we have to start practicing

Autumn G Noble (20:10.2)
that that is true because we all know that it is, but in the moment, it feels like if we disconnect, if we leave, something bad will happen. That is the kind of thinking that we have to reprogram by stepping away, focusing on those priorities and checking our email only with intention and limited time. If part of the reason that you struggle stepping away from your email is because you worry about what will happen and you have all these negative recurring thoughts that keep pulling you back.

I really encourage you to reach out and schedule a free coaching consultation. This is something that I have helped so many women overcome and it's that fearful thinking and those negative patterns that make our email habits really difficult to break. And if you don't fix the patterning, shifting it is gonna be incredibly difficult. All right, moving on to tip number two for dealing with chaos at work. When we're in the midst of that stress hurricane,

If we're not diving into our emails as an avoidance mechanism, many of us choose other self -soothing tactics. At work, this might look like going on Facebook, chatting with friends, going and getting a coffee, playing on your phone, potentially shopping. At home, after a really long day, this can look like binging on Netflix, drinking too much wine, avoiding work, ignoring your diet, skipping workouts, or eating all of the ice cream in the house.

If any of those sound familiar to you, this next tip will really hit home. Many of those activities provide our brain with a quick dopamine hit. When we engage in any of those types of patterns, running to Starbucks, when we're frustrated at work, sitting on the couch and binging on Netflix at the end of the day, our brain gets excited because it knows a dopamine hit is coming. It is craving the hit not only because our pattern

but because we believe that we deserve this reward at the end of a really long day. So there's a chemical desire for it and then there's a belief desire for it. But ultimately the reward is dopamine. At those times during our day, many of us are feeling tired, we're feeling worn out, we're feeling frustrated.

Autumn G Noble (22:19.392)
And secretly, there's some type of a heavy emotion often going around at the end of those chaotic days. It might be disappointment. It might be worry. It might be self -doubt. It might be sadness that this is what your practice looks like. Most of us are swimming in thoughts like, wish I had more time to go to the gym. I'm sick of working like this. Why do they do this to me? I really don't want to go back to work tomorrow. Those thoughts all feel terrible.

Why would we feel terrible when we can bury those gross feelings with a rush of dopamine? By going shopping, by running to Starbucks, by drinking too much wine. So this brings me to tip number two. When your day is spinning in chaos or you've simply had a really rough day, pay attention to your self -soothing patterns and consider whether those patterns are actually creating more problems in your life.

Rather than experiencing the emotions that come at the end of a long and chaotic day when there's nothing left to do, we often push away from it and try and bury it with a flood of dopamine from sugary foods or shopping or alcohol or a good couch rot session. But when we avoid our emotions in this way and bury them with the rush that we get from external things,

we start trading our long -term happiness for that momentary relief. When we're struggling to overcome the demands of work, many of those behaviors come into play simply because they feel good and they allow us to escape the stress and overwhelm of our professional lives. But what we're really doing is simply adding more problems to our plates. All of those avoidance behaviors result in some type of a negative outcome.

like weight gain, overspending, overdrinking, et cetera. We ignore our best laid plans. We skip our workouts, and we skip the healthy meal for some really yummy takeout instead. As women, most of us want to stop those behaviors, and most of my clients want to work on getting more focused and getting more motivated and achieving their goals and not continually kind of falling off the wagon in this way.

Autumn G Noble (24:31.456)
And they're usually really frustrated with themselves for falling apart or falling off the wagon or letting themselves go. They're irritated that they're not sticking to their plans, that they're unwinding everything that they have been working for. And they're often just really frustrated when they come to a coaching session and tell me, know, yes, I've been meaning to go to the gym, but I just had such a rough week. I never made it. You know, I ate out every day because I just wasn't feeling like eating my healthy food because it was a really crappy week. And all of that in the moment feels really good.

but when they show up to work with me and take stock of where they are in their lives, they're frustrated because they don't like the ultimate results that that is creating for them. As a coach, it is not my job to help you learn how to control yourself. My job instead is to help you understand yourself and understand why this pattern exists. Control is never the solution, but I can help you understand

why you choose those things so that you can have some compassion for yourself and maybe choose differently. Awareness like that can last forever versus control, which is really a finite resource. When we're busy beating ourselves up for avoiding work or for losing hours on Facebook instead of doing the work or drinking too much wine, whatever the thing is, whenever we're doing that and trying to guilt ourselves into changing, you ignore the root.

pause of the problem and instead we're just focusing on the symptom. In order to truly stop these behaviors, you have to stop berating yourself and look at what's really going on and consider, are you reaching for something to make you feel better and distract you from what's really going on in your life? Your stress, your fatigue, frustration was some part of your life. Life is meant to be 50 -50 and sometimes we have to live in the 50 % that sucks.

And that is all there is to it. During those chaotic and stressful times in our lives, our work is not to fix anything, but rather accept the fact that you're going through a hard time, that you had a bad day. And as a human, rough times are simply part of the gig. In that space, we can recognize that we're struggling and try and have some compassion for ourselves that, hey, I had a really bad day and I don't like the way that this feels.

Autumn G Noble (26:54.54)
and I wanna reach for something to make myself feel better and that's frustrating too. That's what compassion and awareness can sound like in that moment. Once you can see how your actions are merely attempts to make yourself feel better and to buffer the discomfort that you're having, you can start considering how to shift out of those thoughts and create a new result for yourself. Once you see that, you can start looking for other outlets for those emotions.

For instance, at the end of a long and chaotic or stressful day, we're often experiencing a pretty wide array of emotions. It could be sadness, it could be dread, it could be some looming fear that this is what my life is gonna be like for the next 30 years. In order to deconstruct our self -soothing patterns and build a better and happier life for ourselves, we have to examine those thoughts. And to do so, we have to be willing to examine the emotions that go with them as well.

So at the end of a stressful day or in the midst of a chaotic day, what if we just experienced those emotions and didn't try to fix them? What if we were willing to examine those feelings and accept them as just part of that 50 -50 instead of burying them with some kind of a dopamine rush? In that space, we can honor them and let them pass as a normal part of the human experience. This could look like

going outside and taking a walk and just taking some deep breaths and connecting with what you're feeling. You can take a bath, you could do some journaling. Any of those are gonna be healthier outlets. They're not gonna create a dopamine rush right away. They're not gonna make you feel better. But what they are gonna do is give you some time and space to see and process what's actually happening with you. And the sooner you do that, the sooner those emotions will leave.

And in doing that, you avoid this cycle of self -soothing through things outside of ourselves that just create more negative things to feel frustrated about. Then we then have to self -soothe for and around and around we go. So the next time you find yourself heading to Starbucks or getting onto Facebook or reaching for another glass of wine, when you feel stressed out after a really rough day, consider whether those actions are helping your current situation in the long run.

Autumn G Noble (29:12.938)
or are just creating more problems to be frustrated about. Consider whether you're giving yourself some kind of a pass because you've had a bad day and how are those choices impacting your life? The solution instead is to embrace that part of life and recognize that nothing has to be fixed and that you can simply move forward while feeling all of the feels and just knowing that that is how life works.

We can acknowledge those emotions, experience them, and we can learn to make better choices around them. To summarize where we've been today, we're talking about how to show up during chaotic days and at the end of stressful days, and how to make two simple shifts so that you can create better results for yourself when those days happen because they will. First, we discussed how obsessing over our emails

not only costs us time and energy, but often detracts from the work that will actually benefit our careers. Our desire to constantly stay on top of our email is driven by a variety of factors. But what I often see is that it comes from either avoidance of more difficult work or some faulty beliefs that tell us that we need to respond immediately in order to succeed. Time and time again, I've seen those actions and beliefs sidetrack progress and success. To combat that distraction of your email,

Get very clear on your priorities for every day and make sure that when you set your eyes on that email, you do so with clear intentions and an established time limit. If you don't want your email to be your number one priority for the day, don't allow it to creep into that space. Second, be aware of your patterning of avoiding negative emotions that often come with the stress and overwhelm of practicing law.

Do you find yourself trying to fix those emotions or treat yourself after you've had a bad day? Consider how those patterns are impacting your life and long -term goals. It's perfectly normal to want to avoid and self -soothe after a bad day or when we're feeling down, but consider how different your life would be if we simply allowed those emotions to be part of our experience and not something that needs to be fixed.

Autumn G Noble (31:27.288)
When we embrace the fact that life is yin and yang and sometimes days simply don't go as we planned, allow those bad times to simply be and get more practice at experiencing them rather than avoiding them and burying them in superficial dopamine hits. This depth of emotional experience is not only more sustainable, but truly can be life -changing.

If you need support setting priorities or deconstructing belief patterns that are making it difficult for you to operate sustainably, or if you need support breaking down your old patterning of buffering and avoiding emotion, please be sure to reach out and schedule a free coaching consultation. I would love to support you and provide you with the tools that I have provided to hundreds of women to help them work through the same challenges.

As always in two weeks, I will be releasing a guided meditation that will complement this topic and allow you some support to process your emotions and deal with the chaos of practicing law in a more healthy and productive manner. Until then, be sure to head over to the Lawyer Life Collective to check out the On Demand How to Lawyer for Real series and all of the goodness that comes with it. Until then, I look forward to seeing you. Thanks for sharing with your friends and continuing to support this podcast.