Into 2007

I'm not very fond of New Year's resolutions. On one hand, I don't see a reason to wait until the new year to adopt a goal. On the other, I find that when I try to come up with resolutions, I tend to pick things that I'm unlikely actually to accomplish. (I suppose that says something about my goal selection technique.)

But 2006 was a fairly difficult year for me, so it seems worthwhile to spend a bit of time looking back while also looking forward. 2006 showed me some of the limits on the amount of work I can do and the amount of stress I can handle before health problems start to show up. I tried to burn myself out in the spring and summer and am still feeling some effects. I also discovered that some of that stress is internally generated, so I'm trying to train myself out of some of the habits of mind that create that stress or amplify what stress is already there.

So what's in store for 2007? Hard to say. But here are some— well, I like to think of these as guidelines. They're too open-ended to be resolutions.

1. Try less hard. What's that? You read correctly. No, I'm not talking about doing less; I just plan to spend less energy thinking about trying hard at something and focusing more on doing whatever it is that I'm doing at the moment. This means avoiding those habits of mind that seem like they would help one get things done but turn out to be sinkholes for energy. Better to put that energy into the activity at hand instead.

2. Maintain variety. I know people who draw almost all the fulfillment they need from legal work and don't need a lot of other activities (or rest) to sustain them because the activities involved in their work provide adequate sustenance. They can go from phone calls to meetings to research to drafting to a lunch conference to more phone calls to more drafting and still have energy at 8 p.m. I respect those people, but I'm not one of them, which is why you'll never find me practicing law with one of the national über-firms. I admit it. It takes more than the daily activities of law practice to keep me going.

3. Be healthy. I already eat a pretty healthy diet, but I need to get more exercise and rest.

4. Read and write more. This is entailed by item 2. It's been months since I read a novel — longer since I read one I hadn't read before — and there are several non-fiction books that have caught my attention as people posted year-end lists of book recommendations over the last few days. Add to that my recent rediscovery of SSRN, which in the last few years seems to have received lots of work from articulate people with interesting things to say about law. I've now got a healthy stack of printed material to read, even more in the form of PDFs, and soon even more in shipment. I'm trying to make sure that I include some fiction book purchases to keep a balanced diet.

4(a). Start blogging again. Done.

4(a)(1). And keep it up. This seems, from past experience, to be the challenging part. I haven't selected a particular theme and don't plan to, but I have decided that I'm usually not going to write about real estate or what it's like to be a real estate practitioner in a Denver firm. That's partly because that would cut a bit close to writing about my job (a big no-no for an employee in most fields) and partly because I spend enough time thinking about real estate already. (See item 2.) I may write about law practice in general from time to time, but I will avoid writing about my own practice. I hope that instead the blog will become an outlet for some of my other interests and thoughts within and apart from law.