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I think the psychological trap here is treating January like a magic reset button. This is why most people’s New Year’s resolutions fail. When you wait weeks or months to make sweeping changes, you inevitably lose momentum and you end up projecting discipline onto some future version of yourself. What’s worked for me is instead making small, concrete changes now (one boundary/habit at a time), and have that have a cumulative effect over time. Don’t wait until Jan 2027 to do your next reboot. Just start making incremental changes *now*. Hope this helps.
Small cumulative changes is absolutely one key. Find the thing that most needs to be addressed and do that one thing. As a junior partner that one thing was daily time entry. I was chronically behind (sometimes by months) and it was a major stressor for me and my firm at the time. The reason/excuse is that I was trying 5 or 6 real cases a year and was therefore constantly either in pretrial/trial or recovery. I finally (on January 1, 2000), went all in on time entry. My inbox was still a mess and there were other issues, but time was number 1. My solution was dictating it into a microcassette recorder every night while driving home and handing the tape to my assistant the next morning. (I know - old technology.) At first it sucked but I gutted it out for a few months, then became a ritual, and then it became a reflex. Once that was fixed I turned to my to-do lists. Then the trial boxes stacked in my office that needed to be sent to the file room ….
The one thing I never got to was my inbox, which upon my retirement contained 17,000 unread emails. The point there is to give yourself some grace. If you deal with all of the nuisance work you don’t have time for the important work.
They have happen, but you might consider a therapist to help you, and it’ll have to be gradual because you can’t reset these expectations with your partners and senior associates overnight.
Wow. You actually get to February? I blew all work life balance goals on January 2nd.