Top 1 Reason To Resolve to Get Your Law Firm Organized in 2011

I love the inherent double standard of the New Year’s resolution. What other holiday couples self improvement with a tradition of getting as lit as a Christmas tree?

“This year, I am determined to floss more often and get six pack abs. Just as soon as I finish nursing this hangover.”

As the obsessive consumer of productivity and self-help literature that I am, I’ve decided to share with everyone the main recurring theme I read over and over again. It’s a short list. Not a five or a tenner, just a oner:

1) Being organized reduces stress.

There. That’s pretty much all there is to making life more enjoyable and less stressful.

Whether it’s Steven Covey urging you to live a “Quadrant 2” life, David Allen insisting that you get your tasks and nagging thoughts out of your head and into a capture system, the Pomodoro Technique’s relentless assault on ordering the day, or Gretchen Rubin urging you to clean out your closet and begin your bedtime routine earlier, the message is unmistakable:

Getting your stuff neat and orderly makes your brain operate better.

For the law firm, time to look at ways to consolidate your scattered information. Get your stuff out of a hodge-podge of Word, Outlook, Excel, and filing cabinets and adopt a web-based legal practice management and time and billing software. Put your calendar on Google so you can access it from everywhere. Go paperless and put your docs in Dropbox so you can access them from wherever you are.

You’re in the legal advice business, not necessarily the stress business. So getting even a little bit more organized will do wonders for you and your soul in 2011.