The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

So here I am once again, apologizing for the lack of posts, which seems to now be a weekly ritual. It's been a while since I've produced anything substantive, although not for lack of trying. I've got a Word doc lying around with the drafts of several meaty posts, none of which have quite evolved yet into something postable for lack of enough attention to give them. My weeks lately have been particularly frenetic as things with my job have heated up and I'm trying to get lots of hours in, since hours conveniently turn into money and experience, and I want to take both when I can get them.

I see, however, how this law career thing can completely eat your life. I get paid hourly and can only get paid for work I do that my firm can bill the client for. Even if I were a regular salaried associate somewhere, the same would essentially be true. You can be *at* work for twelve hours, but you might only have done billable work for eight. The rest of the time is lost to you as work time - meaning time you can't do whatever you want to with - but there's no payoff to you for it being work time since it's only billable work time that you can cash in for pay. Thus being a lawyer requires extremely good time management skills and discipline to make sure you can attend to those eight hours of billable work time as efficiently as possible in order to still have enough time/energy/attention left for yourself and the needs of your own life. Because there's not much room for error - there's only so many hours in the week, and you still need time to eat, sleep, etc. And, as I unfortunately and unexpectedly learned this week ... if you skimp on those on one day, the resulting condition you'll be in will keep you from being properly productive on the next, causing a huge domino effect that can make you behind on everything.