This is not balance

I really need to restructure my working hours. This is the 3rd weekend I have had to work to try keep up with my workload and the 3rd weekend in a row I haven’t been able to spend some quality time with my family. I have a huge amount of work to do each week between my usual workload and the Internet and the Law course I am involved in. The course, alone, takes roughly a day’s work a week to prepare for each module and the marking and other interactive stuff only begins this next week.

So far I have been trying to do the coursework on the weekend and focus on my practice work during the week but all that is happening is I am not around for Gina and Aaron and that isn’t what I signed up for when I started this practice 5 years ago. There must be a better way to get all this stuff done and still have some time with my family.

My week days start around 8am and finish around 6pm. Perhaps the solution is to extend those hours and outsource whatever admin related stuff takes me out of the office during the day. It is probably better to work longer hours during the week and at least have most, if not all, of the weekend available for some downtime and family time.

I don’t think I quite appreciated that this is what it means to be a lawyer back when I was at Werksmans (I probably would have progressed far further and had less conflict with my principals if I had realised this and accepted it) but the more I work at building my practice, the more I realise that being a lawyer means working crazy hours. That said, many lawyers who are better and harder working than me have found ways to spend time with their families too and I should be able to do that too. I can’t bear the thought of missing moments like these if I don’t get it right: