As a newly minted attorney, I recently experienced my first end-of-year push to complete as much as possible before the holidays. According to my peers and colleagues, such a year-end scramble — whether it be for filings, client requests, or anything in between — is neither uncommon nor unanticipated. And I suppose I may have anticipated this ramping-up of workflow toward the end of the year, especially having happily joined a boutique litigation firm that takes on not-so-boutique cases. What I did not anticipate was the flurry of documents and legal pads and note flags that would trail in its wake, rendering my office a bit of a snow globe. Before I could sort all of that into anything pleasingly intelligible, I was rushing to catch a flight cross-country to spend a few days with family.
If you missed the chance to impose order on your workspace before the holidays, the dawn of a new year is the perfect time to consider the life-changing magic (as Marie Kondo would say) of tidying up your office. Ample research exists with data demonstrating the psychological (and even physical) benefits of living and working in tidy spaces. However, I offer my personal impressions gleaned from years of work at various levels in practices of varying size and specialty.
First impressions first. Though I don’t subscribe to the wear-a-suit-to-take-exams school of thought, I do believe visual impressions are critical on many levels. I want to feel good when I walk into my office, and I want others who enter my space, whether they be colleagues or clients, to feel the same. A tidy office, for me, inspires that positivity. When my office is well-ordered and clean, I feel at ease and confident — confident that whatever I need will be easy to find, that nothing will slip through the cracks, and that I simply have it together at a foundational level. From another’s perspective, the aesthetic of an untamed office risks concerns analogous to one’s attorney or colleague beside them showing up to court with a crumpled suit and documents falling out of their briefcase — not a great look.
Clutter, while perhaps indicative of an active workflow, is not only distracting but also tends to beget more clutter. I have found that the longer an unruly workspace remains untamed, the harder it is to ultimately address — mentally and physically. The physical task of decluttering is often a pain but always gratifying. The mental burden is, I find, the harder one to surmount. It is easy to shove papers left and right and stack them like skyscrapers to carve out desk space. But once one’s office looks like the view from my window in the Financial District, the mere idea (not to mention the job) of addressing that skyline becomes a burdensome (and, let’s not forget, unbillable) task on the never ending to-do list that is the practice of law. It’s much harder to strategize the tearing-down of a skyscraper than, say, a small shed.
That said, tidiness tends to beget more tidiness. When I returned to my office from the holidays, I was invigorated by that new-year-fresh-start feeling. I was inspired to finally get rid of stacks of hard copy marked-up cases that I had no reason to keep in my space. And, through that sifting and sorting process, I was prompted to think about — and indeed learned — what actually is useful for me to have on hand. Documents I could recall picking up countless times while researching and drafting for ongoing matters got their own folders and were housed in files (organized by case and subfiled by document type) which now sit tidily on my shelves. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any hard copies I preserved ‘sparked joy,’ as Marie Kondo would urge, but I was at least prompted to consider the utility of physical files in this day and age.
Since I undertook to tidy up and impose order upon my workspace, I feel that the task of staying organized will be much easier. In fact, as I glance around my office, despite having a busy week, not a single piece of paper in view is without a home to which it will return at the end of the day. That does spark joy.
John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.