A very belated happy new year (and almost Lunar New Year)!

I can’t believe that it’s already February.  I worked straight through the first week of 2015 and the rest of January was a blur.  It was a busy, busy month, with lots of normal work but also lots of time spent researching, networking, and….interviewing!

Yep.  After many, many conversations, research, and hours of self-reflection (and many glasses of wine over those hours), I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a partner.  The thought of ever leaving the firm makes me teary-eyed.  I’ve worked so hard, invested so much, and made so many good friends here.  But I find myself yearning to go do more somewhere else, to be more in charge, to go build something.

Most of all, I feel the need to take risks.  I want a lot of responsibility, over things that I may not be an expert in (or know how to do at all).  I want to make decisions on imperfect information. I don’t want to pass the buck when it comes to tough decisions.

So, I know it’s going to be a crazy next few years for me, but I can’t wait!

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.  Weekend work goes without saying, but on top of the normal work, I had to prepare for a CLE presentation.  It was pretty painful, reading cases at 3am, but glad to have done it, and it made me think that I should do it more often.  Then off to NY — although the time difference is just three hours, it’s really hard for me to wake up in the morning (particularly after being up until 3am or later)! NY is bustling as always — I love the energy here, but particularly when it gets cold, everyone looks exhausted.

Was reading a few articles on the latest Uber snafu involving privacy.  Apart from whether the VP should have made the threat in the first place (the right answer to that one is obvious), it highlights just how much information companies handle, and the potential for misuse.  The thing is, how would an individual like you or me ever know that our information is being mishandled or used inappropriately?  Companies have privacy policies, yes, but how do we the people know whether people are actually complying with them?

Bookmarking a somewhat related article for future reading:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141118051323-2259773-lawsuits-for-hipaa-violations-and-beyond-a-journey-down-the-rabbit-hole

This is what my friends and family have spent the last seven years doing:

In looking back, there were dinners to which I was late by two or more hours.  The number of meetings and dinners (and dinner meetings) to which I was late far outnumbered those to which I made it on time.  I always thought that there was nothing I could do about it — I had to work.  It was the responsible thing to do.  People were counting on me.  The work that I did was important.

Plenty of people work very, very long hours.  Everyone seems to have endless piles of things to get through.  But I realized that, sometimes when you get used to working all the time, you take all of that time for granted.

It’s a vicious cycle.  You bust your ass and work on a Sunday night until 2am.  You might do the same on Monday and Tuesday.  On Thursday, a new project comes in.  If the team worked until 9pm on Thursday and Friday, it could get completed by Friday night.  But what happens more often than not is that your team of zombies spends most of Thursday catching up with co-workers, facebook, and whatever else they have missed since Saturday.  They go out on Thursday to blow off some steam.  Then Friday comes along, and…well, who wants to stay at the office late on a Friday.  So before you know it, everyone is saying “I’ll just do it over the weekend.”  And before you know it, it’s Sunday night.

Some people and some industries will never snap out of this cycle.  To the extent nothing great can be done without a team, some delay is inevitable — some discussions just have to wait until the team can all make a meeting.  But apart from that unavoidable delay, I feel there’s a good chunk of time (i.e., YOUR time) that is wasted because someone else is choosing to do something other than work, on the assumption that you will be available at 5:30pm (or, in my case, 8pm) to meet.

I’ve always been a hard worker.  My very first job was 9 to 4:30, and that wasn’t enough so I tacked on a waitressing job that kept me busy until 12:30am.  So it’s not the number of hours spent working, but the number of hours spent at work (but not working) that dawned on me as a huge waste, a waste of MY LIFE.

So, I’ve decided that this deserves some time, reflection, and action.  Hopefully putting it down in writing will result in further clarity, since how things appear can change depending on the season and how the sunlight happens to hit it at that particular moment.