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Sometimes, there’s too much going on. But life can still be good.
Every August, someone asks me some version of "enjoying the slow season?"
Most years, I’ve been able to share how I took advantage of a little extra free time to squeeze in a lunch by the pool with friends, or a random Tuesday at the beach.
This year . . . not so much.
Summer at Red Cell was the busiest stretch I've had yet, with none of the pre-Labor-Day quiet moments everyone assumes lawyers get. My legal team spent the summer helping get multiple big deals done, launching new companies, and continuing with all of the day-to-day legal work required to keep existing companies running.
All of which is obviously great. And yet, there was no summer slowdown.
I knew this was coming, and back in June I talked about what I was doing to make sure I still enjoyed the summer. You can read that here.
And the good news is, doing all the things I said I would in order to enjoy the summer worked.
I saw friends, because I planned it in advance. Got some real (if short) breaks, because I disconnected from social media apps.
As we come out of summer, I’m still busy. Here’s some of how I’m making sure that life is still good.
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Strategies I’m Applying:
My team and I are prioritizing especially intentionally (and a little differently).
For in-house lawyers, prioritization always matters. There is always more work we could do to be useful than we have the bandwidth to do well.
Some of that work meaningfully moves the needle. Like improving the standard customer contract to speed up signatures and revenue. Some of it doesn't, like the third pass of redlines on a low-stakes NDA.
I've written before about the tools I use to tell the difference, like the Eisenhower Matrix and how it works in the age of AI. Because being busy in itself is not a win, even when it feels like one.
In normal times, prioritization is how a legal team makes its highest possible impact. But when things are especially busy, it becomes mission critical: fail to prioritize, and you don't just lose impact. You risk mistakes, dropped balls, and real cost to the company. And even when things are busy, excellence always matters.
So right now, we're triaging. We’re spending less time on the big but non-urgent, business-driving goals. We’ll return to those next month. We’re spending less time building out things for our own team too, for now.
Our prioritization means sometimes letting colleagues down. Sometimes the answer is that we cannot hit their timeline unless they give something else up. Other times, we can hit it — it will just cost more.
