Attorneys are bombarded from every direction, many times with competing demands from clients, colleagues, staff, and family. If you don’t have a way to manage all of it, your world becomes utter chaos. Research suggests that when your environment is in a state of disarray, your attention is drawn away from what you need to focus on, and the appearance that your work is never done adds to stress. What’s more, that chaos can lead to malpractice or an ethics violation.

Chaos results not only from external obligations, but also from internal pressure. The average person has approximately 70,000 thoughts per day. That’s 49 thoughts per minute. No wonder research shows that we spend nearly half of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we are currently doing. Suffice to say, lawyers have a lot of stuff (internal and external) to keep stored, organized,and accessible when needed.

To avoid chaos and the parade of horribles that follows, you need to figure out what to do with all that stuff. Is it sprinkled throughout Word documents saved somewhere on your hard drive? Is it handwritten on notepads piling on top of your desk? Is it overloading your brain? Or, is it neatly tucked away in a central repository of information that you can access wherever and whenever you need it? If it’s not already the latter, then keep reading.