Take A Sabbath

Everyone needs a break for a full life (and not just in August or during the holidays). Real breaks — each day, each week, each month or season — make you and your staff better lawyers and professionals.

Everyone needs a break for a full life (and not just in August or during the holidays). Real breaks — each day, each week, each month or season — make you and your staff better lawyers and professionals.

The rush to take a break is afoot.  All across the country, Americans are running to get away for just.one.last.holiday.weekend (at least those Americans with the money and flexibility to do so, since many, if not most, have neither, and don’t “summer” outside their backyard or local playground). Looking out the offices of our firm above Lower Manhattan streets this summer on Friday afternoons, you could practically feel the neighborhood get lighter as people scrambled (and scramble really is the right verb) to escape to nearby (or not so nearby) beaches and mountains.

Getting a break is great, indeed, essential to have the right state of mind and emotion to do great work and simply be a well-rounded person. But it cannot be reserved for Memorial Day or Labor Day.  It cannot be reserved for the holidays, or kind of/sort of during the summer.  A true break from work — a sabbath — is necessary for every professional, including every lawyer and every manager.

A break starts with sleep. We somehow have gotten to the point in the law and business where the idiot that sleeps four hours a night sees fit to brag about it as if he is more productive than anyone else. I question whether that guy really does only sleep four hours a night every night: I have several kids and remember as a blur nights where I was lucky to get four hours of sleep, night after night, and practically had to mainline espresso to get through the day. But more to the point, you are not functioning like a professional — not a good boss to those that rely on you, not serving clients that need you as their lawyer — if you do not get enough sleep.

You need a real break every day. It does not matter what that break is. After I drop off my kids at school I start each day in prayer at the church down the street from the firm. I do not have time for mass and, frankly, a 30 minute morning mass is no good for me as I’ll get distracted by all I want to get done that day. But just a short bit of time — as few as three minutes, probably never more than 15 minutes — is what I need to focus on my values and my day, and then I am enormously more productive in it.

Obviously, daily sabbath time need not be prayer. It could be prayer-like, as in meditation.  But it could be a short walk, or a long one. It could be a 15 minute mid-day nap. It could be a crazy SoulCycle class where the music is too loud and the exercising too intense that you simply do not have time to worry and can clear out your head and your heart. It is individual. But it should be something — a true break.

You need it each day and you need it each week. Our firm has in-office drinks every Friday afternoon where one of the firm’s primary rules — No Complaining About Anything — is suspended so that everyone can vent about the characters and scoundrels and frustrations we encountered, as a firm, that week. But then, after a half hour or a couple of hours, everyone leaves. We really do manage to take Saturdays off, at least almost all of us, and at least most of the time. We love our jobs, but we get a break from it.  Yes, I’ve had an emergency court call, or took an out of state deposition, or prepared for trial on a Saturday. It happens. But it does so very, very rarely. As professionals and as a firm, we take a sabbath, refreshed to get back to work on Sunday or Monday or whenever the week starts for different people.

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And then, yes, besides the daily and weekly sabbath time, we need a break in the summer, at the holidays, and at other times. Getting away, physically, can refresh us in a way that daily prayer or a Saturday focused on family and friends (however essential those are) do not. But my strong advice is not to over-rely on such semi-annual (or less frequent) vacation time. You cannot only take off 10 days a year and think that’s enough. There will be too much pent up in you, too much unwinding and untangling to be done in two weeks. Get the real break, but take the sabbath time each day and each week as well. Then your vacations will be better breaks themselves, and not about repair but about respite and relaxation.

Taking sabbath time is simply not easy. I am blessed enough to be very actively engaged in the days of my children, to have a huge family I spend time with (and where I sometimes have to bail someone out, literally, when they have gotten into trouble), to have a very busy practice as a trial lawyer, and to be in a management position at the best, thriving law firm around. I could come up with reasons, every day, not to devote time to that time in church or the Saturday I know is sandwiched between two crazy, busy weeks. But I almost always resist and take the sabbath. If we want to be great lawyers, and great managers, and great people, we need to make sabbath time part of our days and weeks and lives.


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.

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