A divorce does not occur in a vacuum. It touches every facet of your life—financial, emotional, physical, and social. A skilled divorce attorney can help you make sense of the seemingly convoluted process of not only filing a divorce but also finding success and stability amid separation. As you work through your divorce, keep the following considerations in mind.
Why Should You Bother Organizing Your Life and Prioritizing Tasks During a Divorce?
Life in modern times is chaotic enough. Even before you made the decision to separate, or you were faced with your spouse asking for a separation or divorce, odds are that you had your hands full with work, health issues, financial needs, and other projects clamoring for your attention. A divorce can add a whole new crush of obligations and commitments to your “to do” list… while simultaneously hamstringing you by tying up your time and resources and potentially cutting your income stream in half (or worse).
When your attention is scattered — when you’re thinking about a hundred different things and consumed by a hundred different worries — you will likely find it harder to concentrate and make strategic decisions about your divorce and other projects in your life. As the adage goes, focus equals power. A magnifying glass can concentrate the sun’s ray strong enough to start a fire.
How Can You Control Diverse Commitments, Worries, and Obligations?
So how can you control all your diverse commitments, worries, and obligations? After all, there are only 24 hours in a day. As New York Times bestselling productivity author, David Allen, teaches in his books, “Making It All Work” and “Getting Things Done,” the mind is a terrible place to store information. Our short-term memories can only hold about 7 bits of information at any one time. (That’s why phone numbers have seven digits in them.) If you try to store more information in your short-term memory than it can hold, you will start forgetting things. But you forget only on a conscious level; subconsciously, your mind still thinks it needs to remember and potentially act on something. This can lead to subtle stresses that build up over time. You feel a vague sense of dis-ease that “something needs to be done,” but you don’t know what to do.
A Five-Part Process for Organizing Your Commitments
Allen recommends a five-part process to get control of what he calls “open loops” — the commitments that exist at various levels of your consciousness and focus — so that you can make progress on them and feel more relaxed and in control. The process begins by writing down everything that’s on your mind. Write down all your projects, big and small, relating to your divorce or not. You want to compile a complete inventory of what’s on your mind. This inventory might include goals like “finalize the divorce” and “move Roger into his new school” as well as personal goals like “climb Mount Kilimanjaro” and “lose 15 pounds.” Many people find this process of writing down all of their commitments quite cathartic. Your list of “stuff” is not infinite — for most people, it’s surprisingly manageable.
Next, you need to process, organize, and review this list. (You can learn more about Allen’s processes for doing so by watching this lecture.) The point is that by maintaining a written inventory of projects and actions you need to take regarding your projects, you won’t waste as much mental energy in non-productive thinking. You need to think about your stuff more than you’re probably doing right now, but not as much as you fear. Just remember: you can only feel good about what you’re doing when you know what you’ve chosen not to do at any moment.
Create a Better Personal Organization System
In addition to creating a better personal organization system, what else can you do? Recruit good people (and good businesses) to help you get through this process. No one does it alone. You’ve just been separated from the person who was presumably closer to you than anyone else in your life. You need to expand your network and share your burden. For instance, you might ask your parents or your sister to help with the childcare, while you organize the divorce. You might recruit a bookkeeper and/or financial planner to get your books and budget in order. You might find a therapist or support group to discuss emotional issues that have erupted. You might reconnect with old friends for social support. And you should retain a top Virginia divorce attorney to manage your legal needs. The bottom line is: get help. Do not try to “be a hero.” Your time and energy are limited, and you are under strain. Delegate your burden as much as possible.
How Can You Establish a Vision for a Saner and Happier Future?
Whole books have been written to try to answer this existential question, but you can make quick progress on it by completing the following exercise, as honestly and as forthrightly as possible:
What’s True in Your Life Now?
First, ask yourself: what’s true in my life now? The David Allen exercises (discussed above) can help you inventory your current projects and concerns. Be honest with yourself. Don’t whitewash anything. See your life and your situation as clearly as possible.
What Do You Want Life to Be Like in the Future?
Next, ask yourself: what do I want life to be like at time X in the future? Again, be as specific as possible. For instance, a year from now, you might want the divorce to be finalized, the custody arrangement to look like such-and-such and your bank account to have $150,000 in it. Imagine an ideal result. In a best-case scenario, what would your life look like? Don’t worry about how to achieve the results yet. Just try to articulate where you want to wind up.
How Can You Get from Where You Are Now to Where You Want to Be?
Finally, ask yourself: how can I get from where I am now to where I want to be? Once you understand what’s true now and what you want to happen, get to work. Strategically and tactically, how can you achieve your goals, given your resources, time, budget, skills, and network? Ask yourself questions like:
- “What’s the fastest way to get to what I want?”
- “What’s the easiest way to get what I want?”
- “What’s the minimum I need to reach my goals?” (Most of us way over-complicate our goals. That is, we create obstacles for ourselves that don’t really exist.)
Divorce-Related Behaviors and Actions That Might Damage Your Health
Divorce has a reputation for being a stressful, exhausting experience. What divorce-related behaviors and actions might damage your health?
Divorce can have diverse and negative health consequences. This is not a medical book, nor should anything here be considered medical advice. But you should seek to protect your health and wellbeing during the divorce process.
Coping Behaviors During Divorce
Divorce can provoke coping behaviors that can have dangerous consequences. For instance, the stress may lead you to consume alcohol or drugs in excess or eat sugary, processed junk food.