Practice Management

Gretchen Rubin, a writer working on The Happiness Project, writes in HuffPo that if you feel overwhelmed because of the huge stack of magazines you have cluttering your house, to throw them out right now!

With the exception that you should recycle them, I agreed.  To me paper-based magazines are almost dead.  They are not far behind phone books in my house or office.  Of late I have bought only one magazine.  It was a copy of Texas Highways magazine, because they will not give me the full article and pictures that I crave of our beautiful Texas landscape, towns and courthouses, even though the magazine accepts no advertising.  I bought only a lone copy.  My wife, I think, has only bought the small Martha Stewart magazine that contain recipes, and I do not wish to discourage her from making fine meals for me to try.  The only other ones that make it to our house are the magazines people mail for free.  I usually look through them quickly and then take them to the recycling center.  Most in our area are just advertising vehicles for Realtors, plastic surgeons, and dentist hawking veneers.

The only time I have felt bad about my general dislike for magazines was lately when a high school student came to the door selling magazine subscriptions for some school club.  I had to tell him I would give him a small donation, but I was unwilling to subscribe to any magazine.  "Not even Sport's Illustrated he asked, with the swimsuit issue"?  Fresh little punk.  Going for my obvious weakness.

I am getting to the point where I hardly pick up a magazine except to thumb through it while waiting at the grocery store checkout to see how Britney Spears is screwing up her life now.  Oh Britney, Britney, Britney.  Where did you go wrong.  (By the way, I saw in one of those magazines that Dick Cheney is really a space alien, and I had to think how is it that I did not notice that).

The Texas Bar sends me a monthly magazine for the benefit of the huge sum of money I am required to give it every year (we have a unified bar).  My alma maters send me quarterly magazine to embarrass me by how much my fellow graduates are giving the school.  I skim the magazines and chunk them.  Off to the recycling center they go.

I cannot much stop anybody from sending me a magazine via snail mail, but I refuse to buy a subscription to anything.

Now, that does not mean that I do not read magazines.  Most are online and FREE.  I make my daily rounds of these.  I read a lot of blogs.  I read specialized ezines.

It is physically not necessary to buy most magazines these days, and it is bad for the environment.  Besides they clutter your home and office.  So do not do it.  If some company sends one to you anyway, make sure you recycle it.

I have one vice still.  I get a copy of my local paper so I can read it over breakfast in the morning.  But, even that is starting to appear a bit silly.

And, if you are a lawyer advertising in magazines, maybe you should consider that there might be better ways to advertise these days.