There's a folder most of us are avoiding. Maybe it's literal: a drawer with insurance cards and old paperwork we keep meaning to sort. Maybe it's a conversation with a spouse or a parent that we keep starting and then letting drop. Either way, most of us are carrying around the same quiet to-do: get things "in order," just in case. And most of us haven't done it.

I don't think that's about laziness. I think it's about what the task represents. Sitting down to write a will, or naming a guardian for your kids, or telling your husband what you'd actually want if you got sick, means looking straight at the thing we'd rather not look at. So we tell ourselves there's time. We tell ourselves it's morbid to think about. And the task moves to next year's list.

This week I talked with Lynn Lambrecht, who's spent her career helping people do exactly this: not as a lawyer reciting statutes at you, but as someone who's seen up close what happens when nobody has a plan. In her 20s, while working in aviation management, she volunteered as an emergency responder on airplane crash sites, twice, which she'll tell you is unusual. What she learned there wasn't really about crashes. It was about what happens to the people left behind when the person who "had that handled" is suddenly gone, and nobody else knows what "that" even was.

One thing we kept coming back to is how much of this is just daily life, dressed up as something scarier. Lynn calls the legal documents "wearing underwear": the baseline, not the whole outfit. Powers of attorney and a will matter, but they don't tell anyone where you live, how to get into your house, who your doctor is, or what you'd want if you couldn't speak for yourself. That's the part she actually starts with: your day-to-day life, not a stack of forms.

She once asked a room full of ER doctors what the hardest part of their job is when a family arrives in crisis. Their answer wasn't the injury. It was that they often don't know who the family even is, and when several people show up with different opinions and nobody's been designated to decide, everyone loses time that a patient doesn't have. One conversation, ahead of time, fixes that. Not a lawyer. A conversation.

I think about my own parents here. I wasn't the one with power of attorney, so I only got a glimpse of what it takes to figure out what Dad wanted, what Mom would have chosen, while also grieving and handling the physical logistics of it all. Lynn asked her own parents to define "quality of life" for her, years before she needed the answer, and when the time came, she already knew.

What I appreciate about how Lynn talks about this is that none of it requires doing everything at once. She's the first to say she wouldn't tackle this in a single day. She says she'd "throw up." 😂 It's the medical ID on your phone this week. The conversation with your spouse about "what's mine is yours, but does anyone actually know where the passwords are" next week. A backpack by the door if you live somewhere with fire or flood risk, whenever you get to it. Baby steps, the same way most worthwhile things get done.

Sixty-seven percent of American adults don't have a will. I'd guess most of them aren't avoiding it because they don't love their families. They're avoiding it because it feels heavy, and because nobody ever framed it as anything other than that. Lynn's whole approach is proof that it doesn't have to be. It can just be one more way of taking care of the people you love, the same instinct that has you double-checking they got home safe, or sending a text so they don't worry.

You don't have to finish this today. You just have to not leave them guessing.

You can find Lynn's book and resources at thelivingplanner.com.