Billable hours….how lawyers think about their time (a lot)

When I was in private practice I (like many lawyers) developed an unusual relationship with time.

When I was an associate I would be acutely aware of how much time I was billing every year, every month, every week, every day and usually, every single hour.

Because I worked in firms with high hours targets I would get to the end of each day and have a minute by minute account of how much time I had billed and I would always judge myself by whether I had billed enough time or could I have done more?  I remember I would routinely think at the end of a relatively busy (but perhaps not optimally busy at all times) working week that despite all the good work I had done it ‘wasn’t enough’ , or worse, that it had actually been a waste of time because working on the types of matters that I had been working on, or choosing to take some limited time out to do things other than work,  didn’t get me optimally closer to a year end hours target which was months away. 

One of the effects this had was that I would constantly judge all aspects of my professional and personal life against a mental opportunity cost scoreboard of whether I was using my time efficiently.

It wasn’t just that the nature of the job was that I had to work hard and that was demanding it was that I became constantly preoccupied with time and my relationship to it.

Thinking about how to optimally account for every minute of the day became a recurring pattern of thinking.

After I left private practice I read a book by Oliver Burkeman called Four Thousand Weeks which seemed to perfectly synthesise all the ill formed and vague ideas that I had about this topic. I think it serves as a useful insight to any lawyer who is concerned with how they are using their (very limited) time.

Four Thousand Weeks

Assuming you live to 80 years old, you have 4000 weeks in a lifetime. That’s frighteningly short.

But Burkeman’s central thesis isn’t about how limited our time is, rather his concern is that the vast majority of us (and lawyers exemplify this) have inherited a series of ideas about how to use our time which are pretty much guaranteed to make our limited days on earth worse.

In the modern world the prominent work (and in fact non- work) culture that has developed is that in order to have a good and productive life we need to master time. Time is a resource to be used and in order to make the most of it you need to control it as perfectly as possible.

Rather than just experiencing time for whatever it may bring in the moment or even getting lost in time and not looking at the clock, we are taught to wrestle time into our optimal agenda to maximise the best life we can produce. Schedules full to the brim with meetings and calls, free time dedicated to self-improving activities, almost every hour of the week planned. Present time becomes only a vehicle for a future life.  A perfect example of this thinking is often a lawyer’ s relationship with the billable hour:

The more hours that I can bill now the more resources I will have in the future. The more I control time now the more free I will be later.

The obvious problem with this approach as Burkeman notes is that this type of thinking applied every day: ‘…wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped- for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives’.

But the problem with this type of thinking isn’t just that our mental lives become preoccupied with the future, the real issue is that for many of us our obsession with using time productively masks a deeper discomfort with accepting that life is often not capable of being controlled.  

Many of us work very hard in the present precisely because we feel insecure about an inevitably unknown future, as Burkeman explains of his own experience:

‘[obsessing over productivity] helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I would feel secure in my career and finances…most of us invest a lot of energy one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves…We recoil from the  notion that this is it – that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we get a shot at. Instead we mentally fight against the way things are – so that…we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless and constrained by reality’.

In other words, the reason many of us try to perfectly master time is precisely because we are avoiding confronting the true position that regardless of how hard you work and plan life is 1) very short; 2) very unpredictable; and 3) often dependent on other people.

Trying to master and optimise time is seductive because it allows you to fantasise that one day in the future you might feel totally in control and have conquered time.

But that is a false equation because as long as you see time as a resource to be used rather than experienced you will continue to cram in more tasks, more goals and more accomplishments (reinforcing the feeling that total control remains out of reach until more things are ticked off).

Put another way – if you always believe that you must do more than you can actually do with the time you have, then you will never be satisfied.

Burkeman’s idea is that rather than constantly trying to fight time with more and more productivity (which is an unwinnable battle because there will always be more work to do) instead adopt an attitude of embracing each day’s inevitable limitations.

i.e. accept that every day, every week, every month we will never have time for everything we want to do…. we will always miss out on something, life’s rhythms and the behaviour of other people will always be unpredictable.

But in embracing rather than denying our temporal limitations, we give ourselves the gift of living in our present reality as we actually find it, rather than a future mental ideal we have set up.  With that shift in perspective we can feel less concerned about failing against some imaginary daily scoreboard and instead enjoy the often messy and unpredictable mix that is a life well lived.

‘The choice you can make is to stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes matters worse. And once you stop investing in the idea that you might achieve peace of mind that way it becomes easier to find peace of mind in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all demands.’

So a starting point for lawyers might be giving up on trying to control our billable time or conquer our to do list, but instead to simply work in the time we have available to do so.

The two patterns of thinking that underlie this relationship with time…

The challenge of billable hour work is that 1) it is very easy to see every hour not billed as an hour wasted and 2) it reinforces the idea that your time is to be used as a commodity for a future outcome.

Burkeman’s thesis around time described above can basically be boiled down to two main risks in our thinking, which I think are similar to how many lawyers end up thinking with billable hours:  

1)     Using present time to control the future;

2)     Living in the future.

Using present time to control the future

Many lawyers are highly motivated intelligent people who naturally want their careers and personal lives to be successful.

The effect of this though is that in the present day we have a very strong desire to know that the future will pan out well. That we will be financially secure and happy and our professional life will be deemed worthy in comparison to our peers. The problem is that many of those things are naturally uncertain and, even with consistent hard work and application, are also almost impossible to predict years in advance.

The effect of this uncertainty and doubt about the future means that many lawyers seek to try and ‘control’ the future by maximising their ‘control’ over time in the present.

In other words by trying to perfect your efforts in the present it serves to remove some of the inevitable anxiety about the future:

‘As long as you are filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere – to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence’.

There are three obvious problems with this type of thinking:

1)     Life is inherently uncertain so to live a life where you are trying to control it perfectly is destined to result in a significant amount of stress when uncontrollable things will always happen;

2)     You will never reach the commanding position of being totally ‘in control’ of your life because the goal posts will always move, there will always be too much to do, there will always be tough choices to be made as to how to spend your limited time;

3)     Using the present moment as a vehicle for the future is bound to rob us of the joy of the present and it has the effect of commodifying our life now, rather than relishing it.

For lawyers if you are perpetually thinking ‘oh if I can just do X amount now then I will guarantee y in the future’ , be wary…

Living in the future

Distinct from the risk of using the present as a commodity for the future is a different risk which is simply not being present and being impatient for the future….

Perhaps because of annual billable hours targets or the long timelines that many lawyers work to it can be easy to constantly live your life forward: ‘I will be free/happy/relaxed when I have finished X case/deal…’ etc.

I remember in private practice routinely saying ‘oh if I can just get through the next couple of months, things will be fine’.

Now obviously there will always be short periods where you have to work hard and it might not be that pleasurable to do so, but to write off significant chunks of a year as being conditional upon some future point of happiness is not sustainable.

The danger is that if you are used to the habit of living in the future you will always return to that habit of mind. So say for example you do actually get your work under control or get a promotion or win a case, your mind will fall into the trap of postponing a feeling of ‘fulfilment’ until some later date because you have trained your mind daily to this pattern of future thinking.

Bringing us back to 4000 weeks, the reality is that actually because of the sheer brevity of our lives in fact we are always doing activities every day for the very last time. The last time you will pick your child up from school age 3, the last time you will have a coffee with a friend in a particular location, the last time you will laugh with a colleague after a certain meeting. These are not things which are passing for the last time when you are 80 years old, but they are passing for the last time, right now.

As Burkeman states, we should guard against always living in the future because:

‘There’s a sense in which every moment of life is a ‘last time’. It arrives; you’ll never get it again – and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact  that we all do it, all the time’.

Something to ponder next time you are entering your time sheets…