Slow Productivity - could lawyers achieve more by doing less…?

In the last article I wrote about the principle of ‘Deep Work’ and why in order to produce quality work of real value we need the ability to spend some portion of our week working with focus in a distraction-free state.

However, while this idea addresses the mechanical issue of how to carve out short sessions in a day to work optimally, it doesn’t consider the question of how are we productive over weeks, months and years.

This is a much bigger and more challenging question.

The same author of ‘Deep Work’, Cal Newport, has written a book: ‘Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout’ which is a useful starting point for this question.

The issue of ‘Pseudo Productivity’

Newport’s central concern in Deep Work and again reflected in Slow Productivity is that:

 ‘…knowledge workers’ problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades…a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness – faster responses to emails and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.’

Newport makes a very compelling argument to suggest that most knowledge workers and the companies they work for do not have a clear definition of what productivity actually is and how to measure it.

Take a typical lawyer who measures their ‘productivity’ by the number of billable hours that they charge per year.

This is an obvious metric to measure the quantity of a lawyer’s output, but it doesn’t meaningfully assess the quality or nature of the work that a lawyer is producing within a single hour.

Now obviously a lawyer’s end work product will be assessed at intervals when documents are reviewed and commented on by more senior members of the team (or by the client or other side), but there is less assessment of how an individual’s single hour of additional work is productive as against the ultimate objectives of the client or the law firm.

In other words, there is often very little reflection on whether lawyers are working optimally or meaningfully but just that they are working enough hours.

Very few individuals or firms (I think) are assessing whether each hour of time is ultimately productive when set against wider macro goals or ideas about how time could be best used, but rather the assessment is generally just ‘are required tasks being completed?’.  

As Newport notes, the danger of an absence of clear notions of what it really means to be productive is that people can end up replacing deep or meaningful work with ‘Pseudo Productivity’ which he defines as:

‘The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.’

In other words, if people don’t reflect carefully on what is good or valuable work they just do more work very visibly in the hope that this is deemed to be seen to be contributing to some undefined end goal. As Newport notes:

‘In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts towards shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list. Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety – it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy’.

We can all easily imagine a scenario where a young lawyer might be dissuaded from spending three uninterrupted hours thinking very carefully about a small thorny problem (which might not lead anywhere or produce any work product, but could in some scenarios be of real value) when a rival associate has spent the same amount of time emailing constantly and being available for calls and appearing to be more ‘productive’.

The problem is that in all of this we can lose sight of what is actually meaningful work.

What is Slow Productivity?

Newport notes that knowledge workers of various types (including lawyers) are paid for:

‘economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.’

Therefore, in basic terms, for knowledge workers to produce the most valuable things it follows that their work should facilitate them using their maximum cognitive efforts.

In order to do that Newport contends for a new definition of productivity—Slow Productivity, as follows:

A philosophy for organising knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner based on the following three principles:

1.      Do fewer things.

2.      Work at a natural pace.

3.      Obsess over quality.

It is worth considering each of these three principles in turn.

Do fewer things

Newport begins each principle with a definition:

“Do Fewer Things: strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most”.

At first glance this principle might seem totally unrealistic and out of touch with modern knowledge work where workers have many clients, with many demands and the only real master is a business’s bottom line.  

However, Newport’s point is that actually by taking on too many superficial non-essential tasks to our core work we risk creating a significant drag on real productivity.

His summary of the ‘overhead tax’ of a new commitment will resonate with many lawyers:

‘…when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronise with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.’

There is often a pressure for lawyers to be seen to be doing a significant amount of work which is additional to the main substantive work they are paid for. Whether that’s writing thought pieces, attending BD events or even just being active in internal law firm life. However, the effect of this is that we often push our administrative or superficial work right up to the threshold of the maximum amount of distraction we can cope with, which still allows us to just about keep up with our actual work.

One of the reasons why many lawyers are constantly at a tipping point with the volume of work they have on is because rather than thinking strategically about exactly how much they can realistically accomplish within a set amount of time, the only self-regulation for the amount of work they take on is when they start to feel stressed and overwhelmed.

The only circumstances when lawyers start to think about saying no to additional work is when they are already past the tipping point because they feel burnt out, and it is only then that they decide to say no to an incoming request because they then feel they have a psychological justification for the decision.

But using stress as a basis for determining your workload is too unstructured and too much of a lagging indicator for how to plan your work efficiently. In fact, that approach is destined to keep you ‘permanently in this exhausting liminal space that immediately precedes the overhead tax tipping point’.

The point is that too many of us use crude ways to self-manage our work volume.

Doing fewer things is not a suggestion to accomplish fewer things. It is focusing on a small number of very important tasks intensely which is a much better way to use our brains to produce genuinely valuable output.

So what are some practical ways we can structure our work to do fewer things very well?

Limit Missions: have only two or perhaps three big professional goals in any one year. These should be the main themes that direct your professional life in everything else you do and so should sensibly be very limited and achievable to have any meaning.

Limit Projects: projects are any big endeavour which create many of the concrete tasks that fill up your day. The point is to be really clinical and precise about the amount of time you actually have available to complete a new project. One way to do this is to look at your calendar and block out time when you could realistically complete that work as if you would for a meeting. If you can’t find enough space then you should decline the project or cancel something else to make room. The point is to focus on reality not a gut feeling about how busy you are.

Limit Daily Goals: clearly in any legal job there might be various meetings, calls and emails to be sent on a range of different matters throughout a single day. But in terms of substantive work one way to be clear and purposeful about your time is to focus on completing one big task per day. The advantage of this approach is that, as I discussed in the last article, there is a mental inefficiency about constantly switching between tasks and this approach allows real clarity of thought.

Limit the Small: Small non-consequential tasks destabilise focused productive work and ideally should all be batched towards the start or end of the day to avoid distraction. One way to do this is to put certain tasks on ‘autopilot’, e.g. ‘I only reply to internal emails on the office move logistics at 5pm each day’.

Change your to do list: divide your to do list into ‘active’ and ‘holding tank’. The active list should only ever contain three tasks. The holding tank can contain everything else. The point is that you only work on the active list until one of these tasks is completed and then you pull in a new task from the holding tank. The effect of this simple change is to reduce the tendency for new tasks to ‘jump’ the queue or distract from what you are working on. A ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ to do list, in which new tasks are only ‘pulled’ in when another one is completely finished, is one way to do this.

Work at a natural pace

Principle two:

“Work at a natural pace: Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.”

Newport’s key point is that working with a perpetual sense of extreme urgency is not an efficient or meaningful way to work (not to mention the fact that it is unsustainable).

I think often in private practice there can be an obsession with presenting work product as quickly as possible. Now clearly clients are paying lawyers to provide advice to meet their commercial objectives, which will inevitably have their own particular timelines, and receiving legal input promptly is the service that is being paid for.

However, for example, there are certain tasks in litigation and arbitration,  like drafting a witness statement, preparing an advice note on a point of law or producing a detailed chronology which it feels many young lawyers are impelled to rush to complete even though the value in those pieces of work is not in speed but in the quality of thought applied to them.    

It often feels that one of the main indicators of an associate appearing impressive is ‘turning’ a piece of work quickly (and notifying the team of having done so).

The cost of doing that is obviously that it takes time to produce high quality work, but perhaps more importantly it is only in working slowly and carefully that you understand complexity and really learn how to produce good work consistently.

One of the most useful insights to have about a career more widely is that big achievements are only ever built on the accumulation of modest results over a long period of time. In other words, it is only possible to build something truly impressive and valuable and to become an expert with consistent application of time rather than in forever rushing to complete the next task.

Obsess over quality

Principle 3:

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the longer term.”

The key point is that without the third principle of obsess over quality, the first two imperatives to do fewer things and work at a natural pace, lack purpose. It is the focus on quality as the touchstone of productivity which pulls all three principles together.

As Newport notes:

‘The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane not pragmatic approach to organising your work. The third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.’

The point of all of this guidance is to move away from pseudo-productivity to produce work of real quality.

The reason to do this is because producing high quality work which is the product of careful and deliberate thought is the only real sustainable value that lawyers have to offer. Anything less than that is vulnerable to be automated or replaced in the years to come.

By resisting the temptation to jump to complete the next most immediate task as fast as possible we allow ourselves the chance to develop something more sophisticated that over time can build to be something which sets us (and our firm) apart.

Slow Productivity is one answer for lawyers wanting to produce better more valuable work over a whole career (rather than in the next ten minutes).