What is the ‘ideal’ daily routine for a lawyer?
The absence of routine…
One challenge I found in private practice was that the schedule of each day was almost always totally different to the next. The reason for this is that a lawyer typically works on a range of different matters, all with competing demands. Meetings and calls will be scheduled at various times throughout the day based on others’ availability and ad hoc queries and issues will inevitably arise on email without warning which are expected to be responded to promptly.
The result is that the daily schedule of most lawyers is almost impossible to predict. Each day is highly reactive to events and communications from others. Unless it has been deliberately blocked out, it is very rare that a lawyer will be able to confidently say on any given day that between certain hours they will have the time and space to undertake substantive work uninterrupted.
This routine of reacting to the immediate demands of clients and colleagues is almost universally acknowledged as just the reality of having a busy practice and the need to be responsive.
Even on days when we are more in control of our schedule, and there are less fixed commitments, the habits that most of us have formed are often counterproductive to focused, uninterrupted work.
Research from Harvard psychologists found that the average worker spends 47% of their time not focusing on the task immediately in front of them but with their mind wandering. In other words, most people spend almost half their time when they are supposed to be doing one thing (reading a document, drafting a letter etc.) thinking about something else. This is perhaps not surprising when according to research from RescueTime, a company that tracks how people spend their time on their computer, the average knowledge worker opens their email 50 times a day and uses instant messaging 77 times a day. An attention researcher, Gloria Mark at the University of California, has found that on average each employee spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted, and it took the average employee 25 minutes to return to the initial task.
Part of the reason for this common style of work is that it is actually addictive and feels good (even if it is not actually productive). If we work on autopilot most of us will default to working on quick low impact tasks (replying to email) because they require less cognitive effort and will power than staying focused on more challenging substantive work. This style of work of constantly changing our focus is appealing because as Daniel Levitin puts it in The Organised Mind: ‘Multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus, for constantly searching for external stimulation’.
The problem with all this, which I have referred to in previous articles, is that the essence and value of a lawyer’s job is to apply their cognitive skills and focus to complex tasks. However, in an age of constant connectivity and distraction, there is no typical daily routine for a lawyer which facilitates deliberate intentional focus on these high value tasks.
What is an ideal daily routine trying to achieve?
Chris Bailey in his book ‘The Productivity Project’ examines what the perfect daily routine would look like for optimal productivity. Clearly in a legal job it is rarely possible to plan the perfect uninterrupted day. A key part of the profession is being responsive to clients and reacting efficiently and quickly to genuine crises when they arise. However, while many lawyers have almost no pre-planned structure to their days in terms of facilitating focused work, I think it must be possible to outline a basic framework for a lawyer’s ideal day which would allow them to be less distracted and more able to complete their really important substantive tasks deliberately and purposefully. Or in other words, how to work more deliberately and with intention.
Bailey has a number of theses in his book to create the most productive day, but I think they can be summarised as:
Productivity involves managing your time, attention and energy;
Not all tasks are created equal; and
Working on your high value tasks takes effort.
Time, attention and energy
The first key point that Bailey makes is that most people only think about productivity as about time management. But actually Bailey notes that productivity is really made up of three things: time, attention and energy.
If you want to accomplish more in the hours that you work you need to be aware not just about how you spend each hour of the day but what level of attention and energy you are able to apply to your work at different points. Many lawyers work long hours but I expect very few are strategic about planning their day to ensure that they are undertaking their most high value demanding tasks at times of the day when they are able to apply the most attention and energy to their work without interruption.
As Bailey notes: ‘when you work consistently long hours, or spend too much time on tasks, that’s usually not a sign that you have too much to do –it’s a sign that you are not spending your energy and attention wisely’.
Bailey explains that each of us have a ‘Biological Prime Time’ which are the periods of the day when we are able to bring the greatest level of focus and energy to our work. We have all had the sensation of trying to read a dense document between the hours of 2pm and 4pm and being incredibly inefficient because we are tired. ‘Rearranging your day around when you have the most energy is one simple way to work smarter instead of just harder’.
Not all tasks are created equal
Bailey’s key point is that there are certain tasks in your work that, minute for minute, lead you to accomplish more. They are the ‘thing’ which distinguish you as being good at your job.
If you are a commercial litigator for example, providing thoughtful and well-reasoned advice to your client on the merits and strategy of taking a particular decision is probably the most high impact and valuable task that you will undertake on any day. That is the task you are being paid to excel at in a competitive legal market.
Responding to internal emails on the logistics of a document disclosure exercise, while important to a degree, is not an equal value task when set against the context of what you are ultimately trying to achieve.
However, in my experience, it is very easy for lawyers to lose sight of this and to adopt a philosophy that because it is important to show ‘attention to detail’ that means all tasks are created equal.
My guess is that only a few lawyers sit down and proactively write down their high value tasks each day and think deliberately about how to give space and attention to this work at the expense of less important tasks. The point is that being a perfectionist on the wrong things is not productive.
Working on your high value tasks takes effort
Your biggest impact tasks always take more time, attention and energy. As a result of this we are often more likely to procrastinate on starting them or be willing to be distracted away from them by less important tasks which are less challenging. These tasks are valuable and meaningful to your job precisely because they are hard and that is why they should be prioritised.
In planning your daily schedule it is important to be aware of how our brains respond to the challenge of undertaking high value tasks. Bailey explains that avoiding hard tasks is a classic example of the battle between the limbic system (emotional, instinctual and impulsive part of our brain) and our pre-frontal cortex (rational and logical).
Your limbic system is attracted to the immediate satisfaction of checking your email, looking at instant messenger, talking to a colleague, looking at your phone, getting another coffee, while your pre-frontal cortex battles hard to get you to focus on reading the dense legal memo. The key point is that in an age of constant connectivity and the power of the internet to distract, there are endless opportunities for your limbic system to convince you to favour the lower impact tasks because they ‘feel good’ even if they are not that productive.
The ‘ideal’ daily routine
The key health warning with this daily routine is that it is an ‘ideal’ day. Clearly there will be days, perhaps most days, when genuine crises will occur which will mean that a planned schedule will have to be jettisoned. But the benefit of having at least a basic framework in mind is that it gives you a broad guiding light each day which you can fall back on when you can.
9.00 am – 9.30 am: Email Check 1
One of the biggest disruptors of productivity is looking at and responding to email and instant messaging. Perhaps the most common non-productive habit we all have is checking our email without even acting on it, i.e. re-reading sent items or glancing at our inbox to see what has come in without responding. Clearly lawyers need to check their email regularly but probably not the 50 times a day that surveys suggest we average. In this schedule we are going to batch reading and responding to email into 5 set periods in the day when we have the attention and energy to focus on that alone. By contrast, in the ‘Deep Work’ sessions you should ideally not check any message, device or the internet at all.
9.30 am – 9.35 am: Daily Goal Setting
We all have ‘to do’ lists with endless numbers of tasks/meetings on them, but Bailey notes the power of setting just 3 high value tasks to complete daily. At the beginning of each day we should know what are the key things we want to accomplish that day at the outset – these tasks should be the substantive work that we want to focus on (not emails etc.). So for a litigator this could be: 1) drafting a letter to other side on a hearing 2) reviewing an opinion from counsel and summarising for the client and 3) reviewing 50 disclosure documents for a privilege check.
The advantage of only listing 3 main tasks, even if it seems like an arbitrary number, is that it forces you to focus your attention on what you can feasibly accomplish in the time you have available and makes you decide what you don’t intend to accomplish that day. Having only 3 tasks in mind throughout the day also makes you less likely to be distracted by a random incoming request which it might be tempting to divert your attention to.
9.45 am – 11 am: Deep Work
Being productive is about optimally using your time, attention and energy. Personally I feel I have the best ability to concentrate and work well in the mornings and between about 4pm -7pm and so, if possible, it is important to use your ‘Biological Prime Time’ to undertake your high value tasks in those periods with focus when you are not distracted by other things.
‘By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it’.
So if you set yourself a 1 hour and 15 minute time limit to work on an important task, like drafting a letter, setting a short artificial deadline motivates you to spend more attention and energy over a short period of time to get it done. You might remember the sensation of writing a long and well-written essay in only one hour in an exam at school or university because you were in a focused ‘flow’ state. Creating the same artificial urgency in our diaries can allow us to get more done in a short amount of time by channelling all our attention and energy into one task.
11 am – 11.15am: Email Check 2, respond to anything urgent that has come in.
11.15 am – 11.30 am: have a break
Obviously sometimes we don’t have the luxury of having regular breaks but if you are able to you should. Bailey notes that one study found that the ideal break length for productivity is 17 minutes for every 52 minutes of work. That might be not be possible but taking a short break can allow you to accomplish more not less.
11.30am – 12.30pm: Deep Work 2
‘One hour of intense focus on your work is worth two or three hours of focusing on your work 53% of the time.’
12.30pm – 12.40pm: Email Check 3
12.40pm – 1pm: Lunch
1pm – 3pm: Schedule calls and meetings together
You will have noticed that up until this point there has been no time allotted for calls or meetings. In an ideal daily schedule all your calls and meetings would be batched together. There are two reasons for this:
1) Meetings and calls generally require less attention and energy than focused deep work and so they should be scheduled outside of your ‘Biological Prime Time’ if possible, which for most people is the early afternoon;
2) Every time you join a call or attend a meeting there is an inevitable cost to productivity and focus just by switching between tasks and so by putting these together you minimise the distraction of changing focus.
Clearly for some Partners they will have to spend more than 2 hours a day on calls, but the basic principle still applies.
A small tip on calls: call people directly if you can rather than schedule a Teams meeting. Since the Covid period the default has increasingly been to schedule a meeting rather than calling someone on their phone, but the downside of this is that people end up filling the time that has been put in the calendar for the meeting (at least 15 minutes) and unnecessary participants join. Two person calls on the phone are usually much more direct and efficient.
3pm – 3.30pm: Email Check 4, with time to respond
3.30pm – 4pm: Break
4pm – 5.30pm: Deep Work 3
5.30pm – 6.15pm: Complete ‘maintenance tasks’ together
In contrast to high value tasks every job has a significant number of what Bailey calls ‘maintenance tasks’ which recur regularly but which have less impact on the overall quality of your work. For a lawyer these might be reviewing departmental emails, responding to requests to assist with training or marketing or completing your time sheets.
The danger with these types of tasks is that they can take up a disproportionate amount of time without offering much return. Therefore, it is useful to batch these tasks together towards the end of the day outside of your ‘Biological Prime Time’ and within a short a window of time as possible so that you are forced to get through them quickly. The key point again is not to be a perfectionist about the wrong things.
6.15pm – 6.30 pm: Email Check 5 and ‘brain dump’ of new tasks
One of the most useful tips that I have adopted from Bailey’s book is doing a daily ‘brain dump’ at the end of the day of: i) all the new tasks that have arisen but also ii) the vague thoughts and ideas you have had on your various projects.
As Bailey notes, our brains are built for solving problems, connecting dots and forming new ideas – not for holding on to information you can easily externalise.
During an average day you won’t just have new tasks to add to a ‘to do’ list but various new ideas and insights of things that you could do on your workstreams in the future. Rather than trying to vaguely remember these ideas or hope you will stumble across them again when you next look at the point, write everything down in a document at the end of the day.
The power of getting unresolved ‘open loops’ out of your head has been widely researched. Incomplete or interrupted tasks and thoughts weigh on our mind much more than we think and by externalising them we free up more of our attentional space to focus on the task in front of us.
Conclusion
The key message from Bailey’s book, and the importance of at least thinking about the idea of a daily routine, is that the most productive people are the people who work most deliberately, and the only way to do that is to think carefully about how we use our time, attention and energy on our high value tasks.