As far as possible, I no longer max out my working days.
By max out, I mean stuffing the day with appointments with clients, courts, or whomever, one after the other, with barely even time to go to the toilet. Seeing people. All day. And when I say stuff, it includes being double or triple-booked and going beyond my usual working hours.
I do not deny having maxed-out days is exhilarating. Dealing with one matter after another has an exhilarating momentum. It has a wind-in-my-face-sweeping-my-tresses-back vibe. I feel useful, important, powerful and that business is good. That sense of earning my keep for the day is more intense.
But there’s a downside to maxing out the day, every day.
I cannot sit down and do my drafting, thinking, and vetting work. This is hard to do when I cannot be at my desk. I cannot deal with something that was not or could not be planned for. I am prevented from pivoting to accommodate an urgent appointment. I don’t have free time to discuss and refine legal strategy or work with my colleagues or administrative matters with my partners. That has the knock on effect of rushing my work.
Worst of all, I am drained from the day and don’t have enough energy and good cheer by the time I get home. Listening to other people’s problems takes an intellectual, emotional and psychological toll.
My day becomes rigid and ironically, despite the scheduling, out of my control. I also don’t like the time-is-money vibe from maxing out the day. It feels hyper-capitalistic where the purpose to everything we do is to profit in some way or other.
My ideal work-to-slack ratio is 75-80% to 25-20% of the working day. Slack is not sloth, slovenliness or shiftless. But too much slack is the road to those qualities.
Slack is the space we create in the day to do other things besides work. They could be work-related, supported or tangential to it. I say ‘create’ because slack is not given or bestowed. It is carved out. We have to make room for it. That means pushing other things out of the room.
I work slack into my appointments by spacing them out. More time between appointments helps me to better prepare myself for the next appointment. Slack lets me accommodate an acquaintance, friend or family that drops by unexpectedly. Slack leaves me room to take over unsatisfactory drafts and finish them off to beat the deadline. Slack gives me opportunity to acquaint myself with the lawyers, staff, pupils and interns in the firm. I impose slack when I leave my desk and go downstairs to look or water the atelier plants.
Slack is the spaces we create in our work day for life to happen. Slack may even simply be a change of scenery or environment in which we work. Slack is the satisfying, fun and nourishing discussion we have with our colleagues, which may or may not be about work. Slack is my five, ten minute cigarette break which suddenly gets extended by another five, ten because…
Slack is the acknowledgment, respect and attempt to live with the natural rhythms of the day and that we are not machines. Slack is the quiet resistance against the relentless hypercapitalistic mindset where time-is-money and profit is prioritised over people.
Above all, it is a reminder that although work is important, life and the relationships we have in them are more important. Because ultimately, work is primarily transactional, and life is personal.
To sacrifice the personal wholesale for the transactional is to eventuallly lose both.
