May 2006 Archives
A few days ago, Bruce MacEwen wrote,
Another set of firms … will also embrace the reality that the highest form of human happiness comes not with work alone, but with work and with love.The good news is that those of us blessed in work and in love are often the most productive and creative as well. This is nothing more than centuries-old wisdom, but some of us lost sight of it at the end of the 20th Century.
I quoted him here. Stephanie West Allen picked up on the posts, reviewed some of the common traditional senses of the word love, then wondered, "If we love our clients and the people with whom we work, what type of love is it?"
I didn't read Bruce's words as suggesting that the love to which he referred would necessarily come from or be attached to the work. I feel strongly about the work that I do, the company in which I do it and the people that my work serves, but I would hesitate to use the word 'love' for that set of emotions. I thought Bruce was referring simply to having the time to cultivate one's relationships with family and friends. His point is still important: a person who has meaningful, caring relationships is more likely to be happy and thriving than a person who has fewer (or no) such relationships, but who spends endless hours working and gets paid buckets of money to do it. People who are concerned about how their work affects their quality of life as a whole human being still value professional achievement and working relationships, but they are willing to make some economic trade-offs to preserve their other relationships and other things that they value.
In drafts of this post I sought to explore further the theme that "quality of life" is not just about time spent at the office versus time in other activities. I quickly discovered (or not so quickly, since I had planned to be falling asleep by now) that I wouldn't be able to cover that territory and do it well. At least, not tonight.
So that must wait for another day, but meanwhile, consider these recent posts:
Rees Morrison: All management expresses values ("managers express values, explicitly or implicitly, as they exercise their power and decide on courses of action")
Arnie Herz: Law firm reinvention: nurturing the partner-associate relationship (law firms where partners hoard work and don't delegate don't do themselves any favors by it in the long run)
Ernest Svenson supported Mitch Landrieu's candidacy for mayor of New Orleans. When Landrieu lost, Ernie wrote this essay about the election, Landrieu, and life post-Katrina. Ernie observes:
It's important to understand the subtle (as opposed to obvious) differences between tragedies and miracles. Tragedies, especially while they are unfolding, are easy to capture on film and that's one thing that makes them easier to focus on (which is not helpful).[. . .]
Whether Mitch Landrieu is the mayor is not as important as our willingness to believe in miracles. A miracle doesn't depend on an election. Miracles happen when people consciously will them to happen. Mitch reminded me that miracles are out there and they can happen, but we have to have the right attitude.
Ernie recorded the essay for WTUL.
It sounds like an obvious statement: the more tasks you try to focus on at once, the less effectively you are likely to perform at any one of them.
Denise Howell linked to this Hewlett-Packard UK release about a study it commissioned that suggests that constantly interrupting one's thinking to review and respond to e-mails yields a decrease in one's "functioning IQ." According to the study, it's not just bad — it's worse than pot.
That reminded me of the recent Newsweek article by Steven Levy on "Continuous Partial Attention."
It also reminded me of the admonition by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done and elsewhere that interrupting oneself to respond to e-mails tends to result in less productivity rather than more.
I should probably dig up that book and have another look at it.
Over the last few months, I've gotten the impression from reading legal weblogs that quite a few older lawyers who struggle to understand what motivates the newest generation of lawyers. I don't know if it's true. I see the phrase "work/life balance" bandied about a lot (though no one quite seems to agree on what it means), and I've sometimes seen that phrase used disparagingly, as if to say, "If you want to have priorities elsewhere, I wouldn't want you to work for me." I don't generally meet this character in my daily life, but lots of people are telling me he exists (it's almost always a 'he') even if the stereotype that circulates is a bit of a caricature.
Bruce MacEwen has been posting about this issue periodically, most recently with a post titled "Can We See the Log in Our Own Eye?"
I'll make no pretense of being able to speak generally about what my generation wants. Over-generalization is seldom useful, and I'd guess that most of us don't know at this point what we 'really' want (will we ever?). But I can say that there are many in my generation who insist upon trying to be not only good lawyers, but also good, well rounded human beings. They find great value in the former enterprise but find that value dramatically diminishes when it detracts from the latter enterprise. This does not mean that attorneys who think this way view their professional work as trivial. In fact, as David Maister points out (picked up by Michelle Golden), they yearn for meaningful and challenging work, and they recognize the importance of that work. What's more, they can do it well; after all, their value systems don't make them inherently less capable. Like anyone else, they want financial security, too. They're just not willing — perhaps not able — to make that work the only source of value in their lives. Even financial security yields diminishing returns when traded off against other human needs.
Bruce concludes:
I believe firms may increasingly find themselves in two camps.The good news is that those of us blessed in work and in love are often the most productive and creative as well. This is nothing more than centuries-old wisdom, but some of us lost sight of it at the end of the 20th Century.
- One set of firms will cling to the "safety" of tradition, keeping associates in the dark, as the second-class citizens they are presumed to be, pointedly oblivious to "work/life" issues, letting the fungible young things sink or swim in the deep end of the pool they're being paid well to inhabit.
- Another set of firms will embark on the adventure of embracing this generation of graduates as true professional peers and colleagues, every bit as ravenous for challenge, stretching, and unfamiliar new assignments as we were— and will also embrace the reality that the highest form of human happiness comes not with work alone, but with work and with love.
Where would you choose to work?
I've been noticing that it seemed like a dry spring that warmed rapidly. It wasn't just me. Apparently climatologists are worried that we're on our way to another dry, dangerous summer. (Denver Post: Outlook grim for snowpack.)
A few days ago I smelled what was probably a brush fire. A few weeks ago one burned just a few miles from here. I just hope this summer won't repeat the summer of 2002.
I spent a while this afternoon sitting. Law practice is one of those jobs that can easily take over the mind, and one can spend even one's scant "free time" designing part of a contract, composing and rehearsing arguments, mentally cataloging information gathered or needed for some purpose, and amending or reshuffling multifarious checklists. Some people can thrive on just that. I can't, and fairly often I like to spend a bit of time focusing on nothing other than my immediate surroundings, giving no mental energy or room to the question what happens next, and setting aside for a while all those mental checklists. I try to do this most days on the bus ride home, and sometimes that's not quite enough.
Today's weather might have been just about perfect for late spring. Mostly sunny, with broken high and mid-level clouds and cumulus a few thousand feet up (not so perfect, then, if you like to fly light aircraft). Eighty degrees. The trees are in full leaf now, and the leaves of the thirty-five-foot (give or take) cottonwood in our backyard twisted gently in the slow breeze. Sweet smells floated to the window of this upstairs bedroom-turned-office from our flowering shrubs, some relative of honeysuckle I've yet to identify. Kids biked up and down the side street and around the cul-de-sac at the end.
I spent a few minutes watching the leaves of the cottonwood and didn't see the darker clouds approaching from the west. The temperature dropped a few degrees, the wind kicked up suddenly, and soon I had to shut the window to keep the raindrops out. I kept watching the leaves, which at first shook and shuddered under the early raindrops and wind, then bent over to drain off the steady rain.
Steady, but brief. The breezes relaxed after just a few minutes, a single, distant, elongated rumble of thunder signalled the end of the rain, and the sun almost immediately returned. I opened the window. The leaves of the cottonwood shook off the rainwater in fat drops. Only about ten minutes had passed.
A little while later, I heard the sounds of a sporting event -- soccer, perhaps, or maybe baseball -- echoing from the park nearby. From time to time I heard cheers accompanied by the muffled, muddy harshness of a voice on a loudspeaker. By that time I was no longer sitting and had turned once more toward work, but I still took comfort in the refreshing sounds, smells and warmth of a spring weekend afternoon.
(Photo July, 2005.)
I couldn't resist. How often do you read a line like that?
Stephanie says to let the workaholics be. I can live with that, as long as the workaholics can realize that non-workaholics can do valuable work even if they don't like to do it at the expense of absolutely everything else.
