Many lawyers opt to go solo or set up small practices with an eye to creating a better work-life balance, but find that kind of equilibrium is out of reach as the challenges of building a practice with limited support staff while trying to spend time with young families – or elderly parents – weigh heavily on their time.
Role overload
Dr. Linda Duxbury is a professor at the Carleton University Sprott School of Business in Ottawa where she is an internationally renowned work-life balance researcher and pioneer in the field of organizational health. When she began collecting data on the subject back in 1991, she framed it the way that most academics do: work interferes with family and family interferes with work. “But after I did the research over a number of years, I came to the conclusion that ‘it’s all about workload, stupid!’” says Duxbury.
The legal profession’s problem lies within its reliance on billable hours – what she calls an explicit metric that places undue pressure on lawyers because of the expectation of a material reward for every extra hour put in.
“In a lot of other firms that I look at the metric is not explicit; it’s part of the culture. You still get the same behaviour but not to the same toxic level as you do when the hours are explicitly linked to measurement,” says Duxbury. “And the bar is set right at the top of billable hours, at 40 hours a week, which doesn’t leave you any time for all the other crap you have to do that’s not billable. So the expectation is you’re going to put in 60 hours, just to keep employed.”
Duxbury says we’re at a point where a big psychological shift will be necessary. The younger people in her research have seen their parents’ marriages fail as a result of the long hours they put in – and that those long hours of hard work are no safeguard against downsizing. They’re determined not to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
But hanging out your own shingle is no answer either, says Duxbury.
“It’s a mythology to think that if you run your own practice you’re automatically going to have more balance. In fact, if you run your own business, unless you’re willing to take a big income hit, you’re not going to have more balance.”
Making it about you
In his new book Is Work Killing You? (House of Anansi Press), stress-management specialist Dr. David Posen of Oakville, Ont., describes the roles of life as: work, family and self. For people who do volunteer work, a fourth role would be community.
Work-life imbalance occurs when those roles get out of whack with one another – typically, when work gets all the time and energy that it needs in an average week, while the other parts of life getting what’s left over. He warns that this kind of conflict, left for too long, often turns into chronic stress.
A certain amount of good stress actually helps performance levels, he says, but when stress continues to increase, you “move into distress, where performance starts to fall off and so does productivity, and you start to get symptoms,” says Posen. Fatigue can lead to exhaustion which can lead to sickness, including heart attack and stroke.
“I always ask patients, do you feel hopeless, helpless, do you feel trapped? Those kinds of feelings and symptoms you really need to pay attention to. When people feel that they’re on a treadmill that they can’t get off, they don’t have time to take a vacation, they don’t know whether they can keep soldiering on…they’re already well over the hump” into distress, he warns.
Self-evaluation
The biggest danger in not considering the “holistic you” is ultimately job burnout, according to Vancouver-based professional coaching speaker Lisa Martin, creator of the Lead + Live Better programs and the author of “Briefcase Moms” (Cornerview Press).
“Classic signs are working longer and longer hours to get the same job done, unusual tension and irritability, non-communication, inertia and prolonged indecisiveness, missing deadlines and avoidance behaviours” says Martin.
She insists on proactively balancing action with rest. Book downtime into your calendar – and take it. When you do so, you'll be re-energized, make better decisions and foster better relationships.
And don’t worry about being perfect. The more perfection you demand from yourself and those around you, the more disorderly and unmanageable life feels.
“Perfection is a career killer. When you focus on making everything 100-per cent correct, you inevitably hold on too tightly. You don’t delegate or let things go. Your pride can interfere with admitting you need help. In an effort to control everything, you miss opportunities to grow and take risks.”
Instead of insisting on perfection, she says, aim for success, or even progress.
“If you aim for progress instead of perfection, you will have more time to complete important career development tasks like networking, strategizing, building a profile, and communicating about your accomplishments,” says Martin.
Posen says one of the best pieces of advice he received early on in his practice is to start as you mean to continue.
“Let people know up-front what they’re getting, and you decide ahead of time what kind of life you want to have,” says Posen, referring to the often unrealistic prospect of billable hours overload many young lawyers saddle themselves with.
Duxbury emphasizes that no one’s going to give you balance. Rather, it’s something that you have to do for yourself. “When I talk to people and I say to them, you know, on your deathbed what are you going to say? Dear Lord, don’t take me now I have emails in my in basket?” she laughs.
Jason Scott Alexander is an Ottawa-based freelance writer specializing in frontier-media and technology law topics.