Time

I'm paid - and to a significant extent, evaluated - by the minute. Or to be more precise, by the six-minute increment. At work, I account for my time in tenths of hours. Typically, people who do the type of work I do are expected to write up and "bill" at least 1850-2000 hours per year. Considerably more to rank near the top in billings. On the surface, that doesn't sound like so much. Over fifty weeks (allowing two weeks vacation), 2000 hours equates to forty hours per week, or eight hours per business day.

In practice, however, it's far more. Billable hours are the time submitted on a bill to a client, and it is a rare day when eight hours in the office nets even seven hours of billable time. Ethical lawyers don't bill for lunch, chit-chatting with their secretary, trips to the rest room, talking with their daughter's school on the phone, sending out the bills and paying vendors, writing articles for publication, managing the office, training younger lawyers, business development, or being diversity coordinator. Yet most of these activities must take place for the business to function, and all of them have to take place for life to function. In short, to bill eight hours takes at least ten in the office, maybe eleven or twelve.

Viewed from that perspective, working into the night and many weekends is the norm for most lawyers.

Ironically, the hardest time to bill is often the most harried. There are blocks of time--writing a lengthy court submission, trying a case--that easily translate to long hours. But those are the fun times for a lawyer. The hard days are the days when five different cases each have small crises. There are umpteen phone calls to clients and 238 separate emails to read and delete in between harried hallway conferences about the best strategy for responding to the newest demand.

You look up and it is eight o-clock. You've been glued to the phone and computer screen for twelve hours, and without realizing it, you skipped lunch. You'll be late home for dinner; your spouse will be angry and the children too exhausted to tell you about their days. But when you sit down to account for those hard-worked, hard-earned hours, they just don't add up.

Six minutes for this email exchange; twelve minutes for that call; half an hour here. Six maybe seven hours all told if you search that harried memory. You moved so fast and did so much the only thing you had no time to do was count the time. Where ever did it go?

Today was one of those days.