How do I put out this fire?

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Bar Review, a space where we talk honestly about life and the legal profession. I'm Carrie, and I'm Anika. Welcome to the conversation. Just a quick note before we get started, we are not your lawyers, and this is not legal advice. - And to the extent either of us are employed by the time this airs, this is where we share our personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else, especially those kind enough to employ us. - And one more time for the people in the back? - We are not your lawyers. - This is not legal advice. - Thank you for listening. - I was thinking about this morning, it is how it feels to be under the pressure of not feeling like you have enough of the skills or enough of the time to get done the stuff that is on your plate. I go swimming in the morning, and I went swimming, and for the first 20 minutes, I couldn't get out of my head, which meant I needed to do another 20 minutes. And then I felt better, but I almost didn't do that extra 20 minutes 'cause it was just time to go, 'cause I had all these things I have to do. I'm in a very unique moment where I did a filing today as you know, I have two other briefs, I have to write, let alone like work through the whole process. Last week, my partner's grandfather passed away, my kid was sick. It's just been like one of those moments where there's not enough hours in the day. And I woke up at 145 this morning and started working 'cause I felt like I couldn't fall back asleep, and it was just sort of sitting with me and after a while I just felt like, you know what, I'm working in my head, let me just actually get up and work. I know what it feels like when somebody throws a fire drill on me, and what I have found is that it's this moment where I throw a fire drill on other people, and how that feels to be on the other side of throwing that fire drill. So I thought it'd be interesting to have this conversation on dissecting the fire drill. - Yeah, but it's interesting to think through. I assigned that when my workload is the heaviest, is also the time when I'm most likely to outsource things because I just hit that capacity point where in a normal circumstance, I could just create the shelves for this motion. Or I could pull this all together, I could spend five minutes, truly all it would take me is five minutes. But when you're in fire drill mode, it comes to the point where you feel you don't have those five minutes. And so I'm much more likely to send an email to apparently go or the assistant or another and say, "Hey, I need this, and I need it now. I need your skills." Is also one of the things that I'm saying too. I think you're thinking clearer than I am. But what that also means is when I'm sending that email, I'm not thinking clearly. - Yeah, I've definitely been there. I'm sending my legal assistant email. And I will say, "Could you please closely proofread this?" Because I feel like I'm not speaking English anymore and the word on the page are just a glob. And I really probably have spelled the word the incorrectly and I'm just not seeing it. And so I really want that double check. But it is putting more work on someone's play that if it wasn't a fire drill, I would have that confidence in myself to do that work and to handle that portion of things. So that's where I'm thinking about the ergonomics of a fire drill. It just kind of keeps flowing and that everyone stresses out a little bit because it keeps flowing down. - Well, so there's a couple of things that I want to break down. You just said this really important thing that you didn't have five more minutes, right? But also this morning, I didn't have those extra 20 minutes. And in a different capacity, I knew because I hadn't spent the first 20 minutes getting out of my head. I had no choice. But for not spending an additional 20 minutes, I didn't really get the workout. I didn't get out of my head. And that's the whole point for me of working out. It's taking a break from my own brain. I know how to describe that better. So I thought that's the other thing I want to break down. But do you ever have moments where you feel like your work is literally sitting on your chest and how do you navigate that? - Absolutely. I'm generally an anxious type A person as our most that go to law school. So I think that's a club that we all belong to. If you are not any landed in law school, honestly, I'm impressed that you have something to teach us. So throughout life, I've just always learned the person that is really busy and is really over-involved. At a base level, I had a good skill set for managing multiple balls in the air. How do you keep doing things really well when there's a lot to be done? And what is that skill set? If you were to dig deep, what are those superpowers? What are those muscles? And how heavy strengthen them? - It really comes down to time management, which I feel bad saying, 'cause I think you hear that so often in the legal profession of time management. But what I actually mean by that is inability to know how much time and effort from thing will take you so that you can budget appropriately so that when you sit down to play in your day, you're making an honest assessment of, I have these eight tasks to do, and I know that I can only get through two of them on Monday. And so if there are three things that need to happen on Monday, then I know that I need to start moving things around and something has to give. Or if I know I could do those three things on Monday, you can have that honest confidence in yourself that if you bubble down and do it, you can get all of this done. And college, I used to budget my day in 15-minute increments. And I know instinctually when I'm assigning something to my day, is that gonna be a 15 or a 30 or an hour long event in my life? And pretty accurately guesstinate when I'm setting up my week, what things are actually going to take me. It was very master plan, but it was also very infantural. And I brought that skill set into the law, but also how to keep learning curve because when you first start legal practice, I had no idea what I was doing in any of the practical skills. One of my first tasks by a partner was drafts and minor auditories. I didn't even know what in around three looked like. And so then it's this very, very steep learning curve the first year of what is this all gonna take me and learning how to repudiate and guesstimate and rebuilding the trust in your capacity to know how much time you're gonna need to accomplish tasks. How did you get to a point where you knew what was 15-minute increments? I think the trial, an error, but also as a big passion planner, Gurley. I don't know what that is. I was a huge planner person my whole life. And there's a specific planner called passion planner. And I love it to this day. I don't use it as religiously, but I sound meers still buy one for its goal setting tools. So it was very much at the start of every year you would have prompts and you set timers of what are my, with my one year goal, what's my five year goal, what's my 10 year goal. And then throughout the prompts, you'd break it down to be smaller pieces. So I'd reach my one year goal, what do I have to reach every three months? And you would build that into your yearly planner. You'd have goals of the week. You would have top priorities for the week. It really was structured to build structure into your life and into prioritizing what needs to happen to accomplish the goal. And the way that that planner was built was 30 minute increments. So it truly looked like an outlook calendar, but in a physical planner. And so when I was in college, I quite literally blocked my schedule in color coded. It had basically a manual outlook calendar of my entire life. - There's a lot in here. There is. Do you come in with that? And that's just like quote unquote, "who you are." And there's a certain acknowledgement of, that's what makes you a right fit for this type of thing. Or, is there someone I'd develop that happened? - Yeah, is this available? Is this, can you adopt a growth mindset and do this? - Kind of a complicated answer to that question. I was certainly rewarded for my innate ability. So I did come in with just this is Rice Skullsett. And to be honest, I really think I came out of the womb with this ability. Like it was never really something I learned. It was just like how my brain processes the world lends itself to, I'm gonna structure my day in 30 minute increments. And that doesn't sound horrible to me. That sounds freeing. It just was something I naturally was drawn to. And then strengthen and help to me be the overachieving pipe I honor student in college. So I just brought it with me to the legal world. And then I do think the legal world rewards that type of discipline and that type of structure. I mean, the bill, our is built around this idea of monetizing minutes. And so if you're someone who's just able to think that way and pack as much productive time into a window as possible, the legal profession rewards you for that. But I also do think it is a growable skill. I think it is something that definitely gets easier with practice. There are certainly days where I'm just like, yeah, fuck that schedule. And I have the schedule, but I'm just like, that's not this not today. I'm gonna sit on my couch and watch Netflix or I'm gonna read my book. I'm gonna do something else. Go get brunch. That's what needs to happen for you to be able to do that again the following day. Right. And I think that actually is the skill that I probably have held more in my professional life is knowing when to throw the schedule off the window of realizing that I've hit the point of, yeah, 30 minute increments is not today. I can revisit that conversation. on Monday, but in order to revisit that conversation on Monday, it's today I need to have a day. And we're learning to not feel guilt about that and learning that it's just that rest is a valuable thing. And rest is just as important as anything else, which probably came around because, as an anxious girl, I did a lot of therapy in college. And I preemptively started going to therapy before law school, because I had core stories about law school does to you. There's a lot of horror stories on the internet. And I don't want to lose myself in some anxiety stress by role. And so I started going to therapy, actively. And really around this topic of how do I manage the stress of this environment in a way that feels good to me. And what I've heard challenges was to leave one day a month, which sounds insane to me now, but one day a month with nothing on the calendar. Then I had to have one day where there was no agenda. There wasn't an errand to run. Even if it was something fun, there wasn't a brunch, there wasn't-- I'm getting my hair done. There was truly nothing on the calendar. And that was hard for me to not have something on the calendar. But I think it helped me learn the skill of when is having nothing overly good needed thing. Do you honor that nothing day to this day? Yeah. I probably have let myself have more nothing days in my life now than I did back then. So it sounds like you've always been good at time management. And that to a point, it's a developable skill. But you started with a certain amount of proclivity toward it and also proclivity toward wanting to manage your day. Managing stress is something that sounds like it's more challenging for you. I definitely struggle with stress management. That's something that I've had to figure out a lot more recently. Obviously, stress has always existed in my life. But as you know, I've had a really crazy year professionally and had many different trials, a lot of which were emotionally heavy cases that asked a lot of me as an attorney and also just me as a human. And what it puts through in the human spectrum of emotions outside of the legal spectrum of emotions and learning how to come down from that. And I think I was able to realize that I'm not coping with this well. I am too stressed out. My heart rate is always high. I'm not sleeping well. I'm always exhausted. You literally know that from your Apple Watch. Yeah, quite literally. My Apple Watch, she also said, me because my heart rate is too high. And really, actually, when I noticed it, the most was sleep. That I just was not sleeping, was always exhausted. I'm waking up every couple hours from just the stress and whatever it's going on. And having to learn a way to decompress. And the common thing you read about online is learning to meditate or take these paths. And that never worked for me. I took a meditation class in law school. And I just couldn't. Even when meditation was like homework, and I felt like I was going to have a reward for meditating. It was never dragged with me. So I had to find different ways to disconnect my brain. And so one of the things that you were talking about was swimming where you need those 20 minutes to turn your brain off. And if I don't get it, it just means I own myself 20 more minutes, especially and even when I don't have it. Yeah, especially when you don't have it, I think it's when you need the 20 minutes most. And what I learned is that I just need an active 20 minutes, but it's an active in a different way. It's not a sitting in my computer thinking about law. I take a break to cook dinner. And it can be a 30 minute quick thing, but it's taking the time to do something else with my hands to quite literally do something else with my hands, then set it at computer. And even if I'm still thinking about work or thinking about my job, it just lets me put it in the background more. And it's said I'm focused on, okay, how many, what's seasoning do I need? What temperature does the oven need to be at? I'm just focused at solving a different problem. So it kind of directs my brain into solving a problem that isn't actually that stressful. It's just, I don't want to eat dry chicken tonight. So this is the thing that I wanted to talk about. I love that. I love this. So have you ever had a moment where you were quote, unquote, supposed to, whatever that might mean, but you were supposed to make dinner. You have your dinner plan in your head. You've got the ingredients in the fridge. All you have to do, and you know about around what time you need to start doing it, and you don't do it and you order a pizza. Yeah. And so talk about that. Like how do you get derailed? How does it impact you? All of that. What is it to order a pizza when you've got this plan? And you know that the whole reason you have this plan is to do something else with your brain. Yeah. Because your brain needs you to do that. Yeah. I think it's when you lose the battle in that instance. This is just a profession where there's always more work to be done. There are always deadlines and estetations outside of your control. And I feel a lot of stress and time management in the law is managing things that the profession puts on you rather than fitting the profession into your life. I don't really feel like I'm in charge of my life. The court schedule is in charge of my life. And I am trying to weave that into my life in a way that gives me more semblance of control over my life. But the reality is that there's always external pressures. So there's going to be a motion for a TRO that has to have a response in an incredibly short deadline. There's going to be jurisdictions where this standard response time for emotion is seven days and they count weekends. And so you get a motion you're not expecting on a Wednesday. And you have to have the reply in the door on Tuesday night. And so it just takes over your life. The moments where I order the pizza and say goodbye to self-care really, that taking that time to make a meal that I know I'm going to like, food that I know is going to be probably healthier for me than the pizza I'm getting delivered. And probably I'm going to feel better in the long run if I eat my vegetables than the-- Or just the activity, like you said, that taking your brain out for the walk it needs, literally taking it from the walk, I just get to the point where I don't feel like I have the time. I just don't feel like I have the 30 minutes. Or the trade-off becomes even more severe. You can have 30 minutes to make dinner or you can have 30 more minutes of sleep. And so which one are you going to pick? And sometimes I pick the dinner, sometimes I pick the sleep. But this is important because if you forego the making of the dinner in the hope of getting the extra 30 minutes of sleep, do you sleep as well if you didn't make the dinner? No. So do you end up compromising bowls? Yes. And you know you're compromising both in the moment. Usually when I decide I'm going to order the pizza for this hypothetical, I know in the back of my head the reality is I'm losing the dinner and I'm going to lose the sleep. But just in that moment, you're so caught in the stress and in what needs to happen and in the timeline that we're on, you choose to order the pizza and you think you're going to come out ahead, but you won't. And that's also just a blunt reality of legal practice. So taking this full circle, when you're that person who takes the making of dinner away from somebody else and informs everyone that we will all be ordering pizza now, are you working against your own goals? Is there a perfect way to be told we're ordering pizza now? And is there a right response that you really do want to make to somebody who's quote unquote leading a team, leading an action, leading something where you're taking time away from another human being and you're taking time from another teammate that you trust and you value and part of that trust and that value comes from recognizing that what that person can do when they're filing in all cylinders is amazing. But yet you forget that maybe you're taking away the thing that lets them fire on all cylinders. I don't know. I don't really fully know my question. Do you want to say my question back to me? I think they understand it. I think I will start with the first question in the question. Is there a good way to say you're ordering pizza tonight? And is that actually serving your goal? It really does depend. And from my perspective of in my position in my career, I have not been the position very often where I'm pushing the fire drill to someone else. I feel like I'm offered in the one that's being informed without ordering a pizza, not the one that's doing me and forming. So from that perspective, I think what I take from it is if the pizza ordering was avoidable, I'm a lot more salty about it. People aren't perfect. Your life as a lawyer is not one dimensional. You're also a human being. You have a personal life. You have other obligations. You have family. You met a children in the spouse and other things. So even if it's because of those other things, you didn't budget your lawyer life perfectly and you're realizing on Thursday that you're not going to be able to get this together in the way that you thought you were going to be able to. And so you do need to call in the cavalry on Friday. I'm totally fair with that. If there's an acknowledgement of, I really hate to put you in this position. I didn't want to do this. I didn't budget correctly. The taking responsibility. I was like, this is my project to manage. I didn't call this correctly. Making clear it's an exception. Yeah. And you're going to learn from it. Yeah. And that we're learning from this that we understand that I don't ever want to be in the position where I'm asking you to work on a Friday. And I don't like putting you where I need to careful your dinner plans to get this across the line. But the reality of the legal system is that we have deadlines. And deadlines have to be met, come hell or high water. And so we have to meet this. I have to ask for your help. And if that's the message, I really don't have any resentment towards that. I get it. I've been there. I have personalize. I make the wrong budgeting calls. You know, I put something in my calendar is gonna take me 30 minutes. And four hours later, it's still not done. It totally understand what things go sideways. I think the issue that I have is when it's treated as an expectation rather than an exception. Right. I guess the flip side is when do I not like getting told ordering pizza is what it feels like the 30th time. In the 30th time or the foreseeable time or if maybe I've seen this on the calendar and I'm trying to be proactive and breach out and say, "Hey, do you need help?" I have some time right now on Tuesday. Could I offer this to you on Tuesday and Wednesday and then we not have a fire drone Friday and that just doesn't land. And then suddenly we're in the fire drone Friday. That's more than when things get. When I get a lot more resentful for what's happening. I wanna say that back and you tell me if I get it. So basically, when you're invited to collaborate on the time management, that feels better to you. Yeah, I wanna have the semblance of control. If you're a litigator and perhaps this existence actually works, I wouldn't know. As I've talked about many a time with litigators in all realms of litigation, is there is the oven flow of litigation and there are gonna be high points and there are gonna be low points as far as bifinus goes. And there just is, you have to accept a little bit of unpredictability when you're doing litigation work. And I know you like it. Yeah, that would be my next point is then you have to thrive in that. And I will admit that I love the single mindedness at times of litigation. And a lot of times I find the joy in that emergency of we have a problem to solve and we have to solve it right now and we have to think creatively about it. And we need to fire on us in cylinders in an unexpected situation and get this across. And I find a lot, that's what, like that is fun. But unexpected. But unexpected. Yeah. That something has come up and we just need to address this right now. When you become a litigation attorney and a trial attorney, you accept that as a part of your life. And you just know and your partners know and your family knows that there's gonna be moments in time where I'm gonna have to cancel all these plans. And it is nothing against you. It is simply the life that I've chosen. And I think in my experience with my partner, he's incredibly understanding of that. And he understands the work that I do and the schedule that I have. And there is no resentment. And there is very much this understanding of this is unexpected. But one of the reasons why I'm expected is the key term is that in that trickle-down, ergonomics effect of a fire drill is that, not only what something is expected, and I'm trying to avoid it, and then it becomes a fire drill on Friday night into reals my plans. It's not just me. It's also my husband, we were supposed to have a date night and we were supposed to do this and we've been looking forward to it. And so now the impact is not just me, it's other people. And it is a lot harder for partners and other people in your life to find that understanding and to not resent you for the impacts of the fire drill when things could have been avoided. And you and I have talked about how we just happen to be married to people who live similar lives. And we have our own version of giving them the leeway that they need. And we've almost entered into this life together with our partners, which is helpful. But I'll own, I have lost friends and I understand why I've lost friends because ultimately what I am saying to a couple that my husband and I are supposed to have dinner with and I don't make it to dinner is that I am prioritizing work over you. I think for someone that's in the profession, it's a lot more nuanced than that. I would never once in my life think that you're skipping dinner because you prioritize work over me because I've been in that position. I understand that the judgment call is not that clear, but you're in the life. I'm in the life. And so for someone on the outside, it does really feel like, and I've had that instance of my family where I'm maybe on a trip or I'm doing something and something comes up and I just, I need to spend an hour on my computer and I just need to handle it. And people are deeply offended by that. And because this is the time you allotted to it because you're so focused on work all the other times, I mean that's part of it too, right? And like I literally started our recording today talking about how I was working in my sleep last night. That's real. Yeah. Well, OK. One of the things that's really interesting, as you continue to grow into the goddess that you already are, is that that learning curve that you talked about at the beginning, right? So you know what your life can be with the innate time management skills that you have, with the various tools that you found along the way that then support those natural, born skills. But then you get challenged at the beginning, right? And management in itself is different. So you're no longer writing a draft of the brief and giving it to somebody else and then they review it. Now all of a sudden, you do have to think about other people and other things and their time and work that into your adjustment of how to plan things out. What advice would you give to somebody who's doing that that's maybe not thinking through it the way that you would hope that they would ask somebody who has those skills, not everybody has those skills? My favorite thing in life and that I say all the time is that you have to build in buffer. So if you think, and I will do this, even in situations where I trust myself on my estimates. So if something is due Wednesday at 5 p.m, the goal is this is polished and ready and can't go out the door Tuesday at 5 p.m. Because inevitably something is going to come up or something's going to happen and you're going to be very grateful that you built in 24 more hours. Or maybe everything goes perfect. And then you get to wake up on Wednesday morning with zero stress, feeling fantastic because you're way ahead of your deadline and everything's ready to go. What I found in managing other people and in trying to account for those schedules. I still try to put that into my own deadline for myself. So if I have a filing that needs to be done Wednesday at 5 p.m. My goal is to hand it off to the person that will be finalizing and filing by 8 9 a.m. on Wednesday so that they then have six, seven hours to play with in their own day to fit this in where it makes the most sense to them. Rather than sending a panicked email at 3 30, when I know that they leave it for to say, we need this right now and this has to happen. Again, my advice is probably incredibly frustrating because it's time management and communication. But the communication piece is as early as I feel like I have a grasp on things which often is not as early as I want it to be, but reaching out to the person that will be handling other pieces for me to say, you know, this is coming up on Wednesday. Maybe it's Monday. And I reach out and I say, hey, this is coming up on Wednesday. What time constraints should I know about and is this something that you can handle? Basically trying to give them an opportunity to say, actually, there are multiple other things on my plate that day. And so if you could get it to me the day before, very early in the morning and trying to give them a chance to push back on my expectations to say, really, it's not going to work for me for you to just give this to me on Wednesday morning because I recognize that they have other obligations and other people that are asking them to do things. I guess to sum up my two pieces of advice and communicate early so that you give the opportunity for feedback so that people could have the agency over their schedule that you want to have in your own and then second to always build in buffer time so that even if things go sideways or something comes up or somebody's sick and just can't get to it in time, you're still on schedule and you're never stressed. How do you articulate when you do feel the resentment? When somebody has put something on you? Because I mean, let's say this bluntly, when you're good at time management and when you have those time management skills, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's probably very apparent to you when you're working with someone who does not. It is, yeah. So how do you find a way to respectfully articulate that your life and people that you care about have been impacted by what can at first blush maybe feel like in consideration versus oversight? And my follow-up question to that, I know I'm asking you a lot of questions, you're rapid fire, but how do you distinguish oversight from in consideration and do you address them differently? I'm still figuring out how to do this, to be honest. I don't think I have an answer for all this. I think one of my overarching life models and just the way I choose to be the world is to always assume, get intent. So I never assume that it is intentionally poor time management or that someone wanted to put this in the position. So I tend to fall on the assumption of it's a lack of forethought or maybe it is that I've been off more than I could chew and I'm just in this hard place and I need help. So I try to always do it from that scenario. As far as managing it, I don't think I've ever really bluntly said in the moment, you know, "Hey, this is really inconvenient." Because at the end of the day, I don't think that helps. In the motto of assuming good intent, that they're panicked and that they feel bad about the situation that we're all in and they feel bad about the ask. And the least helpful thing that I can do in that moment is reiterate how upset I am about the ask. And so the most helpful thing that I can do in that moment is just make it happen and show up and get it across the line. Because I also think in the legal profession, really the big complicating factor to me is that it is not just who we work with, it's our clients. And so at the end of the day, do I wish that there had been better time management by a manager or superior shore? But the real negative impact here is going to fall on the client that I also owe a professional responsibility to. So I'm always going to show up no matter what is it's at all possible to make it happen for the client that I owe a duty to. I love that. I want to repeat it back. So summarizing and tell me if I get it wrong, you assume good intent. You assume it's not in consideration but oversight and you rise to the ask, what do you do the next day? What do you do a week later? Is there any debrief? Is there any follow-up? So that's the part that I haven't worked out yet is how do you have found it? Follow-up and I think part of it is I want to assume good intent that this is an outlier. This isn't direct-villain saying that this is an exception. And in the case that it is an exception, I don't feel the need to post mortem it. You know, I think it to me it's that implicit. Okay, this was a one-off. I only rose to the occasion on the one-off and we're going to do our best to make sure that never happens again. Because that's probably probably because that's how I do my own practice is that's how I would approach the situation and try. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has oversights. We are all just trying to come together to achieve the goals. Yeah. And in beating someone up for not being perfect in their time management is not helping anyone. And so I've never felt like I want to be that person. I think though when it becomes a pattern where you see more that okay this is tending to happen more frequently than my adoption is more the managing up idea. I can see the deadlines on the calendar. And so if I see something is coming up on the Friday or whenever they all kind of think to myself, okay, is there something that I could be contributing here and try to reach out and have that conversation early with whoever's running that project to say, hey, I see this is coming on Friday. What can I do today to help? Another thing that I'll do is definitely, you know, if I see something's coming on Friday, I'll mentally hold the time to say to myself, okay, I'm gonna hold Friday and clear the deck so to speak for that day because I'm expecting this to arise and be chaotic. And so the best way that I can manage that and kind of limit the chaos that it causes to my schedule is just to assume that it will be chaotic to build in the time for it to be chaotic. And then if I'm wrong and all go smoothly and we have all this time, then I just have a free Friday and my decks are clear and things are across the line and I start making it early. I'm gonna blindly ask you, has that ever happened? No. I will say that every time I expect something to be chaotic, to some extent it ends up being it ends up taking the time I've allotted for it. And part of that is because as we've established you're good at this, you're good at that particular skill, you're good at that particular juggle and it's something that's been rewarded to get you to where you are today. When it becomes very clear that it's not just a one-off and then a pattern of one-off, let's call it a season of someone's life where they're just not managing it right now. When it becomes the 30th time and when it becomes the expectation like, well, we pay you for this and this is your job. Your job is to handle my fire drills so that I can do whatever I want whenever I want to do it. Have you had that opportunity to address that situation yet? I thought I'd probably experience that situation where it seems like someone is just kind of chronically not going to account for what you need and what time management you need to accomplish the task that's needed of you. And I think I still assume that the intent and I don't think it's out of any malicious feeling or any lack of wanting to be on top of scheduling. It's just kind of the way that season is playing out is that things are just hitting deadlines constantly. But I don't think I've ever. I don't want to say had the opportunities. I'm sure there has been an opportunity but I've never taken the opportunity to try to address that, to try to head that off. And I think that for a better or worse, I think just comes back to this idea of I don't think they're doing it out of any type of poor intent. And so I really think that it is a season and I think also I will probably have that own season in my life where I am running against deadlines and I know that I'm putting this on other people and I hate that I'm putting this on other people. I can't see my way to the end of the tunnel. You know, there is no ladder. I am just in the chaos. And so I like to hope that when I'm in that season, there's someone else that I'm going to be putting that on that is just going to keep picking it up and kind of hang with me through that season. And hopefully we're all we can do better on the other end. And there's a light at the end of that tunnel. And so I just have not felt the need myself to broach that topic because if you don't have the capacity to see the ladder, someone telling you there's a ladder isn't toughful. I think that's very fair, but I would challenge you a little bit and say that ladder is different and calling the ladder out is different than saying I need to take the next 45 minutes to go make dinner. I will not be in touch for the next 45 minutes. Well okay, so that's true. And I think there have definitely been times in my life where I have put up the I'm going and I need this time. And I think so you and I were trying to gather for six weeks and it was very intense and there was a lot of work to be done and a lot of impossible tasks if multiple impossible tasks that need to be done in an hour basis and a daily basis. Absolutely. And we never were going to accomplish everything that there was to be accomplished. It truly was the law infinity circle. Like we were never going to be out of work. There was never going to come a moment where we could thus our hands and say okay we did this for now. Let's take this very guilt free earn free time where we have nothing else on our plates and do something for ourselves. I would also say in that particular example, nobody else imposed that. That was truly the courts in position and everyone was hands on duck. So if anything, one of the ways that that experience that you're particularly flagging resonated with me was that everyone's brain sort of matched wavelengths and we all picked up mobs and did what we needed to do. There wasn't a lot of resentment in that situation. No, it was very much where all in this possible situation took out there and highly make the best of it. Yeah. And let's clean up the puddle. Yeah, we just got to handle this and how do we handle this? And I think for probably the first two weeks, it was okay, I live here now. I barely going home. We're barely changing clothes. Like it is eat, sleep, breathe, exist solely in this universe. And then it became clear very quickly that that was not going to be a six week week thing. A six week thing. Yeah. It could be a one week thing, but it can't be a six week thing. It could be a one week thing. It could be a two week thing. But six weeks, that was not going to be a sustainable thing. And so one of the things that I started doing and that I think the team really respected. I mean, you were on the team. Tell me if you didn't respect it. But I just started saying I'm going home for dinner every day. So we would get out of court. We do our deep brief. Decide what needs to happen that evening. I would leave and I would leave the office, go home, go see my husband, have some dinner, change my clothes, get out of the suit. And then I'd reshow up back at the office one hour and a half later. But I had to take that hour and a half to not live in that universe. And then I could come back and be productive. But if I didn't have that hour and a half, it was bad. So I had an eight month old at the time. And I think I missed bedtime one time in that whole six weeks. And that was really important to me. I was still breastfeeding. I was breaking the cardinal rule to not breastfeed your baby to bed. So I knew he didn't fall asleep well unless I was literally home for bedtime. So I think you and I left the office together a lot. So if I said I didn't respect you, I would be saying more about myself than about you. That that was time I needed to be able to fully focus for the rest of the night. And you know, on that too, let's just give our partners a shout out. They held down the forts during those six weeks and they did not know what they were getting into at the outset of those six weeks. Absolutely not. Trial work is hard. And it is hard for the person in trial. But the person in trial is doing this work because we get a little high off it. There's a thrill to the immersive experience and to being in that universe. And our partners don't get that high. We're weird. Like we don't they don't understand. They just married us. And not a stuck year. And they love us for who we are. And they love us. But they definitely I don't think love trial work. They might love us being in trial work. But they don't love making breakfast for the baby every single morning and making dinner for the baby every single night and everything in between. And you know, they get to see us for 12 seconds. 12 seconds of a day. And it's usually we're exhausted and burnt out and need their support and have nothing to give them. It is a big thing to be a partner of a trial attorney, especially in trial and knowing that I've asked you a lot and not able to give it. And no, and that that's really the whole conversation, right? It's recognizing your asks and recognizing what you're being asked. Do you think our profession is good at recognizing the ask? No. How could it be better? I don't know. And I think that comes down to, you know, we've said a couple of times now is that a lot of this isn't imposed willingly. Like it really is external forces. And we're all existing within these external forces. I think the perfection is trying to be better. The jurisdiction that we practice in, you now have automatic extension of deadlines due to a parental leave. The fact that that was a big accomplishment says a lot about the law. I have been in situations where women are weeks away from their due dates and the courts don't care. You have a trial, you're an attorney, you're going to show up. And there isn't a lot of understanding of the humanity behind being an attorney. We're all just colleagues in a system in a lot of ways and not seen as people with real worlds and real villages around us that this system impacts, which is also true for the people that are defendants and plaintiffs in the criminal justice system. We just do exist in a system where we're not always seen as people with lives and as whole people with lives. So I think that the way that I strive to counteract that in my early years of practice and interacting with other people is trying to always see them as this is another person. If it's opposing counsel, even if it's opposing counsel that I have a tenuous relationship with, if they're coming to me to ask for an extension of a deadline, I'm not going to say no, right? Because I know that whatever is happening that has gotten you to the point where you feel like you have to reach out to a opposing party to ask for an extension means you need that extension. You're probably not doing this to gain this system. And it says more about me that I would assume that you would gain the system and deny it that it does about you asking for that extension. So I think that it is just like treating each other with kindness and professional respect, professional respect and trying to acknowledge that we are all people in this really hard system that makes a lot of really difficult asks of every single person in it. And so just where can we make that ask slightly easier? Yeah. And I like what you said. And one day I might need to make this ask. And I would hope that you would respect me enough as a professional to understand that I'm not asking to gain this system. I'm asking because I need the time. Last question. I have gotten a lot of different versions of the ask. Let's call it. And some of the version of the ask doesn't seem to give much of a fuck quite frankly about what I've got going on. Some of it, you know, acknowledges that it's making the ask. And I think that's my favorite version of it, but I don't fully have a formula on that one. And then what I actually find more annoying than any version of the ask is when I'm given the ask and then asked if the ask is okay. And I hate that. You know, I'd rather that middle field. It's I'd almost rather somebody be more inconsiderate about my time and I just have to figure it out than try to get my buy-in on having this be the 30th email about a thing that really, you know, yes, you're in a season. And we're on a team and we're going to figure it out. And at the end of the day, we're this is the situation and we're in it together. But I have a really hard time with that email and I try very hard to not send that email myself. So I think I'm going to need to say a little bit more about what that email looks like. So like in my head, I like sending email with an ask and I'll say, this is the deadline I want. This is what I want. This is the deadline. And then I'll say, you know, please let me know if you have concerns about that or if you feel unable to meet that. Is that what you're saying you have issues with or what does the email look like that you have problems with? Yeah. That's a really good clarification question. When you ask that follow up and you authentically mean it and you're really creating that space for, hey, actually I've got to go to yada yada yada or hey, I was going to make dinner at five o'clock and I jump into this at seven or I'm a morning person. I'm not a night person. Would it be okay if I go to bed at six o'clock, wake up at three o'clock in the morning and pound this out? That is not what I'm saying. I would call that that middle way of let's collaborate together to time manage this together. I mean more when you're you are being told what to do. You are being told you're ordering pizza, but then after being told you're ordering pizza, there's literally a phrase at the end that says like sound okay question mark. Right. Okay. So it's made very clear that this is the deadline. You're the only person that could accomplish this task by this deadline. There really isn't any wiggle room. Is that okay with you? And I think also like I'm not collaborating with you. I did oversight this. I am throwing something on you. I recognize I'm throwing something on you or I don't recognize I'm throwing something on you, but something is now being thrown at you. You know how to figure it out. Is that cool with you? Because the obvious answer of course it's not super cool as me. It would be way better if we could have thought this out and collaborated and have a debrief about it. But for some reason, and I do find this email comes more from women. Do you understand a version of what I'm saying now with that clarification? Yeah. I had to say what you're saying. I know you've had that. I have. And where I see that play out the most is in the artificial deadline. So the idea being, you get an ask and they say, I want this by Thursday. And I treat Thursday as a real deadline. And so I move things around. Maybe I skip something that I had planned. I make it all happen. I get it see by Thursday. And then we're on the back end. The deadline's really Monday. That makes a big difference to me. Because I had known the real deadline was Monday, even if say you wanted it on Sunday so that you could look at it on Monday, just tell me that. Just tell me that because then that gives me so much more time in my life to play with. And I could have made the informed choice of why I'm going to keep the dinner plan on Wednesday night. But maybe, you know, I'll get up on Saturday morning and I'll finish this then because that's how I'm choosing to structure my time. So I much more appreciate that second email where it becomes, hey, I'm passing this to you on Thursday. This is due on Tuesday. Frankly, I won't look at it until Monday. But then you get this to be by Monday morning. I will need it by Monday morning. But you're autonomy to figure it out between me now and Monday. Can you make this happen? I like that. And my answer almost always, I don't think I've ever said I can't make something happen when you give me a time range to play with. Because it's also very clear to me that you're being a cotton is in my time. You understand this as an ask that is on a short time frame that you wish was maybe a little bit of a different time frame. But also it's just being honest about what those deadlines are. I think that that really means a lot to me because I will jump through the hoops and I will make it happen for you. But if I find out on the back end that I didn't need to jump through those hoops, that's when it starts to become more problematic to me. Dissecting that is it, it's again, it's giving you the semblance of control. Yeah, I think it is giving me that semblance of control about autonomy over how you stretch your time. And will you do a better job on it? Absolutely. Because I've had build in time to do your own work process, right? So I maybe I'll take the research and I would do that on Thursday and then I draft on Friday and proof on Saturday to try to give myself that space in my brain to let things percolate a little bit more because I know the work products on Saturday will be better if I've given myself the time to me under through it and have it percolate, then trying to bang it all out Wednesday night when I'm pissed off that I'm having to skip something and I'm on this type deadline. Obviously, that work product is not going to be as good as I have a lot more control and calmness and presence and working on the work over a span of time. I love that. So if you want to get the best out of your team, if you want to be a person who doesn't put work on your teammates where it sits on their chest or it keeps them from sleeping, give them as much time as you can give them or at the very least be transparent about working together with the time that you have to achieve the shared goal. Exactly. Awesome. Great. Thanks for joining the conversation. You can find bar review wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and share. You want to keep the conversation going? Follow us on social at bar review LLC. Onika will see you there and she'll tell me all about it. Got a question you want us to tackle in a future episode? Send it our way. We try to read every you know. And just a reminder, we are not your lawyer. This is not legal advice and these opinions are just our own. Cheers.