biglaw procrastination Forum

[jotarokujo]

anyone dealing with procrastination problems in biglaw? any tips?

[CanadianWolf]

Sure. I'll get back to you in a bit.

[Anonymous User]

If it causes you to end up working late, lean into the reputation that you are/were super busy

[4LTsPointingNorth]

You'll eventually get burned by it (both in the form of pissing off clients/partners and in the form of having to work unnecessary late nights or weekends to catch up). New work also routinely pops up out of nowhere, deadlines get accelerated, etc., which compounds the problem.

When you catch yourself procrastinating at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, ask yourself whether you'd rather do the assignment that you're putting off now or at 8 p.m. on Friday.

[nixy]

You'll eventually get burned by it (both in the form of pissing off clients/partners and in the form of having to work unnecessary late nights or weekends to catch up). New work also routinely pops up out of nowhere, deadlines get accelerated, etc., which compounds the problem.

When you catch yourself procrastinating at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, ask yourself whether you'd rather do the assignment that you're putting off now or at 8 p.m. on Friday.

I don’t think that actually helps someone not procrastinate in the moment, though.

[cam1992]

You'll eventually get burned by it (both in the form of pissing off clients/partners and in the form of having to work unnecessary late nights or weekends to catch up). New work also routinely pops up out of nowhere, deadlines get accelerated, etc., which compounds the problem.

When you catch yourself procrastinating at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, ask yourself whether you'd rather do the assignment that you're putting off now or at 8 p.m. on Friday.

I've only been on the job since October, but this what has been helping me the most. I have some projects that are longer-term memos (i.e. three-four week to complete), so there are definitely times when I feel mentally exhausted and want to push the work off...after all those hours will have to be billed eventually. When this happens I just ask myself whether I want to work (extra-hard) weekends. Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is no. If I decide to put it off until the weekend, I try and not beat myself up for "procrastination." After all the work isn't being done late and I'll probably do it better when I am not so mentally tired.

FWIW I have found these types of deliberations to be the most challenging part of being a first year lawyer at a big firm, the time management aspect can be really stressful, especially when you primarily work from home.

[Anonymous User]

(Posting anon because main account has IRL stuff.)

When I started in biglaw, I kept most of my bad procrastination habits from undergrad and law school. Not that I was consciously making a choice to procrastinate, but I didn't have a lot of fear about leaving things until the last minute because lots of school work seemed pretty complicated or difficult, and I was always able to put things off and still be pretty successful (good grades at a T14, clerkship, etc.). That just turned out not to be the case with firm work. A lot of what you do in biglaw requires diligent, careful work, not just being sort of clever off the cuff. It definitely helps to have the capacity to work really quickly and cleverly when needed. But to succeed in biglaw even for a few years, you also need to be able to make sure your work is as error-free and as thorough as can be, and in my experience there's just no shortcut for that except doing the hard work with enough time to get it done.

So for me, what it took was failing a bunch, thankfully working for patient seniors and partners, and eventually internalizing that to do good work I just needed to start earlier. It was less about consciously struggling to fix habits and more about realizing that the standard for "good-enough" was a lot higher than I was used to, and wasn't something I could meet working the night before a deadline.

[Anonymous User]

Pretty similar backstory to the poster above. Eventually it turned out that (one of) the problem(s) was that I have ADHD - YMMV. Medication has obviously helped some but I still have a lot of issues with it. One thing I find useful is trying to work on as many of my outstanding projects as possible per day, even if for some projects I can only bear to do like 30 minutes split up into multiple chunks throughout the day. This approach has pros and cons, but it reduces the most common source of procrastination paralysis for me - being extremely behind on something to the point that even if I work nonstop until the deadline, I still won’t finish. My brain is like “oh okay let’s just not do it at all then since we’re fked either way.”

[jotarokujo]

(Posting anon because main account has IRL stuff.)

When I started in biglaw, I kept most of my bad procrastination habits from undergrad and law school. Not that I was consciously making a choice to procrastinate, but I didn't have a lot of fear about leaving things until the last minute because lots of school work seemed pretty complicated or difficult, and I was always able to put things off and still be pretty successful (good grades at a T14, clerkship, etc.). That just turned out not to be the case with firm work. A lot of what you do in biglaw requires diligent, careful work, not just being sort of clever off the cuff. It definitely helps to have the capacity to work really quickly and cleverly when needed. But to succeed in biglaw even for a few years, you also need to be able to make sure your work is as error-free and as thorough as can be, and in my experience there's just no shortcut for that except doing the hard work with enough time to get it done.

So for me, what it took was failing a bunch, thankfully working for patient seniors and partners, and eventually internalizing that to do good work I just needed to start earlier. It was less about consciously struggling to fix habits and more about realizing that the standard for "good-enough" was a lot higher than I was used to, and wasn't something I could meet working the night before a deadline.

super interesting that procrastination worked in law school but less so in biglaw

[nixy]

I mean, not really - law school is a whole bunch of sprints, whereas jobs usually require much more steady, constant effort.

[da.goat]

So much easier to procrastinate in law school - there, your professor isn't emailing you randomly saying "I know the exam isn't until a week from now, but I actually need you to give a complete analysis of the issue right now." In biglaw, I constantly get projects due a week or two out, but then a random email from the partner saying "I'm about to hop on a call and it'd be good to have an understanding of this, I know this isn't due to me yet but I'm hoping you've covered this section of the research already." This still hasn't forced me to stop procrastinating though. Help.

[nls336]

During law school, the worst assignments were those on which I ended up procrastinating because the thought of doing them gave me really bad anxiety. Usually, this was because the instructions for the assignment were predictably poor or I absolutely hated the class and everything about the work and just didn't want to do it.

For me, at that time, it was just easier to avoid work that I didn't like until it wasn't easier anymore, at which point I would freak out and find a way to scrape by last minute. The results of this were mixed: I usually did an okay job, but my anxiety was much higher than it needed to be.

Now, I try to handle my workflow in terms of which assignments give me the most anxiety (and have the soonest deadlines). I start there in the mornings because when I accomplish those tasks everything else is just much easier for the rest of the day. I also have trained myself to hate having outstanding work due. That has helped a lot. I don't feel a lot of project anxiety anymore because I just am able to get my work done.

I also recommend staying like 5-10% slower than you think you need to be because, as is always the case, when you can least afford a stupid little pop-up assignment from the partner you'll get one.