is not something I've done just yet. To be clear, I left the law firm almost fifteen months ago, and the day I surrendered my Blackberry was also the day I thought I'd quit viewing my time in six-minute increments. But old habits die hard, and there are still afternoons when I look up and, for a split-second, panic that I haven't kept a record of what I've been doing all day. This past Spring I was grading papers at home one evening, and upon finishing the last one the first thought that popped into my head was "one hour forty minutes." Yes, I had been subconsciously tracking my time, just as I did when I worked at home while at the firm. And the strange thing is, my firm was fairly reasonable as far as billable hours went -- they certainly wanted me to keep my hours up, but I was never called into a partner's office after a slow month, nor did I think I would be fired if I didn't bill 2400 hours a year.
For a while, I thought I was the only professor suffering from "billable hour hangover," but I recently read Patrick Schiltz's article "Legal Ethics in Decline," where he describes, two years after leaving law practice, feeling himself "getting jumpy when colleagues or students stop by my office to talk, because I have been so conditioned to regard time spent talking with anyone except clients as wasted." I don't know that I have it quite as bad as Schiltz did, but I know what he is talking about.
So, when does the little billable hour clock in our heads go away?
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1. Posted by Jeff Lipshaw on September 14, 2007 @ 13:12 | Permalink
Harwell, we really have to ask ourselves whether billable hours create the angst or the angst creates the billable hours. I am fifteen years removed from billable hours (which I did for the thirteen preceding) and I still look at a morning without X hours of class prep or X hours of writing as somehow wasted.
I suppose the advantage I might have over others is that I spent ten years in the corporate world where time invested means nothing except in terms of the result you are seeking. That is, there's no value, indeed it's counterproductive, in spending a minute longer than you need to in accomplishing goal Y. We don't judge the value of an article by how many hours you put into it, except indirectly because there may be some relationship between effort and result. Pity then, in the law firm, the fast writer or the fast thinker! A
2. Posted by Lawrence Cunningham on September 14, 2007 @ 13:48 | Permalink
I only think in terms of work hours the way I did in private practice—fifteen years ago—when performing consulting. The old habit likely dissolves gradually as appreciation sinks in of the new reality of holding a job that mainly involves thinking (whether on ideas generally or during specific writing, teaching or workshop exercises) and all one’s time can be occupied with it—joyfully.
3. Posted by M. Hodak on September 16, 2007 @ 10:35 | Permalink
"So, when does the little billable hour clock in our heads go away?"
This reminds me of something I've heard from a few of my students after graduation: "When does this feeling that I'm behind in all my classwork go away?"
Remember that?
4. Posted by Jake on September 16, 2007 @ 16:45 | Permalink
Why should it ever go away?
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