I used to think the brutal part of BigLaw was just the number of hours you bill. The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I think the stranger part is all the time that never shows up anywhere.
Sitting at dinner with your phone face-up because comments are supposedly coming “soon.”
Not going to the gym because there’s a decent chance someone will need you in 40 minutes.
Staying near your laptop on a Saturday afternoon even though nobody has actually asked you to work yet.
Avoiding plans that are more than 30 minutes away because the deal is “quiet for now.”
Refreshing Outlook before getting in the shower because you don’t want to be unreachable for 20 minutes at exactly the wrong time.
None of that is billable.
Sometimes nothing even happens. You spend three hours mentally reserving the evening for work, the email never comes, and technically you had the night off.
Except you didn’t really.
That’s the part I underestimated before starting. A 10-hour workday is obviously a 10-hour workday. But a 4-hour day where you’re waiting for something from 6 PM until midnight can somehow make the entire day feel occupied too.
And once you get used to it, you start organizing your life around the possibility of work instead of actual work.
I can handle long days much better than I can handle never knowing whether a normal day is actually over.
My billable report only knows about the hours I worked. My calendar knows about all the hours I was afraid to use