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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
GET BUSY LIVING - Do you send late-night work emails on Saturdays? Do you start responding to work emails at 4 a.m. each day? Were new episodes of “Friends” still airing the last time you took a proper vacation? If so, your colleagues have a message for you: nobody cares. Look, by all means, you do you—just don’t brag to everyone about how hard you work. It’s not impressive and, actually, it’s pretty concerning. That’s the basic gist (with some paraphrasing) of a recent tweet by Canadian criminal defense barrister John Hale, which received more than 1,700 likes and has sparked a conversation about the dangers of what some are calling “performative busyness.” The attitude that working nonstop (and talking nonstop about how much you work) is something to be lauded “seems to be embedded in the DNA of the profession, because the major metric for lawyers is the billable hour,” Hale told Law.com International’s Rose Walker. But Hale added that he worries about the message being sent to young lawyers who think they have to burn the candle at both ends every day and completely forego a personal life to be successful. The reality, he said, is that working insane hours does not always translate to being an effective lawyer. Or, as he put it: “A well done steak is not more valuable to me because it took longer to cook.”
