Mother in Law: Procrastination part 2 – slay the day!

On Friday the little white dog who lives behind us was barking at her back door to go in the house from 8.30am to 9.30am. This has happened before and, like before, I went round and asked them to stop their dog barking. I knew who would answer the door – the teenage girl of the family. Again, she was home alone and, again, she was presumably staring at her phone getting just as annoyed by the dog as I was but couldn’t be bothered to get up and open the back door. This was despite knowing the crazy woman was probably going to be complaining.

I get it. Before we had a TV remote, my brother and I would watch hours of something we didn’t want to watch rather than getting up to change the channel. But my first piece of advice to overcome procrastination has to be this: grow up. If poet Mary Oliver asked you what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life would your answer be ‘play Candy Crush while my work stacks up’? You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. So, in the words of most Year 4 girls I know (and I know a lot), you might as well ‘slay’ today. Now that I have given you the useful advice to ‘grow up’, what else can I say about procrastination?

For Chief Procrastinator Deceptively Angelic Child 1, it all comes down to perfectionism. She is too scared to finish anything in case it isn’t absolutely perfect and as such doesn’t finish anything. I said in my last article that I work with some people like this too. I get it. When I send an email to a difficult client I proofread it about 30 times before working up the courage to press ‘send’, and I’ve been writing to difficult clients for nearly two decades now.  The thought of them immediately phoning and saying I have misunderstood their case or pointing out errors makes my stomach turn. What if you were completely wrong and eventually your boss sees the email too?

Being generally overwhelmed – either by the complexity or the amount of work on my desk – has been the cause of me losing hours of my time too, spending way too long wondering where to start rather than, you know, starting.

There are other causes of procrastination, like depression, which I am probably not qualified to advise on, but I am going to give some practical tips based on overcoming overwhelm and perfectionism.

1. Have some humility and ASK FOR HELP. You are more likely to keep your job if you say to your line manager ‘I don’t understand [lease extensions] and would like some additional training’ than if you pretend to understand and it all unravels later. If you are at the beginning of your career NO ONE expects you to know everything. Any lawyer worth their salt not only learns something new every day but is open to learning something new every day. For me, the main reason I have to learn something new every day is because I forget stuff and have to learn it again. That is OK too. This is a difficult job.

2. Accept the help. Ask for a mentor if your firm has not offered you one, or seek out someone you can confide in. If your line manager says ‘would you like me to check your letter before it goes’ or ‘would you like to discuss this matter before you see the client’ do not be precious and say no.

3. I think this next tip is what single-handedly gets me through each day and the only thing that makes me deal with difficult files. Embrace the endorphins that come with ticking something off your ‘to do’ list. If you want, you can tick it off and strike it through to get a double hit. You make the rules. Personally, I cross things out then, when I have either finished the whole list (or more often, carried some over to a new list), I put a big line through the whole page and then screw it up and put it in the bin. Endorphins through the roof. For life admin I have started using an app called HabitNow which can be used for tasks as well as habit tracking, and it gives you a lovely tick and moves the task to the bottom of the list when you tap to say it is complete. Bliss.

4. Work out how to make things ‘bitesize’. This includes allocating a realistic and appropriate time frame – and a time limit – to a task. For example, you are going to spend 30 more minutes fine-tuning your letter of claim and then you are going to send it to your client for approval. You are going to have in mind (a) that your client does not want to pay you to look at it for another five hours; (b) you are trying to make a profit so do not want to spend another five hours; and (c) nothing is ever perfect and that is why you want your client to check it. Then, after that half an hour, you move on to the next thing on your list. You look at a realistic time limit for that. If the realistic time estimate is 10 hours, you are going to have to break it up into chunks. What can you do today and when is your diary free to continue? Do not obsess over whether someone more experienced could do it quicker; YOU are the one who needs to get it done. However long it takes, the important bit is the finishing. Finishing means doing a bill. Doing bills justifies your existence and keeps the firm in business which is a prerequisite for you ever getting promoted.

5. When I was reaching adulthood, Northern Rock were doing 110% mortgages and most people I knew were bouncing around debts on 0% credit cards. My dad was outraged that no one was waiting for anything anymore. Now, my kids do not even have to get us to drive them to the video shop on a rainy day to get to watch a movie. If they want Domino’s with the movie I can get them one in about 15 minutes moving only my thumb. Life has become faster and faster, everything is instant and (without wishing to sound even older than I am) people are becoming rather entitled. So my last point is a shout-out for delayed gratification. In that moment when you are overwhelmed, or fixating on some wording, or not really understanding a part of the law, it is quick and easy to bury your head in the sand, check LinkedIn again, send a funny meme to your mate or work on an easier file. If, instead, you grasp the nettle and ask for help/break it down into bitesize chunks/get the work done to an acceptable if not perfect standard, what does the future look like? A couple of hours into the future you will have that sense of relief that you have done the task. A couple of weeks into the future you might have to do the same thing on another file and finally feel like you know what you are doing. A couple of months into the future you might have a really positive appraisal. And let us not forget the most important thing: this is not really ever about us. We are, as a rule, helping a client to get through one of the most stressful times in their lives. Rise to the challenge.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article