‘Deep work’ in today's legal practice

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Kate Simpson
Bennett Jones, Toronto, Ontario
simpsonk@bennettjones.com

The pace of technology in our smartphone world, inside and outside of work, has overtaken our ability to create time and space for the cognitively demanding work of today's legal practice.

Does anyone remember distraction-free workdays? The days before the constant need for speedy responses to emails took over our lives? In the name of efficiency and productivity, modern technology has enabled us to meet the growing expectations of now, rather than later - today rather than tomorrow. However, is this beneficial for today's legal practice?

Cal Newport's book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World made me ponder that very question. Newport describes how easily distracted we have become. We are reading an email the second it arrives, filling every empty moment with a stream of social media feeds to avoid being bored, or being distracted by a flood of notifications from numerous communication channels that clients, colleagues, friends and family might try to reach us on. This is all at the expense of being able to focus completely on a topic when we need to.

In his book, Newport describes the concept of ‘deep work’ as ‘professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit’; those moments when you sit with a problem, unravelling it, and when you finally look up, hours have flown by. It is that feeling of flow, being in the zone and perfect balance between intellectual challenge and achievement and breakthrough. The difficulty with this is that no interruptions are essential to this feeling of flow. So, where do we find these periods of uninterrupted concentration in our working day?

With all our project work there is an inevitable amount of back-and-forth with team members, clients, opposing counsel and other third parties over email and in meetings. Often, that feeling of being a ‘human network router’ (coined by Newport, describing the time we spend in our inboxes pushing emails around), can lull one into thinking that you are getting things done and being super-productive. It is also essential to keep all those projects, deals and cases moving, and our businesses operating.

However, today's clients are often instructing us to develop deeper and more considered opinions and solutions. The matters we work on often require us to creatively problem-solve, and need thorough research and understanding to produce something rock-solid and exceptional.

Where do we find this time for this much-needed ‘deep dive’? Perhaps after the torrent of emails has slowed to a trickle? When demands on our time have been allayed? Or, in the evening after the kids are in bed?

Some may be lucky enough to close their office door, switch off all notifications and focus solely on a specific piece of work, but most firms have now joined the always-on-always-available world of digital traffic. Fewer and fewer now have this luxury.

The constant flicking between apps on our phones affects our ability to focus when we need to. In moments of silence, instead of taking advantage and diving into ‘deep work’, we find ourselves checking headlines and catching up on the latest updates from friends and family. This seems to have been normalised in our working culture.

However, Newport has brought our attention to something that needs analysing further. Perhaps we need to push back a little to recreate space for us to focus on our ‘deep knowledge’ work. We have let the implicit expectations of our bosses, colleagues and clients rule how our working day is structured. We need to be more explicit about our need to actively create the time and space for ‘deep work’ to take place. We need to show that these spaces are in fact critical to the quality, productivity and value of our work.

Instead of letting technology force us into being automaton-like machines, responding faster and with less deliberation of thought to everything that pops up on our screens, we need to take charge of the technology. We need to force it to give us the time and space we need for the cognitively demanding ‘deep legal work’ that we do.

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