It is my birthday, and I am rushing to get to the office. I do not drive faster when I am in a hurry, but I shorten my stops at stop signs if I can, I accelerate quicker, and I spend more time changing lanes so that I do not have to slow down.
The irony of worrying about getting to the office on time on my birthday is not lost on me. I am the founding member of the firm and, thus, its most senior partner. No one would bat an eye if I came in late. I do not have a court hearing or an early morning conference call. I just want to be on time.
I recently pulled up a spreadsheet of my vacation days for the last ten years. On average, I have taken 11.1 vacation days per year. Two weeks of annual vacation is what I suspect most young people are given at their first full-time jobs. In the legal profession, senior partners can easily take four to six weeks off per year and no one complains, assuming that they have important clients and regularly bring in new work that feeds less-senior staff.
But I have never felt comfortable taking very much time off. I have always been the person with the biggest investment in my firm and the one most concerned with its viability. Whether I need to be diligent to the point of anxious, I do not know – and I do not have the luxury of testing that hypothesis.
A couple of times, people have referred to me as a workaholic, a term that irritates me to no end. But to be certain, I pull up some internet research to help me understand the definition of workaholic. Some distinguished psychologist surmises that it is a person who has an uncontrollable need to work incessantly. That is not me. Though I enjoy the anticipation of my workday, and certainly the drive into the office with fresh coffee, it is dwarfed by the feeling of driving home at the end of the day when my latest Audible book plays through the car speakers, and my agile little electric car practically prances with eagerness at hitting the highway. I love thinking about sitting down to dinner with my husband, our happy hounds lying at our feet.
My internet research also says that workaholics often have low self-esteem, are perfectionists, and are highly conscientiousness. Okay, so maybe I have some of that, but what I do not have is an inability to set work and home life boundaries, a key characteristic of workaholism. Other criteria include routinely taking work home, often staying late, continually checking emails while at home, and being mentally focused on work even when not there. I do none of those things.
There have certainly been times when a major case – or business management – has stayed on my mind during non-business hours, particularly in the middle of the night. But it has been many years since I have brought files home at night. Though I can work remotely from home, I do not because I do not want my law practice to intrude on my home life. I do not give clients or opposing counsel my cell phone number, though if the stakes are high, I may check emails during the weekend or at night. But those situations are rare.
My belief about what it took to be professionally successful pivoted when I started my own law practice twenty years ago. Though I had been a partner at a law Seattle law firm before that, and an associate attorney at two other laws firms, I was never responsible for the viability of an organization before. It is different when your livelihood, and the financial realities of your life, is contingent on whether your business survives or not. And the knowledge that your employees’ wellbeing is dependent on being employed by you is, at times, a crushing burden. That fact drove me to be conscientious beyond reproach.
Law firm sustainability is based on many things: hiring the best people, pricing legal services competitively, marketing repeatedly, and developing a reputation for excellence in your area of expertise. But underneath it all, humming incessantly in the background, is the demand for diligence, for watchfulness, and for consistency. Call it what you want; those needs have kept me attentively drawn to every aspect of my business whether I am physically present or not.
An economic workaholic? Maybe so …