Month: December 2021

I flew Southwest Airlines last week to celebrate Christmas with family. For those who don’t know, Southwest has a unique boarding process. Your ticket displays your boarding position, split into A, B, and C groups with numbers potentially going to 60 in each group. A-1 boards first and A-60 boards before B-1. Once you are aboard the plane, it is open seating and you can choose any available seat to sit in.

My strategy for Southwest boarding is simple: sit in the first available seat with space in the overhead to hold my backpack. I don’t fly Southwest across the country, so even a middle seat is okay if that means I get off the plane sooner when we land. I checked a bag on this trip which negated most of the advantage of this approach, but usually it saves me ten minutes as compared to sitting in the back of the plane.

On both flights, I was buried deep in the B group. This meant that 100 or so people boarded before me. Middle of the plane at best, I thought. On the outbound flight, I ended up in the aisle on the fifth row. There were two ladies already in the row who had left the middle seat open. I asked them if someone was sitting there, and the lady in the aisle seat moved into the middle seat. They were flying together but were trying to deke everyone out, a tactic that was never going to work on a full flight. On the return flight, I sat in the aisle in the front row. I guess other people just thought it wasn’t an empty seat. I don’t know.

My working theory is that others were too timid to ask if the seats were empty. Sure, some people would have been traveling in groups and so wanted multiple seats together and some people would have prioritized having a window seat above all else; people can have different preferences. But there is no way that I should have been able to sit in those seats when every other airline now charges a premium (meaning they know there is greater demand) for them.

As we come to the end of the year, it is a time of reflection over 2021 and some big picture planning for 2022. I could not have predicted where I am presently in my professional life twelve months ago and am trying to plan for multiple possibilities in 2022. Taking those flights last week, though, was a reminder that sometimes all it takes to make a plan come off is to ask. Sure there is the possibility of rejection, but I find that I care less and less about that as I grow older. It is an example of an asymmetric bet where the potential gain is so much greater than the potential loss. So learn a little from my airline experience if you can and take the initiative in the coming year.

I am infamous for being the last one in the family to complete his Christmas shopping each year. Many times, I have made last-minute trips to shopping malls, bookstores, and other retail establishments in order to give things to everyone on my list. And you can forget about pretty wrapping paper. I never mastered that art anyway—bags and crumpled tissue paper are good enough for me. Based on a conversation I had with my brother over the weekend, this year will be no different as he had purchased nearly all of his gifts and I have still not purchased a single one. No one who has celebrated a Christmas with me will be surprised by that.

I am not a serial procrastinator in other areas of my life. I always got my homework done on time in school and hit my work deadlines now. There is just something about Christmas shopping. Maybe it’s having to be around all the people at shopping malls (which is no longer an excuse given the rise of eCommerce and has always been self-defeating as the crowds get larger as Christmas approaches) or maybe it’s little excitement I get from the creeping anxiety that this might finally be the year I don’t have anything to give anyone on time. I cannot be the only person who feels that way.

I would be much more effective if I set an internal deadline some time before Christmas Eve to complete my Christmas shopping. There is an idea referred to as Parkinson’s Law that holds that work will expand to fill the time allotted to a task. The idea also applies to monetary budgets and many other things. If I had to complete my Christmas shopping today, then I would. Mind you I won’t be doing that, but I might set aside Friday afternoon for the task. It may be irrational to both understand why I delay my Christmas shopping until the last minute and yet not do anything to change that reality, but alas. Take my own experience and use it as an opportunity to reflect on how you complete your own tasks. A task will take as long as you allow for it, so impose tight deadlines on yourself and watch your productivity increase as your mind calibrates to those tight deadlines. It will take a bit of experimentation to figure out how tight you can set internal deadlines as lying to yourself will defeat the purpose, but as you start to think about New Year’s resolutions it may be more effective to think about New Month’s or even New Week’s resolutions instead.

I recently read A World Without Email. It is one of those dangerous books by an academic (Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown) that has some suggestions for things that could be implemented in the real world. I was so taken with some of its ideas that I also had my law partner read it and we had a discussion yesterday about how we could implement some of them, at least on a trial basis.

For any clients who may be concerned, no, we won’t be deleting our email accounts and you will still be able to contact us that way. Our experiments are going to be more internally focused. There are various methodologies used in software development that we are going to experiment with in a law firm setting. We have already adopted a task flow tool to help us visualize what tasks need to be accomplished next for each of the multiple matters we are juggling at any one time. We are still refining the template for what that tool will ultimately look like, but it’s basically some version of a digital whiteboard with a bunch of sticky notes on it. Another experiment we are conducting is to run daily “stand-ups” each morning. We don’t actually stand up during these short meetings, but we do go through each of our outstanding matters and update each other on what progress has been made and what tasks need to be accomplished next. This allows us to set our work agendas at least for that morning and better ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. We are still too reactive in the afternoons for my liking, but progress is progress and great systems take time to build. It has already cut down drastically on internal emails and at the expense of just a few minutes a day and a few phone calls a week.

We are still toying with blocking off certain times during the week for dedicated Deep Work Sessions (to stick with the Cal Newport terminology), but that has not yet been formalized. It’s just so draining to have a half-hour meeting every hour on the hour all day and I’m willing to experiment with batching things as much as possible to boost my productivity and sanity. And don’t expect to see our firm or me personally on Twitter any time soon.

Not only do I recommend reading through this book, but I also recommend thinking about how you can take ideas that you see working for other people in other industries and mold them to improve your own work. Many of the greatest innovations have taken place when people transport an idea from one field to solve a problem in another. When you expose yourself to ideas outside your core competencies, you never know what you might encounter.

I spent most of last week in vacation mode. I made an early break for it on Tuesday afternoon to reduce the amount of time I would spend sitting on I-95 and after a late night phone call upon arrival I put work on hold other than a few maintenance items each morning. Mom had announced our Thanksgiving plans in the most passive-aggressive manner possible, and that she did so unknowingly made it better. At some point in either late October or early November, well before I would have made plans on my own, I received an email calendar invitation for a restaurant reservation on Black Friday. No advance communication—just a calendar invite. That is the sort of direct communication style I appreciate but that most find off-putting. It was a restaurant we had tried to eat at on our last several trips but couldn’t get a table since it’s still the hot new restaurant in a food scene with limited options. I wasn’t expecting Asian fusion to be combined with a raw bar at a restaurant on the Georgia coast, but the octopus was the best I’ve ever had.

We don’t do Thanksgiving in the way many others seem to partake. We have never had massive gatherings with extended family. It was usually just the four of us and Mamaw and Papaw. This time there were five of us as my future sister-in-law joined us, but it was a low-key affair. We didn’t even eat turkey. Ham was the main dish for our Thanksgiving meal (and my subsequent lunches). Store-bought turkey is just bland after you’ve eaten organic, free-range wild turkey that you yourself harvested, and cooking it in an unfamiliar oven would do little to help that situation.

The best parts of the week were the times between the end of dinner and the start of whatever Hallmark movie was debuting that evening. I am no fan of any of the three or four Hallmark plots that are cycled and so when that came on it was my signal to go upstairs and read. During that hour-long interlude each evening, there was no television and most stayed off their phones and iPads. It was just conversation. The topic of discussion varied from plans for the upcoming wedding to new jobs and new apartments to potential hunting trips and travel destinations. That wasn’t exactly the point (though I want nothing to do with planning my brother’s wedding), but it was more just having people to talk with at more than a cursory depth. That has been the thing that this period of restrictions has limited the most. It is why I spend a couple hours most Saturday mornings on a zoom call with a group of friends from law school. I hope you too were able to avoid explosive topics and to have meaningful and enriching conversations over the Thanksgiving holiday.