a tale of two schedules
the corporate grind vs. the creative still-grind-but-a-different-grind
When I was in law school, the thing I most wanted to know was: What is billing 2000 hours a year *actually* like? As in, do you still have time to get dinner with friends? See Broadway shows? Exercise?
The U.S. talks so much about the 9-5, which by virtue of its name suggests the ability to engage in outside-of-work activities (unless you have a two-hour commute or are too demoralized by work to engage in those activities). But all the jobs I’ve ever been interested in—lawyer, event planner, crisis comms, writer—are never categorized as 9-5s. If they’re not 9-5s, though, then what are they?
Well, I’m not an event planner nor do I work in crisis comms (although I would love to try out both)—but as a Big Law lawyer for many years and now a writer/content creator/self-employed lawyer, I’ve noticed a few interesting points of comparison.
My schedule when I was a Big Law associate looked roughly like this:
A few notes:
The red blocks of “Work” are not always filled with work. They’re simply the times I expected to work. If I woke up on Thursday, for example, and didn’t have any pressing assignments, I might decide on a morning workout class and then roll into the office at noon. Conversely, I did not always clock out on Fridays at 6pm—when fire drills come up, I obviously would just stay in the office (or go out for a bit and then work from home later). If you’re curious about how the days veered between non-stop to straight-up relaxing, check out my latest YouTube video going over the three types of work days I had while in Big Law.
I blocked out evening periods (9:30-11:30pm) for work because a Big Law associate can’t simply leave the office at 6:30 and never look back until the next day. That’s just not the job. So in order to make up for the fact that I would take a break from work in the evenings, I had to ensure that emails/asks sent during that period were triaged and dealt with before the next day.
Not sure if this was due to working in Big Law or simply being in my twenties (probably both), but I prioritized partying hard and spending hard a lot when I was an associate. Looking back, I think I needed some sort of justification/release/catharsis from working, which manifested in compulsively shopping and attending events that represented “fun” on a superficial level. (Many events were, in fact, fun, but that’s beside the point.)
In comparison, my self-employed writer/content creator/lawyer schedule nowadays looks like this: