Some random thoughts, as I ease in to a new work week.
First, I listened to C.S. Lewis's
The Abolition of Man this weekend while I was doing my weekend chores. It wasn't on my immediate reading list, but it popped up as available on the Libby app, and given that it's only about 1.5 hours long, I thought I'd give it a listen. And wow, good stuff; excellent defense of objective value. And crazy to think that this was written (or that the lectures were delivered) ~75 years ago, given how relevant all of this is to today.
Second, I've been having a lot of success at work lately using the pomodoro technique--using my laptop's timer app to do work in 25-minute chunks, followed by a 5-minute mental break where I give myself permission to do some Internet surfing, to check out this forum, to get out of my chair, to catch up on personal emails/texts/tasks, etc. I've been much more productive and efficient; and there haven't been any days where I find come 5pm I've only billed like an hour or 2 because I've been screwing around all day looking busy.
My plan/hope, is that as I get better at NOT wasting time at work, I'll be able to use some of my time at work to focus on productive but not necessarily (or directly) work-related tasks while I am at the office; whether that's working on my ever growing reading list, or writing articles for my various trade association journals or even writing small hyper-local history books (I've also been meaning to write down my family's own genealogy in narrative historical form).
Third, also on the topic of trying to work on some productivity skills, I've been incorporating some better note-taking habits into my routine. I'm still trying to refine my system, but so far it's been very fruitful. It's not quite Zettelkasten (I'm not that OCD), but we'll say it's Zettelkasten adjacent. It started because I needed a better way of taking notes and absorbing the reading I'm doing for my great books book group--so that I can be better prepared for our book clubs and also, of course, so that the significant time commitment I'm making to doing these readings will be worth it.
Here's my current (and ever evolving) system:
- I keep a 3x5 card and pen/pencil in my pocket at all times, for writing down what might be called "fleeting notes" in the Zettelkasten method. This 3x5 cards has everything from the main takeaway from Sunday's homily--yesterday's was "How is your heart?"--, to every other sort of idea I want to capture, to my daily to-do list, to my grocery list, to the names of people (and a detail or two) I meet during the day I want to remember, etc..
- At the end of the day, or whenever, I transfer each of the more important fleeting notes to its own permanent 3x5 card--so, the "How's your heart?" takeaway got it's own card, but the grocery list did not--and the to-do list just get's transferred over to a new card for the new day, bullet journal style. And for people, I might create a permanent card that has the names of all the kids and their parents from my daughter's soccer team, or my son's baseball team, etc.
- For my reading, I'm pretty generous in my marginalia as I make my initial read through a text--including writing down a particular idea that's come to mind based on the text--but I don't take any notes outside of the marginalia. Then, after I've finished the book (or article, etc.), I go back through my marginalia and create a number of permanent 3x5 cards, the topics for which will vary on the book. So, e.g., for the Iliad (finished over the weekend), I made the following notecards:
- 1 card that names all of the primary characters
- 1 card for each "book" (chapter), that in 1-3 sentences summarizes that book/chapter, in a creative/clever headline form, if possible.
- 1 card that identifies the 3 or so things I think the book is about--i.e., the themes (mortality, honor, fate and free will, love/friendship, war)
- 1 card for each true thing/assertion I think the author is trying to tell us about those various themes
- 1 card for each idea, etc. from the various marginalia, trying to limit to no more than 3 or so permanent cards from each chapter/book
- For work, when I have a brief to write, or some similar writing, I'm trying to completely scrap my prior writing method and replace it with a 3x5 card system, whereby I'll write each of the main arguments I want to make (and if it's a response brief, each of the arguments the other side made), each of the sub-arguments I want to make under those arguments, with a separate card for each case/statute/fact (evidence) that supports that sub-argument. And then I won't even open a new document in Word until I've completely mapped everything out with the 3x5 cards, by which point the brief (or letter, or article) should really just write itself.
I haven't tried this system yet for a significant piece of writing; but I'm really hoping it works--I see no reason why it shouldn't. And this also should really help with all the other efficiencies I'm working towards. Because the 3x5 card system should allow me the ability to go in and out of significant writing projects; without worrying about being distracted. My current system (and the system I've used pretty much since law school) is to knock everything out at one sitting (so, I still have more all-nighters than anyone my age should!). I open a Word document before I know what I'm going to say, and then I just start writing and researching and reviewing the prior pleadings and case file, etc. all at the same time. It works, BUT it's very taxing and it is not at all systematic.
It also means that anytime I get pulled into something else, and have to stop working on the brief, or whatever, I end up losing about 75%+ of my progress; because my "notes" to the extent they exist, are a bunch of random and incomplete writings on this word document, and a bunch of tabs left open on Westlaw of cases that I had opened for some reason or another. So I have to basically start over because I'm unable to really recall where I left off. So this means I write very early in the morning, or late at night, or overnight--so that I can have large chunks of uninterrupted time. And this is stupid. I'm hoping with the 3x5 system it'll be much easier to drop something and come back to it later and not lose any progress in the process.
It also means that I often don't develop arguments as well as I should. One problem I know of with my current system, where I figure things out as I'm writing, is that the result is often that I give more sway to how I write about an argument than I do to developing the argument in the first place (or even scrapping arguments that end up being unpersuasive). Really, how I say something is nowhere near as important as what I'm saying.
I thank Mortimer Adler for this particular insight, as his "How to Read a Book" method doesn't really concern itself with how an idea is being conveyed; it's concerned with identifying what the idea is, what is being said about it, whether it's true, and what of it. Seems like this translates extremely well to legal writing (and really any writing). Figure out what you want to say first; then figure out the how.
Anyway, a work in progress, but one with lots of promise.
ETA: Another side effect of the way I write now is that I tend to over rely on "forms." Forms are great for certain things, like run-of-the-mill cease and desist letters that don't necessarily need to be reinvented each time (and the client isn't going to pay for that reinvention). But for most other writing, starting from a form and trying to actually just find/replace as much as possible ends up being counterproductive and inefficient. Use the form as a resource, sure, like any other piece of research you do; but don't try and fit square pegs into round holes.
Another negative side effect of the way I write now is that I don't retain ANYTHING. And I think a big reason for this is that my style of writing tends to use things (facts, cases, etc.) in a very one-off, utilitarian model--i.e., I want to say X, and I need a case that supports X, and I don't really care what else the case says so long as it doesn't say something that happens to be really bad in addition to saying X. I've worked with plenty of people who began practicing law during the days when they would still dictate all of their writing to secretaries (either live in person or via Dictaphone). And those folks really just seem to think differently, and better. They know what they are going to say before they say it (I don't usually); and they write that way as well. And all of them seemed to have memories like steel traps; they could remember facts of 20 year old cases they handled, or what a specific opinion from a case might say that might be helpful (sometimes they even remember the specific legal citation). They actually absorb the cases they read in a more holistic manner. I always thought it was damn near magic (or unique cognitive ability); but I'm realizing it's probably more to do with the way they were taught and had taught themselves to think and write and process information.