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Annmarie Carvalho: It's lovely to be here. Hello, everybody! The 1st thing I should say I often say this is, I'm a recovering lawyer. I regard myself as a recovering lawyer. And yeah, we're talking about a very interesting subject here today, which is toxic productivity. So the 1st thing I'm going to do is start sharing my slides.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And so hopefully, you can see our 1st slide today, busy, busy, busy toxic productivity and law. How does it happen, and how can we find a way beyond it? I spend my days

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Annmarie Carvalho: therapizing lawyers, if I can use that term training lawyers and speaking to lawyers all day long. So this is a subject that is close to my heart, and we're going to speak about various aspects of it over the course of the next hour, and, as Rebecca said, with time for questions at the end

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Annmarie Carvalho: set, let's get going.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and this is my cheap plug of my agency. These are the people who I work with. We're mainly ex lawyers, and we spend our time, as Rebecca said, trying to help lawyers and people in the legal profession. Stay sane

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Annmarie Carvalho: set.

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Annmarie Carvalho: We're going to think about over the course of the next hour. What is toxic productivity? What causes it?

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Annmarie Carvalho: How can we create a better model. And we're going to have a look at some of the different models worldwide worldwide. And then, finally, we're going to look at remedies that we can all incorporate into our daily life, including meditation. I should say, after that wonderful meditation with Ashley, and remedies that we can incorporate to counteract this tendency towards toxic productivity.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So

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Annmarie Carvalho: before I offer my definition of what toxic productivity means, we thought we would have a poll and ask you guys

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Annmarie Carvalho: what you think the contributing factors to toxic productivity are. So we've got 3 factors here. Firstly, the chargeable time system number 2. We have excessive and unrealistic targets, and then 3, our own internal drivers to excel. So our own psychology so

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Annmarie Carvalho: hopefully, you can see the poll. So place your votes. Now, which of these, do you think, is the chief cause of toxic productivity, as you understand it, from your perspective.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and I shall be interested to see what you come up with.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Oh, this is really interesting. I hope you can all all see this. So 15% chargeable time system 41%, the targets, 44%. Our own internal drivers. So that that is fascinating. I did not expect that. So that leads us nicely into our 1st couple of sections for today's talk. So

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Annmarie Carvalho: 1st of all, let's have a think about what actually is toxic productivity. And there's no my, my pictures in these presentations tend to be very literal. So I've got my hamster on a wheel here because I think a lot of lawyers and people in the legal profession often feel like this. So I like this definition of toxic productivity. So it's that drive to be productive at all times, not just at work, but in all areas of life.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I don't know about you, but I'd often find myself having to do lists at the weekend always to do lists, never sitting still, finding it really hard to relax. So it permeates all of our areas of life, not just work.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So it happens when we push ourselves to unhealthy extremes in order to accomplish more often at the expense of our physical and mental health so hopefully that resonates with you all, or is a simpler way of thinking about it. I think of it as becoming a human doing rather than a human being.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And I like this picture here because this depicts my days some days, and so always the to-do list human doing rather than a human being. So.

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Annmarie Carvalho: secondly, our second interactive element today is to get personal, I guess, to see if you guys can think about how much you identify with toxic productivity and what are the key traits of it

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Annmarie Carvalho: from from my perspective. So I'm going to pose to you 6 questions, and I want you, if you have a piece of paper in front of you, just to note down for each question or each statement, how much do you identify with this statement from on a scale of one to 5? So if we take the 1st one as an example, so to what extent do you feel guilty for not doing enough

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Annmarie Carvalho: at work and at home? So it might be, not achieving enough in the workplace. It might be not tidying the house enough being with your kids enough, etc. Etc. So to what extent do you feel like this? So if you don't really identify with this very much. Give yourself a 1. If this is completely you every day give yourself a 5

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Annmarie Carvalho: statement, 2. Never getting to the end of your to do list for the day or week. Does this sound like you? If so, give yourself a 5 or a 4? If not, give yourself a 1,

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Annmarie Carvalho: number 3, and this is quite an incisive one. How often do you take up hobbies and find it difficult not to turn them into a competition? This reminds me of my old law firm, where we always used to have baking competitions, or we'd take part in half marathons, and it was supposed to be fun. But inevitably, when you get a group of lawyers together. They were the most amazing cake creations in the world, and everyone was doing personal best in the half marathons. So

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Annmarie Carvalho: to what extent do you find this difficult not to turn things into a competition? If that's very much you, everything becomes a competition. Give yourself a 4 or a 5, if not so much. You can chill out about hobbies, then give yourself a 1 or a 2

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Annmarie Carvalho: number 4. How often do you feel pressured to be productive at the weekends. That's a nice easy one. I've already confessed to you that I often feel like this.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Number 5.

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Annmarie Carvalho: How often do you have a list of things to read or do on your commute? But instead, find yourself zoning out or scrolling on Instagram, or reading Showbiz gossip? That's my one. That's my confession. Confession number 2,

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Annmarie Carvalho: okay, and our last one. How often or to what extent, do you find it difficult to relax? So when you finally get downtime, when you finally go on holiday, are you the kind of person who actually it takes you about 3 days to relax? And by that time you're having to think about coming home again. So if you identify with that a lot, give yourself a high score, and then what I want you to do is add up all of your scores, so you should come to a score out of 30,

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Annmarie Carvalho: and

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Annmarie Carvalho: and then this is my hopefully, none of you will take offense at this, but this is my different, my 4 categories. So vote in the category. Which category did you fall into? Did you have one to 7? Were you actually Mr. And Mrs. Child?

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Annmarie Carvalho: 8 to 1415, or 22 out of 30? Or were you in that highest category, 23 to 30. Let's see what we got.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I'm intrigued by this one as well.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Let's see, okay, interesting. Only 2% in the lowest category. Maybe that's good. 2 sorts of horizontal. And those 2 highest categories, we've got 45% and 41%. So I'm going to draw the conclusion that we relate quite a lot to this idea of toxic productivity. So that that's interesting. Thank you. Everyone.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Okay, so moving forward.

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Annmarie Carvalho: let's think about the warning signs. So I wanted to include this slide today, because what I found interesting through having been a lawyer and then retraining and then working as a therapist with pretty much. Only lawyers over the past 8 years

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Annmarie Carvalho: is the warning signs that I now identify, and which I relate to toxic productivity because they are not necessarily what I might have expected before I came into this work, so loss of perspective, I think perhaps you would expect to see that what I didn't perhaps expect is how often people end up coming to me for therapy, because

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Annmarie Carvalho: initially, there have been various different physical manifestations. But that haven't initially been identified as stress related or related to excessive productivity, skin issues, insomnia, digestive issues, migraine vision issues in some extreme cases

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Annmarie Carvalho: and decision fatigue is very common. So we can make those really difficult decisions. We're often operating at a really high level in the workplace. But then we go to the supermarket after work, and I can't decide if I want apple juice or orange juice. That's what I mean by decision, fatigue, socializing, fatigue, and developing a split existence is very common. So the easiest thing in the world, even though it sounds curious

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Annmarie Carvalho: to anyone who's never practiced law is to throw everything into your job and to keep being that hamster on a wheel to the point where socializing it just becomes very gray. We don't want to do it. We channeled everything into work, and we've got nothing left to give.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And also these 2 aspects of becoming quite hyper reactive, perpetually wired difficulty concentrating and focusing. These are perhaps some of those side effects that we might expect to see. So these are what I regard as the early warning signs when someone's got into a state which has become quite toxic

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Annmarie Carvalho: in terms of what causes it. As I asked in my question at the start, and I think it's a combination of factors, I think it's the perfect storm between the current system that we're working with within the legal profession, chargeable time and targets and our own psychology. And when those 2 things come together, you know sparks fly. So let's think a little bit deeper about what causes this toxic productivity

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Annmarie Carvalho: when diligence becomes dangerous. So the 6 min mentality, the chargeable time system, where every second starts to count, and our self worth becomes entirely linked to the hours and the volume of work that we've produced. And actually, when you think about it, people who come into law without wishing to excessively generalise, we do tend to be people who have.

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Annmarie Carvalho: who are naturally predisposed to having external metrics of success and self-worth, because we tend to be the children at school who were bright, academic. We did well at school over time. Gradually, gradually our sense of self worth becomes attached to those good exam results.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Did I get 99%? Oh, why didn't I get 100%. What does that mean? And we become our self-esteem and our self worth, as I say, becomes very attached to external metrics of success. What do other people think of us? What exam results am I getting? And law? Let's not forget, is a people business. So we are inevitably going to be predisposed to people pleasing to wanting to please others, and that's quite a precarious Metric to attach your self worth to.

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Annmarie Carvalho: It becomes about Quantity, not quality, doesn't it. And I think there are issues with the chargeable time system and and the target space system at the moment, because

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Annmarie Carvalho: it has this kind of tendency to take away the meaning of what we do. So I speak to lawyers all day long, where gradually, gradually, over time, they've lost that sense of meaning in what they do, and that's particularly difficult when you work in a service-based industry where there isn't something tangible

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Annmarie Carvalho: to draw your attention to. We haven't made anything physically. If I made this is a weird example. Wheelbarrows for a living, I would be able to see that I've made a wheelbarrow. There would be something tangible there to feel a sense of achievement about when you're working in a service industry.

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Annmarie Carvalho: It's much more difficult to do that to develop and to maintain that sense of meaning because it's also intangible. And when you add to that the fact that law is often a distress purchase, and it is easy to see how you start gradually, gradually to lose the meaning in what you're doing. And that's particularly difficult and particularly potent when you're working within a system which values

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Annmarie Carvalho: quantity over quality.

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Annmarie Carvalho: occupational hazards of the profession. What I wanted to highlight to you in this section when we're thinking about our own psychology and how this may contribute to the difficulties that we experience around toxic productivity is how our natural attributes, which make us good at being lawyers.

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Annmarie Carvalho: can actually be toxic for us in our personal lives, in our private lives, and can easily turn on us and become quite addictive. So in the blue corner over here, on the left of the slide. You can see professional diligence. Who wouldn't want a professionally diligent lawyer, you know this is what we want.

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Annmarie Carvalho: but very, very quickly because we're taught to be professional warriors. We can develop this disaster movie, mind. That's difficult to turn off in our private lives. We're constantly

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Annmarie Carvalho: scanning the environment, looking for danger which is not very helpful in day to day life, perfectionism becomes difficulty turning these these thoughts off outside of work, and anybody who has a family life, ie. All of us will know that if you apply perfectionism to family issues, you're in a hiding to nothing. This is not the way to happiness. Family life is essentially imperfect.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and those go getting tenacious personalities and ability to let things go. And and, as I say, I've alluded to this already this sort of chicken licking syndrome, and this alludes to a children's book which some of you may have read when you were younger, or to your own children.

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Annmarie Carvalho: where, when something goes wrong, we feel like the whole sky is falling in. We find it very difficult to maintain nuance in the way that we think you know lawyers, we are predisposed to black and white thinking and a negative bias. I think all intelligent people are. And when we're working with stressed clients, we can vicariously pick up on more of their negative bias and black and white thinking.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And so, as I say, that tenacity and drive can quite easily turn into addictive tendencies, and we find it hard to give ourselves a break for these feelings.

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Annmarie Carvalho: There's a slide at the end of today's session which contains references, and one of them is a reference to a brilliant book by a lady called Professor Laura Emson, where what she did was. She went and spoke to lawyers and accountants and other people in high, fast paced professions, and she observed particularly of lawyers, she said, we are insecure overachievers.

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Annmarie Carvalho: We are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of our own inadequacy. And, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, what makes this worse is the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. It's very hard for us.

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Annmarie Carvalho: on a self-esteem basis, to convince our clients or to be able to convince ourselves often that we are good enough when we're working in a system where we charge high fees, and we are tied to the chargeable time and that particular metric of our own worth.

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Annmarie Carvalho: This is a good question to ask. What are your leaders doing? The reason I've got this picture of a guy on a golf course, is not because I'm trying to terribly stereotype about leaders in law firms and legal organizations. But

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Annmarie Carvalho: what Laura Emson identified, which I think is very interesting, is back in the day. A lot of our leaders in law firms were on the golf course quite a lot of the time, but she penned this article that's called. If you're so successful, why are you still working? 70 HA week? And she identified that actually, for a lot of people who are high up within the law, they find it very, very difficult to let go and to reduce their hours, even

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Annmarie Carvalho: when they're in senior positions. And what she said, is that actually, this kind of demonstrates that law can be quite addictive. And this is another manifestation of that sort of toxic productivity.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I was just checking out the Q&A. There just to check. I've not missed something. So.

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Annmarie Carvalho: as I say, there are various reasons why our psychology kind of leads us into this profession, and then we become like these hamsters on a wheel, never feeling like we're good enough never feeling okay, to find a sort of landing spot and a place where we can sit back and enjoy the view and go. Oh, wow! Look what I've achieved. I'm doing well here.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and and it's because of, as I say, that tendency towards having what I call an external locus of evaluation. So I never feel good enough unless you think I'm good enough, or unless this client is happy with me, or I've done enough chargeable hours on. On this particular day

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Annmarie Carvalho: we have a tendency to have a very strong what we call in the therapeutic world, internal, critical parent voice.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And then, when we go into the profession, what we find is the outside world chimes with that. So a lot of clients are often unhappy. They do have high demands. Our supervisors may have high demands. So again, we see that sort of perfect storm, where the outside world and our experiences there chime with this internal critical voice that we already had from quite young. And again, we have that sort of perfect storm.

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Annmarie Carvalho: This is why I often I often go into law firms and legal organizations, and talk to people about how to supervise well

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Annmarie Carvalho: and often what I find is the supervisors are not horrible people. They've not been shouting at their trainees or shouting at the people that they supervise, or being overtly, excessively critical, but often what the issue is is an absence of feedback, an absence of constructive feedback delivering difficult messages, an absence of praise, positive reinforcement.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And actually, it's often in the absence of that feedback that lawyers with our busy brains and our tendency to be like a hamster on a wheel, and our tendency to look to external validation. We start to mind read people. So if my boss sends me an email which isn't rude, but seems slightly abrupt.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I can easily start to think I've done something wrong. They're annoyed with me. What is it? So? I think it's very important for supervisors within the legal profession to think about that, to think about who you are supervising, and to let that guide you when you think of how to work with people.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And it is actually, even though we call it a team profession. And many of us work in teams. It's quite an isolating profession. I would say. You're often working on a matter or on a case where it's only really you who's dealing with a particular aspect of it. Nobody else knows exactly your experience. And so we see, and we've had lots of horrible cases within the Uk about lawyers who've

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Annmarie Carvalho: really experienced that intense loneliness, that intense feeling of isolation, and many of them have ended up in really difficult, horrible situations. So we need to remember that this is this is quite an isolating profession. That's why initiatives like like this session today are really important.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So we can actually talk about these characteristics and these feelings that we all share.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I've talked a lot about feeling like a hamster on a wheel within the legal profession. And

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Annmarie Carvalho: those internal drivers, those things that drive us and make it quite difficult for us to stop or to stand back and go. Oh, I'm racing around like a hamster on a wheel again. Why am I doing that? And one of the reasons that I think is quite prevalent is.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and what we call within the therapeutic world a spiky profile. So a spiky profile is most commonly referred to in relation to neurodiversity. So you'll often hear people talk about neurodivergent people having a spiky profile. What that means is they excel in some areas

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Annmarie Carvalho: while struggle quite markedly in others. So this is a particular feature with neurodivergent people. Often I don't wish to overly generalize, but you might find that one person who's neurodivergent has incredible memory, incredible ability to concentrate, but might struggle with sensory issues, writing that kind of thing. So what I have observed in both neurodivergent and neurotypical lawyers

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Annmarie Carvalho: is that actually spiky profile is quite prevalent in all of us in the sense that we are often people who are very, very good at really difficult, specialized intellectual things, but we struggle with some quite simple day to day

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Annmarie Carvalho: things. This is such a silly example, but I struggle with working out what to do when my car needs fixing. I can't change a tire. My parking abilities can be a little bit hit. And, miss, let's say not literally hit. But you know I can struggle with things like that. But I can talk to massive groups of people without really feeling nervous. So you will often. That's just one example. But you often

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Annmarie Carvalho: see that in lawyers where we're really really good at the really tough stuff, and we find the simple stuff quite difficult. So it adds to that insecurity, because we kind of know that we struggle with certain things, and it adds to that feeling of feeling like a bit of a fraud. And of course, because so many of us are so busy, we start to outsource those simple things in life.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and it adds to that feeling of insecurity.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and this is also exacerbated by that early specialization that many of us in the legal profession have. You know, we specialize early. We specialize in quite small areas

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Annmarie Carvalho: often and so. And then we start to lean in more and more to the work, and we lean out more and more of our lives, and we start to lead those quite split existences that I mentioned earlier, where the easiest thing is just to keep on working. It's much harder to stay engaged with life, and all the uncertainties and the ups and downs of children and extended family, and all that kind of thing.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So we start to feel a little bit like the hole in the doughnut that we're leading this kind of one dimensional existence.

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Annmarie Carvalho: The last aspect that I want to mention in this section is that we are quite bad humans generally at forecasting how long things are going to take. And when you add that to a system, where we are often being called upon to predict how long something is going to take us, and and certainly supervisors and bosses are often called upon to predict

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Annmarie Carvalho: how long something is going to take. We're actually really bad at it. So it exacerbates this hamster on a wheel thing because we're constantly chasing our tail thinking. I'm sure this statement should only take 2 h to draft when actually we really should have given ourselves 4 or 5 h.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So these guys, Kahman and Tversky were some neuroscientists and psychologists who coined this term the planning fallacy and said that as humans, we have this tendency to underestimate the time it will take

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Annmarie Carvalho: to carry out future actions and to overestimate their benefits. So you can see, when you combine these 2 things, how easy it is for us always to end up promising. We'll do something within 3 h, and actually we should have said 6 h. So we're again chasing our tail, chasing our tail. And Carmen said.

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Annmarie Carvalho: actually the most. A way of countering this is to start to do something that they call reference class forecasting. So whenever we are predicting how long something should take. We should always be looking back to similar experiences, factoring in common risks, and then trying to come up with an accurate estimate for how long it will take and how long it will cost, because I don't know if you're anything like me. But when I was working in family law.

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Annmarie Carvalho: I would always think, oh, it'll only take me 5 h to do this thing, and I never thought to myself, well, Anne, Marie, history would tell you that every day you always get at least one or 2 calls from clients who are in difficult situations that you hadn't expected, and which you haven't factored into your forecasting of time. So why don't you do that? Given that history tells us that is absolutely going to happen.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Why aren't you factoring in those kind of curveballs into your time estimates, and therefore your cost estimates. So we always need to be mindful of this fallacious forecasting.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So we're going to have a taste of neuroscience before we then move on to thinking about different models worldwide. For how we deal with this toxic productivity.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And I wanted to talk 1st of all about our tendency to categorize, and I'm going to bring up. I've got my friend here, Brian, the brain. This is where I sound really, really strange, but I do have a large model brain in my room at home, and I want to talk to you about the brain just a little bit and talk about

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Annmarie Carvalho: the 3 part brain. So we have. All of our brains are divided into the old brain and the new brain. So the old brain is made up of the body brain which governs our bodily functions, ability to breathe respiratory system, ability to walk, and our emotional brain, where our feelings reside.

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Annmarie Carvalho: the other part of our brain. The new brain is our thinking brain, our prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain. So that's this bit which we hone through our legal training. And for anyone who's interested. This is where the body brain sits at the base of the skull here, and our emotions are right in the middle here somewhere. So if we keep thinking about old brain and new brain.

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Annmarie Carvalho: our old brain is the part of our brain that reacts most quickly to stimuli our emotional brain and our body brain comes online more quickly than our thinking brain. Whenever anything happens to us in life. So I want you to remember that. And remember the fact that our old brain has no sense of linear time, so it does not have the ability to project forward

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Annmarie Carvalho: and think backwards and have memories and that kind of thing. And so the reason I kind of wanted to mention that today is because it

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Annmarie Carvalho: feeds into what we're talking about in relation to categorizing so often, people will say, Oh, you know, you shouldn't compare yourself to others. It's a really bad way to live. You should run your own race, etc. Etc. And that is all good advice. But what it ignores is the brain does categorize. Our brains are categorizing all the time. That is because whenever we meet anyone, or whenever we come into contact with

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Annmarie Carvalho: any person or any situation.

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Annmarie Carvalho: in order to not feel completely overwhelmed by that, by the stimuli and the various different things that go on on a day to day basis. Our brain has to categorize. When I meet someone, my emotional brain immediately will categorize them

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Annmarie Carvalho: as friend or phone. Do I feel comfortable with this person, or don't I? And it will be on the basis of millions of experiences I've had previously, and so I will put them into a category. That's what our brains do. They categorize? If we didn't have that ability, everything would feel like complete chaos, and every situation would feel completely new.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And added to this is a psychological phenomenon called transference. So the idea of transference is.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and that whenever, as I alluded to earlier, whenever we meet anybody in life, we start to categorize, based on previous experiences. The reason I've got these pictures included here is there is a particular kind of transference that relates to professions. So

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Annmarie Carvalho: policemen. Often people have particular ideas about particular stereotypes, particular transferences towards them, nurses as well lawyers, is one of those categories that people have strong transferences to strong stereotypes about.

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Annmarie Carvalho: whether that's good or bad, whether they think lawyers are all horrible, and feeling fat cats, or whether they think, oh, lawyer, clever status power, whatever it might be. People have strong feelings about them. And we, we categorize, we compartmentalize, we do this every day. We naturally categorize in life.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And so, as I say, when people come up with these phrases like comparison, is the thief of joy, etc. Etc. That's all true, but I think, as I say, it ignores the fact that as humans, we have an inbuilt categorization structure in our mind. And as lawyers, I think we're particularly prone to that because we work in a system that is full of metrics.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and I guess my reason for mentioning it today is I work with some lawyers supporting them in therapy where their firms have completely gone away with targets. They've got rid of them completely. And they thought, Oh, this will make everybody really happy, and everybody will just calm down a little bit and chill out, and no one will be running like a hamster on a wheel.

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Annmarie Carvalho: But what they ignored in this, and what they didn't take into account is, we kind of create our own metrics as humans, we create our own competitive structures. Even if we try to get away from these structures completely, we are built to compartmentalize, we are metric seeking beings.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And so we need to factor that in into our thoughts about this, I thought about this the other day. Actually, I was driving along the motorway, and I had a very, very long journey to do.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and I realized that what I was doing was I was compartmentalizing. I kept looking at my sat Nav, or whatever we used to call them, and thinking, Where's the nearest service station? How long have I got until I get to that point. And how long have I got to get to that point? So we are always doing this. We break things down. We try to put things into boxes.

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Annmarie Carvalho: That is what we do as human beings

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Annmarie Carvalho: I mentioned earlier on Laura Emson talked about law as being slightly addictive. I'm very interested in addiction. I work a lot with addiction, and I I find it. I think law is quite addictive. Actually, I think the clocks, the chargeable time system.

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Annmarie Carvalho: It's all quite addictive. And I think it's interesting to think about what does it give us if we agree, if you agree that it can be quite addictive, and I think it gives us a sense of control to be doing well at work, to be succeeding in meeting our targets. It gives us a feeling of importance.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Often when we think about addiction, what's interesting is, it's not actually about the thing, the substance or the behavior. It's about that acquisition, and what I notice through working with lawyers myself every day is, I think, a lot of lawyers. I can't say this scientifically, but I think a lot of us

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Annmarie Carvalho: have a dopamine deficit. You often see this in neurodivergent people as well, actually, particularly in people with Adhd, a dopamine deficit, we seek out things which give us a dopamine hit. We're actually very sensitive to dopamine. So our senses we get flooded with a good feeling when we get that hit of meeting our target or having the alcohol or whatever it might be.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and we're flooded with this brilliant feeling. But over time that dopamine hit loses potency. So we keep on striving more and more and more, which is why we see people who find it difficult to leave the profession and go and have their nice game of golf. It has an addictive element to it. We're striving, striving, striving.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So let's think about how we create a more productive model here. And I'm going to mention some things that actually, you might not instinctively relate to toxic productivity. But

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Annmarie Carvalho: I think when we think about this issue, and we think about our wellbeing generally. I want you to think of it as like a stick of rock. So in England, if any of you have ever been to Blackpool. It's renowned for its rock and the writing that runs through it, or the Brighton stick of rock. And I think when we're thinking about how we counteract toxic productivity, we need to think about the whole system which we're working to.

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Annmarie Carvalho: not just targets. So when I work with law firms and legal organizations.

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Annmarie Carvalho: We look at all of the policies we look at. How does our working hours policy? How does our supervision policy? How does what we're saying to clients about our services fit with what we're saying about our wellbeing, because the issue we've had in the Uk is lots of firms come up with these amazing wellbeing policies which actually bore little relation to reality on the ground. So if you have a wellbeing policy.

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Annmarie Carvalho: make sure that it fits with actually what is happening on the ground in terms of working hours.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Don't have a policy that says everybody should take Fridays off, because that's wonderful. If what that means is, everybody on a Thursday is working literally 24 HA day. You don't want to get into that game of sort of whack-a-mole or window dressing and pretending. You know, everything's wonderful and actually creating problems elsewhere. As I mentioned earlier methods of supervision is also something that's really important

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Annmarie Carvalho: in relation to toxic productivity, and the absence of proper supervision is almost as bad as a really toxic supervisor

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Annmarie Carvalho: and

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Annmarie Carvalho: other kind of variations on the sort of whack-a-mole game that I mentioned earlier is a lot of organizations have tried to bring in fixed fee work, which I think is is quite a positive development, and but it doesn't take away the problem completely, does it? Because

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Annmarie Carvalho: reports that I've had from some lawyers is they will have brought in a fixed fee system. But actually, some clients are still saying, Well, I still want the time narrative. I still want to see how much time has been spent on my work. So then the lawyer is there, only charging the fixed fee, but having to sort of justify the existence and still working to time narratives or the firm might still be using and time narratives as a way of

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Annmarie Carvalho: measuring performance against certain objectives. So it can feel like the worst of of all worlds. So obviously, it's quite a good idea to try and identify different metrics like non-chargeable time. But it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be linked to progress.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So one way of doing this is actually something that I want to depict in this slide here now. So this is just an exercise that I'm going to offer you, which is one that I often do with my clients, which is about trying to extricate, that

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Annmarie Carvalho: those measures of worth trying to extricate them from external achievements. So what we will often do in a session is.

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Annmarie Carvalho: think about a difficult situation at work, and then, rather than focusing on the outcomes, or whether I met my target or not, thinking about what values, what principles, what positive character traits did you demonstrate in dealing with this difficult situation? And they're usually kind of unglamorous character traits, patience, resilience, tenacity, integrity, all of those things.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and thinking for yourself, and writing down. How might things have been had you not demonstrated such skills. Had you not been able to to demonstrate these kind of quite unglamorous skills, because what we're trying to do in having in deploying these sorts of exercises and in deploying these, this sort of exercise that I'm showing on this slide here

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Annmarie Carvalho: is focusing on the process rather than the outcomes focusing on your own principles, your own integrity, the way you are conducting yourself and developing those as a new metric for success, rather than always being tied to externals and targets and what other people think of you. So whenever I work with people who operate in a supervisory role in a law.

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Annmarie Carvalho: what we start to do is within their appraisal system. Try to work in some questions that are centered on these sorts of character traits and asking people about skills building. How have you dealt with a difficult situation? What traits did you show? Divorce it from the outcomes? Just focus on those character building aspects because we're trying to get away from this hamster on a wheel approach.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So, as I say, there were just some tips in this slide about

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Annmarie Carvalho: good ideas for for conducting appraisals and giving feedback, and really just aiming to have those kind of ongoing conversations with with team members.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Those are just some pointers in there. I'm not going to kind of dwell on too much, but they're useful pointers for appraisals, and, as I say, we are trying to focus on the process rather than the outcomes.

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Annmarie Carvalho: There are other things that seniors can do if you're watching this, and you're in a leadership role in your organization. And of course you're not going to stand there comparing members of the team, saying, Oh, your drafting is not up to par. Why don't you go and speak to Freddie? He's great at drafting. Try to avoid that kind of thing. It's not helpful

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Annmarie Carvalho: role modeling to the extent that you feel able and talk about the tensions within the system.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Talk about the difficulties that you've experienced and how you got through situations that's always really useful.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And standing still once in a while. This is something I feel quite strongly about. We work in a profession where we are taught to constantly strive. This year's budget should exceed last year's budget. We're constantly in a state of growth, always growing, always growing. If you're in a leadership position, it's quite a radical act, I would say to actually, once in a while. Say, we're not going to increase

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Annmarie Carvalho: our target this year. We need a calm year. We need to consolidate. Let's just stand still and consolidate what we've done rather than striving, striving, striving, growing, growing. I think that's quite a radical act, and I applaud it whenever I see it. So

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Annmarie Carvalho: that's something to think about

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Annmarie Carvalho: external metrics as well or sorry alternative metrics. And again, if you're watching this and you are in a position of leadership within a firm or an organization. These are some alternative metrics that I think are useful to think about when you're grading people. If you have to grade people, and you know, to try and start sort of extricating it from

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Annmarie Carvalho: targets and start to make it a little bit more of a holistic approach. So client interview scoring. What do the clients think of this person? How much work does this person bring in? What are the reviews like from other members of the organization or firm about the experience of working with them. How good are they at providing cross-selling opportunities for different departments.

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Annmarie Carvalho: mentoring committees, pro bono work, all of those sorts of things are great metrics to to start thinking about and incorporating.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And, as I say, this picture of this mole here quite creepy. But there is a big problem. We are certainly experiencing it in the Uk, where a big issue around whack-a-mole. So lots of organizations saying, Okay, we're going to do this thing. We're going to champion, as I said, not working on Friday, or only working as

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Annmarie Carvalho: a number of hours a week, or we're going to enforce a strict no working on holiday policy, and they're all, you know, very well intentioned. But then a problem pops up somewhere else. So we have to think about things

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Annmarie Carvalho: holistically and like I said earlier, one of the biggest and one of the best approaches I think there is to this is having someone like me or somebody else come in, have sessions, go through the policies, look at how all of the policies fit together.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and then ask, people have a team session where everyone gets together. And you say I'm quite a fan of the traffic light system. What I mean by that is, we look at each section of a supervision policy or at working hours policy. And we say, you know, this policy says we should be turning off our computers at 6 30 pm. To what extent are we abiding by that

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Annmarie Carvalho: green? If we're yes, we've absolutely got that covered. That's absolutely what we're doing, Red, if we're failing miserably, Amber, if we're somewhere in the middle. Let's grade how we're doing against this traffic light system for all these metrics. And then look at bringing in more realistic policies, you know, because there's nothing more demoralizing than having a policy which bears little relation to reality.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So we want to make those policies live and breathe. And and that's a very effective way of doing that.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Many of you will have heard about psychological safety as well. And obviously, if you are working in an environment where you don't feel psychologically safe as in. You don't feel safe to make a mistake. You feel nervous about leaving the office at the end of the day, because you think you'll be criticised, then you can't do your best work, and I often speak to supervisors who will say.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Oh, well, this junior is just not living up to their promise. You know they keep making silly mistakes. I asked them a question, and they can't provide me with an answer, and I sometimes say to them, well, it could be that that Junior is not up to the job, or it could be that they are in such a state of fear, and the environment doesn't feel safe, that they are simply not able to function. Their new brain, that

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Annmarie Carvalho: you know the logical, analytical part of their brain is shut down and they are racked with fear and in their old brain. So we need to think about ways to create a safer environment. If people are going to be able to flourish and not get into toxic productivity where that feels like their only measure of worth. So there have been some interesting studies in the Uk around what helps people to feel psychologically safe.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And it is this sense of some degree of autonomy, some degree of belonging and a sense of growing competence. So just to kind of mention a couple of these, I think it's very effective to institute surveys. Well-being surveys a great way to harness lawyers.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Propensity towards competitive behaviour is to say to each team in your firm, okay, we're going to have a well-being survey. We're going to see how we're doing in terms of staff happiness.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And year on year we're going to see how we're doing. And each year the team that's improved the most is going to get a prize. So something like that, I think, is quite

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Annmarie Carvalho: effective and really supervising in a more precise way, a more engaged way, a more ongoing way, and being very clear with people, do not avoid difficult conversations with people. There's lots of evidence to show, and I feel very passionately about this, that actually, in order to improve people's self-esteem and to avoid them getting into these kind of toxic behaviors.

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Annmarie Carvalho: you don't improve people's self-esteem by avoiding difficult conversations. You make them feel more unsafe because they start to pick up on. Oh, I'm not getting much work here, or something's going on, but no one's talking to me about the subject so actually, curiously, being able to deliver difficult feedback well and constructively and honestly bearing fair witness to a person, as we would call it.

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Annmarie Carvalho: can actually improve their self-esteem because there's a certainty about it, and they feel safe. So we want to have as much certainty as possible certainty in feedback, certainty, in time, expectations, certainty, certainty, certainty.

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Annmarie Carvalho: So our last poll today is about the chargeable time system. So I've given you 5 options here, so number one is the current system. We find ourselves with the chargeable time model as it is. If this is your preference, then choose one number 2 contingency fees. So fees based on outcome.

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Annmarie Carvalho: 3 capped fees so chargeable time system. But a certain level. It's capped. It's it's shut off. You don't go beyond a certain level. Number 4 is a bit controversial, I think all fee, and is charged out at the same rate. So operating on a blended rate system, some clients quite like it. And then number 5, we have fixed fees or values based pricing. So which of these is your preference?

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Annmarie Carvalho: Having listened to everything that I've spoken about today. And which do you gravitate towards? What's your preference?

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Annmarie Carvalho: I'm excited to see what you've gone for, because you've all surprised me so far.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Okay? So 29%. Say, let's stick with the chargeable time model. The most popular by far is fixed fee values based pricing. Yeah. You see, that's what I like as well. So yeah, yeah, I think it fits with what we're talking about in general today, which is psychologically.

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Annmarie Carvalho: it's much better for us, I think, if we can tie our pricing to the value of the product to the client, it just sits better with us as human beings. I think so. That's really interesting. Thank you.

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Annmarie Carvalho: Last section. And then we're gonna have a few minutes for questions. So I'm gonna

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Annmarie Carvalho: skip through this. And I'll just offer you a couple of simple exercises to do in the comfort of your home, which are really aimed at trying to change your circuitry. So if you're someone who's got into this kind of toxic productivity, only attaching your self worth to outcomes and what you're producing, then this, I like this exercise, because it's just a way of counteracting

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Annmarie Carvalho: that. So you can do this in in your own time. But I want you to think about it because it's about becoming a whole person again. So

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Annmarie Carvalho: what 3 words would a friend or family member use to describe you?

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Annmarie Carvalho: What did you do to while the time away when you were a kid. So you know, I was with one of my kids at a park the other week, which is a park. I used to hang around with in when I was a kid, you know, when you're just kind of hanging around doing nothing. And it really reminded me of all those hours that we just used to sort of make stuff up and mess about. And I thought, God, I haven't done that for ages.

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Annmarie Carvalho: and so it's quite useful to ask yourselves these questions. When was the last time you did something for fun not to achieve something. What was it? How did you feel while you were doing it?

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Annmarie Carvalho: Number 4. When was the last time you had a proper belly laugh? And what was it about?

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Annmarie Carvalho: This is an interesting one. What's the bit of a newspaper or magazine that you always turn to first? st What are you naturally most interested in? What gives you joy

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Annmarie Carvalho: and number 6 bit of a morbid one. If you could go anywhere and do anything for your last day on earth, where would you go? And what would you do.

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Annmarie Carvalho: And so I want you to. When the slides are distributed after the session. I just want you to have a go at those questions for yourself.

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Annmarie Carvalho: because it reminds you who you are as a human being, not a human doing.