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w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m J U L Y 2 0 1 7 17 Harvard Business Review said, ". . . the story of overwork is literally a story of diminish- ing returns: keep overworking, and you'll progressively work more stupidly on tasks that are increasingly meaningless." As the famous proverb says, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." And the same thing, mutatis mutandis, applies to Jill. It's a kind of moral bankruptcy. These dire warnings apply to what we think of as traditional legal work — shuf- fling papers around, endlessly drafting fac- tums or contracts or opinions, attending mind-numbing meetings. There's another kind of "work" that isn't exactly work (you can't bill for it) that has good conse- quences, activity that is calming, detoxi- fying, extraordinarily pleasant, enhances physical and mental health and, ironically, also increases our ability to do traditional work well. In July 2016, Michael Shear wrote an article in The New York Times about how then-U.S. president Barack Obama spent his evenings in the White House by himself in his study, doing the traditional work kind of things a president has to do, for sure, but not just those things. Shear emphasized the contemplative nature of Obama's time alone. "Mr. Obama calls himself a 'night guy,'" he wrote, "and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essen- tial as his time in the Oval Office . . ." Sometimes, Shear tells us, after dark, the president read novels. Books, Obama has said, allowed him to slow down and get perspective. His favourite novels include Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. George Shultz was former president Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in the 1980s. He insisted on time for quiet reflec- tion, what came to be known as the "Shultz Hour." He told his secretary to interrupt him only if one of two people called — "my wife or the president." In Michael Lewis' new book, The Undoing Project, about the intellectual relationship between two Israeli psychologists, he quotes one of them as saying, "You waste years by not being able to waste hours." Daniel Levitin of McGill University has writ- ten that daydreaming "is responsible for our moments of greatest creativity and insight, when we're able to solve prob- lems that previously seemed unsolvable." David Leonhardt reviewed these ideas and comments in The New York Times edito- rial pages this past April and urged wide adoption of the Shultz Hour. "Even before smartphones, this country's professional culture had come to venerate freneticism," he said. "How often do you hear somebody humble-brag about how busy they are?" Leonhardt argues that society needs more laziness and time for reflection. "They are the route to meaningful ideas in any almost any realm: personal relationships, academic papers, policy solutions, diplo- matic strategies, new businesses." So, forget this "I'm very busy!" stuff. It's no badge of honour or achievement. Be lazy. Daydream. It's good for you. You'll be happier. And you might also, strangely, be a better lawyer for it. Maybe you can have it both ways. Philip Slayton is working on a new book about freedom in Canada. Because business issues are legal issues. So if you want to get ahead in business, get the degree that gets you there faster. ONE YEAR – PART - TIME – NO THESIS FOR L AWYERS AND NON - LAWYERS }«°>Ü°ÕÌÀÌ°V> GPLLM Global Professional Master of Laws [Get a Master of Laws] ntitled-6 1 2017-06-12 4:19 PM

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