Time can work against a lawyer's capability to maintain productive professional and personal lives. Many lawyers and law students experience time differently than most people do. For those in the legal profession, time is compressed, intense, valued for its capacity to produce, linked inextricably to money or research, and defined by deadlines. This is the experience of time that most of us have most of the time. This way of experiencing time has an important, useful place in our lives.
Time is oriented toward the future.
This includes court dates, deadlines, responding to faxes, billable hours, and so forth. The pressure exerted by the press of time, under the best circumstances, can be an additional boost to productivity and a challenge to creativity. This experience of time can have its down side. In this experience of time, one is more conscious of what needs to be accomplished than what one is experiencing at any given moment. Here, time is too scarce and the tasks too demanding.