It's Not the Time You Spend but the Result You Produce 11:00 AM Monday November 8, 2010
Pozen began to develop his approach while growing up in working-class Bridgeport, Conn. His dad was a BVD underwear salesman. The younger Pozen held down two jobs while playing basketball and tennis — and graduated first in his class at an innercity high school where, he said, "academics were a low priority." He then made his way through Harvard College and Yale Law School on a combination of scholarships and side jobs. JF: How many days each week do you work on average? I go into the office five days a week, plus I read and write half days on the weekends. In certain professions, there is a false dichotomy between work and play. I feel like I get paid to do many things that I would do anyway — except grade papers. JF: How did that work when your children were still at home? I came home most days at 7 p.m. to have dinner with them, as well as to spend quality time after dinner. Then at 9:30 or 10 p.m., I would go back to work in my home office. JF: On weekends, too? Absolutely. When kids get to junior high, they start to sleep until 11 a.m. or later. So I would work from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. and then have most of the day left to be with my family. My older brother died very young, so I was close to his two sons as well as my daughter and son. Two of the boys were all-state soccer players and played on multiple teams, so I attended a huge number of soccer games. I went regularly to the swim meets of my daughter when she was competing, and also coached Little League baseball as well as a basketball team for younger kids. JF: Did your work obligations ever conflict with your commitments to your children? Yes, there were time conflicts, but I tried to manage them down to the extent possible. For example, I worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when mortgage-backed securities were starting to become big. There was an intergovernmental task force on the subject with staff from the SEC, the Treasury and the Fed. I was asked to head part of the task force, which was supposed to meet from 6:30 to 8:30 several nights each week in order to avoid interference with the normal work of these agencies. But I turned the offer down because I was so committed to having dinner with my children at 7 every evening. When the people in charge heard my reason for turning down the offer, they changed the time of the task-force meetings to end by 6:30.
After the SEC, I worked for a law firm in Washington, D.C., for six years. While many lawyers stayed at the office late, I soon realized that charging clients by the number of hours worked did not make sense for me. In my view, it's not the amount of time you spend on helping a client; it's the result you've produced for your client. After a few years, my clients knew that I was efficient, so I ran an experiment. I sent them a letter explaining that in the future I would be billing them for double the time I actually spent on their work — unless they objected. Not one client objected. Professionals sometimes boast about how many hours they are working at their firms. But hourly billing results in perverse incentives. The longer you take to complete a task, the more you are allowed to bill. The clients should pay you more to accomplish tasks more quickly than others. JF: Don't you ever procrastinate? I've seen quite a few of my co-workers delay getting down to work — at times for long periods. It's not something that I really understand. Perhaps they have a fear of failure, or they are more interested in building their social networks. I don't have any of that because I never had the luxury. The only thing I knew is I didn't want to wind up living back in Bridgeport.