Four things at once: why the first year feels impossible

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

A candidate attorney’s day looks something like this. A partner needs the discovery bundle indexed by lunchtime, and has said so twice. A client has telephoned about the transfer that was supposed to register last week and wants to know why it has not. An associate wants the case law on a point that came up in consultation an hour ago. The court file needs a practice note by close of business. A senior has asked, in passing, on the stairs, whether you have “looked at that thing yet”, without saying which thing. And your own matter, the small one you were trusted with, has a deadline on Friday that nobody else is watching.

Six live items. You are expected to hold all of them, in order, with their facts and their people and their risks, and to switch between them the moment someone appears at the door. Nobody has told you that the equipment you are doing this with was never built for it. A candidate attorney, whom we will call Sipho, described his first three months as “waiting to find out which thing I had forgotten today”. He was not careless. He was doing exactly what the job asked of him, with a mind that cannot do it.

It is worth saying at the outset that this does not stop at the end of the first year. The associate is holding twelve matters instead of six. The partner is holding forty, plus the practice group’s fee target, plus the two juniors who are struggling, plus the client who is thinking of leaving. The head of legal is holding every contract in the business and a board that wants a view on all of them by Thursday. The mechanism described here applies to all of them, and the senior practitioners who appear to manage it effortlessly are, almost without exception, the ones who learnt early to stop relying on their memory. The first year is simply where the lesson is cheapest to learn.

The limit that nobody mentions

Working memory is the part of the mind that holds information while you are using it: the name of the person on the phone, the point you were about to make, the reason you walked into the file room. It is the workspace in which all thinking is done. Research over the past two decades puts its capacity at around four items at a time for most adults. In a widely cited review, Cowan (2001) examined the evidence from many different kinds of task and concluded that the true limit, once the tricks of grouping and rehearsal are stripped away, is about four. Four. Not six, and certainly not six complex matters each with its own history, its own personalities and its own way of going wrong.

When you ask working memory to hold more than it can, it does not politely refuse. It drops things silently, and you find out later, when the client telephones for the second time, or the senior on the stairs asks again about the thing you had “looked at” and you cannot now recall what it was. The feeling this produces is familiar to every first-year: a low hum of dread that something has been forgotten, without knowing what. The dread is accurate. Something has been forgotten. This is a capacity problem rather than a character problem, and it was built into the job before you arrived at it.

The first tool: offloading

The response the brain needs is to stop holding and start storing. Every live item goes onto paper, in one place, with the next action and the date on which it will happen. This is not because a list is a management technique, though it is one. It is because the moment an item is written down somewhere the brain trusts, the brain can release it, and the working memory it was occupying comes back for the work in front of you. Candidate attorneys who begin keeping a running list often describe the effect as physical. Sipho put it simply: “the hum stopped”. The partner with forty matters keeps the same list, longer, for the same reason, and the partner who does not keep one is the partner whose juniors quietly keep it for him.

Three rules make it work. The list is one list, in one place, kept on the desk where the eye falls on it. It is written, by hand, at least at first, because typing into a system the brain does not yet trust does not produce the release; the brain keeps a copy just in case. And it is reviewed at two fixed points in the day, first thing in the morning and before leaving at night, because a list you do not look at is simply another thing to worry about, and the brain knows the difference.

The second tool: single-tasking on purpose

The other drain on the four slots is switching. Every time you move from the bundle to the case law to the telephone call, the brain has to unload one context and load another, and this is neither free nor instant. Gloria Mark and colleagues (2008), studying office workers, found that interrupted work was completed in less overall time but at a measurable cost: people worked faster to compensate, and reported significantly more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. Other work in the same field has found that regaining full concentration after an interruption can take well over twenty minutes. Each switch also leaves residue from the previous task in the slots, so that part of your working memory is still on the transfer while you are trying to read the case law, and the case law is read badly.

Where the day allows it, group the work. All the telephone calls together, in one block. An uninterrupted hour on the bundle with email closed and the door, if there is one, pulled to. Where the day does not allow it, which in a first year is often, at least notice the switch and write down, in one line, where you were before you leave a task. “Bundle: indexed to item 34, next is the correspondence file.” The return then costs a minute rather than ten, and the slots come back cleaner.

For those further up, the same tool has a second use. A partner who understands what a switch costs a junior stops asking “have you looked at that thing yet?” on the stairs and starts putting the request in writing, with the thing named and the date it is needed. It takes thirty seconds and saves the junior an hour of dread and a dropped item. The best seniors do this without thinking. The rest can learn it.

What this does not do

None of this makes the six items fewer. The bundle still has to be indexed, the client still has to be called, and Friday still arrives. What it does is hold the six items somewhere other than the four slots you need for thinking, which is the only place a candidate attorney’s value is actually produced. The junior who is remembered from the first year is rarely the one who held the most in her head. It is the one who never dropped anything, and she never dropped anything because she never tried to hold it.

PMRI’s Ultimate Time Management Course for Legal Professionals builds the running list, the two daily reviews and the grouping of work into a full structure shaped around a legal diary, and the High-Performance Productivity for Legal Professionals webinar covers the same ground in a single recorded session. Both are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, who remembers her own first year clearly enough. Candidate attorneys who want a single session to start with will find the High-Performance Productivity webinar the right one, and firms that want to give their whole intake this material at once can look at training for law firms, shaped around a morning, a full day or two days at the firm as the intake requires.