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 like this. A partner needs the discovery bundle indexed by lunchtime. A client has telephoned about the transfer that was supposed to register last week. An associate wants the case law on a point that came up in consultation. The court file needs a practice note by close of business. A senior has asked, in passing, whether you have “looked at that thing yet”. And your own matter, the one you were trusted with, has a deadline on Friday.

Six live items. You are expected to hold all of them, in order, with their facts and their people and their risks, and switch between them on demand. Nobody has told you that the equipment you are doing this with was never built for it.

The limit that nobody mentions

Working memory is the part of the mind that holds information while you use it. Research over the past two decades puts its capacity at around four items at a time for most adults. Four. Not six, and certainly not six complex matters each with its own history. When you ask it to hold more, it does not politely refuse. It drops things silently, and you find out later, when the client telephones again or the senior asks about the thing you had “looked at” and cannot now recall.

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. It is a capacity problem, and it was built into the job before you arrived.

The 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. Not because the list is a management technique, but because the moment an item is written down the brain can release it, and the working memory it was occupying comes back for the work in front of you. Candidate attorneys who keep a running list often describe the effect as physical: the hum stops.

Three rules make it work. The list is one list, in one place, kept on the desk. It is written, because typing into a system the brain does not trust does not produce the release. And it is reviewed at two fixed points in the day, first thing and before leaving, because a list you do not look at is just another thing to worry about.

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, which costs several minutes each time and leaves residue from the previous task in the slots. Where the day allows it, group the work: all the telephone calls together, an uninterrupted hour on the bundle with the email closed. Where the day does not allow it, which is often, at least notice the switch and write down where you were before you leave a task, so that the return costs less.

None of this makes the six items fewer. It makes them held somewhere other than the four slots you need for thinking, which is the only place a candidate attorney’s value is actually produced.