Caroline Mandell

2Hi Pulat. Thanks for having me back.

4Executive function is relevant to everybody because it is how our brains get things done, but it's not more complicated than that. So if we think of any task that we have from getting dressed in the morning to writing a factum going to the Supreme Court of Canada, there is a gap between the task that we have to accomplish and the outcome. And of course, our goal is to get that task done on time and on target, meaning we want it to be a product that we are proud of and that meets other people's expectations. If there's another person on the other end of it that's obvious and everybody intends to do their best work on time, the gap is in how we execute. And executive function is what fills that gap. The reason that you're hearing so much about it if you have teenagers and young adults is because the incidence of ADHD is soaring in that population.

5And so certainly in Ontario, probably in other provinces as well, if you have a kid who's in high school and they have an individual education plan and an IEP, then they take a fantastic course called learning strategies in grades nine and 10. And learning strategies really teaches you how your brain works and how to stop fighting, how your brain works, and to work with it to improve your executive function and to more importantly, being mindful of how your brain gets things done and what gets in the way. And like most things for people with ADHD, the interventions and the accommodations are what I would call a matter of universal design. So the same way that a ramp can help somebody who is in a wheelchair, but also help somebody pushing a stroller, but also help somebody who just finds that sloped entryway easier than using stairs.

6Everything that supports the ADHD brain would also support everybody else who doesn't have ADHD. And I would mention the interesting statistic that people with ADHD are overrepresented in the legal profession. And that's not a surprise because ADHD, it's I think sort of misclassified as a disorder. It's all a matter of context. The hyper focus that comes from ADHD is a superpower. And the creative thinking and the rapidity of thought flow that people with ADHD have is obviously a benefit for lawyers. It's a matter of maximizing the benefits and reducing the challenges. And that's something that I think is true of all of us.

8Absolutely. And it's about going from ideas to results in a sort of big picture way in a matter of professional goals, the thing that's sitting on your desk that's not getting done. And also really just the sort of activities of daily living. So I intend to drop off my dry cleaning. What's the gap when the third week has passed and I am out of clean dress shirts or whatever. So executive function is something that is a cognitive process that governs getting things done in all domains of our lives. It's primarily governed by the prefrontal cortex, but there's a system in the brain that controls executive function. It develops most notably in the early years of life, but this is really important for people to understand. Neuroplasticity is a phenomenon that affects adult brains as much, not as much, but affects adult brains as well as the child and adolescent brain. So it is simply not true that if you have struggled with executive function as an adult that it can't get better. There is a lot that we can do to improve executive function and as we improve executive function, our brain rewires,

10Here's where I have to provide the obvious disclaimer. I am not a physician. I am not a psychologist. I am by no means an expert in the question that you have just posed. I will say from my sort of informed layperson's point of view, alcohol is a depressant. So it is not a stimulant as far as I understand. And so if you are using alcohol, for example, to wind down at the end of the day to slow down your cognitive processes to be able to relax so that you can sleep to be ready for the next day, I don't think anybody would suggest that that's a sustainable or healthy practice for sure. And in terms of caffeine, I mean, I shrugged my shoulders and say, I don't know mean do many of us sort of get a bit of a jolt when we've had a cup of coffee? Sure. But again, all things in moderation, if we're fueling our lives with caffeine, that is going to have an impact. One thing I do know for sure, and I can say with informed layperson's authority is that executive function depends on adequate sleep. So if the choices that you're making are interfering with you getting an adequate number of hours of sleep every night, most nights you are sort of looking at very short-term gains and long-term problems.

12We can do something about it. And I want to be really clear that executive function is certainly to some degree within our own control. And there are things that we can all be doing as individuals. And let's shift to in our professional lives, there are certainly things that we can do to support executive function and we can't do it alone. A lot of what gets in the way of executing tasks and meeting goals are systemic. So to give you a simple example, if you are interrupted constantly throughout your day with teams messages and email that you leave open and it's pinging, and then you have your phone next to you and your text notifications are pinging as well, and you have notifications turned on for news services, wire services and all the rest of it, it's really just no wonder that by the end of what should be a reasonable workday, we haven't actually accomplished what you needed to accomplish. And so you are burning the candle at both ends. And so yes, sometimes that is our own self-directed procrastination. I think more often it is a function of how we've constructed our work days in a way that doesn't support healthy executive function.

14I think that I would make a distinction between the practice of law and the way we are practicing law. So the practice of law is an interesting intellectual exercise. That's why most of us went into it. And we welcome lots of different kinds of professional tasks and we have varied tasks. And one of the reasons that I am really interested in all of this stuff is because I am a writing expert and what do lawyers do all day, more or less, but write, we are professional writers. We write email all day long. We write memos, we write reports, we write articles, we write factums, we write pleadings if we're litigators. And so, I mean, I can't compare it to other professions, but it's certainly true that the output of the practice of law requires a high degree of executive function. Is that different than other kinds of cognitive, non-routine professions?

15Because that's sort of the quadrant that we operate in. Maybe and maybe not. But what I would say is that the way we are practicing law is not always set up to maximize executive function and to reflect the deeply cognitively demanding work that we as lawyers do. And I'll give you another simple example. It is often true now that not all lawyers have their own offices. That's a change. That's sort of a generational change and there's lots of good sound, important reasons for that. There are financial reasons for that. Lots of firms are right now renovating and so they're not in their ordinary spaces, but there should be some recognition that putting people in a hoteling kind of a situation where they don't have a place where they can use their environment to support executive function, they're always someplace different. That's a challenge. And more so co-working spaces. I mean, we are not startups, so co-working spaces are very challenging for executive function because there's constant stimulation, there's visual stimulation, there's of course lots of noise. And so something as simple as having walls that you can tack something up on a bulletin board that helps you remember here's the checklist of things I'm supposed to do when I'm filing a document or whatever it is. We're not allowing people to support their executive function in ways that we know would work for everybody.

17And how did you find the experience?

20You're

22Okay, so a few things. First, to go back to your answer, I'm sorry you had that experience that it shouldn't be like that. I was at a conference this past summer and one of the speakers said something that really stuck with me. He said, law is an adversarial process or litigation is an adversarial process, but that's not to say that the people in it should be adversaries. So that's something to keep in mind. I'm absolutely not suggesting that people should work by themselves with their doors closed all the time. So please don't misunderstand. Colleagues are really important. I'm only suggesting that a sort of co-working space where you have where it's really hard to be able to close the door and focus if that's what's required, is something to be aware of that it has an impact on executive function, not an insurmountable one. Maybe you go and you sit in a boardroom and close the door.

23That's all I'm saying in terms of mistakes, I think we should all give ourselves a big break and not be so hard on ourselves. None of this is our fault. We aren't doing anything wrong. No one really teaches us how our brains work. If we were in another profession that depended on a single body part, we would learn how to use it and we would learn how to protect it and we would learn how to strengthen it. And so this is not a question of mistakes or regrets. And when you know better, you can do better. So what are some things to know about how this all works? The first is that the gap between your goal and your outcome is your system. And this is an idea that I got from James Clear's book Atomic Habits, which I recommend to everybody. It's a really great book and you need a system.

24And what he says is we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. So the first thing I would say to anybody is revisit your system and see if it's working for you. And by the way, Pulat other people are a really important part of that system. There's a wonderful book called The Extended Mind, the thesis of which is there's only so much thinking we can do between our ears. We are not actually wired to think by ourselves and to work by ourselves. When you think about the span of human history, we are social animals and we have always used our environment to help us think. We've always used our bodies to help us think. So it really is true that we do our best thinking, standing or walking, and we use other people's brains. So even if you are a sole practitioner, you need a network of phone of friends to help you out.

25So that's all something to be aware of in terms of people being mean and upsetting you. It's important to recognize that that does have an impact on how you process information. So if you are coming off of a stressful meeting or phone call or hearing or whatever, recognize that you probably aren't ready to sit back down at your desk and do your best work. You're going to need to have some kind of process by which you can deal with that and move on from it. And so as we record this, it's a week out, almost a week out from the Jays losing Game seven of the World Series. But there are so many lessons we can take from this Jay's team, and one of them is that they didn't just talk the talk of flushing a bad game and then moving on the next day.

26They obviously developed systems to actually make that work for them. And so that's not like magic. There are practical things that they must have implemented to do that. So you need a system within that system. You need four things. Number one, you need a process. You need a process for whatever your routine tasks are. You need to know what do I start with? Knowing where to start is really important because it will reduce the overwhelm that we feel that causes us to procrastinate if we know where to start and we know what the next step after that is. It also really helps to relieve a cognitive error called the planning fallacy. And it's a cognitive error is not our fault. It's just how our brains are wired. And the planning fallacy holds that no matter how long something took me the last time, this time it will be different.

27We always forget. And because what we're forgetting is that there were intervening things that interrupted our best laid plans. If you have a process and you break it down into enough steps that it feels like you've made progress every time you turn to it, then that's really going to help you in that regard. You should be thinking about how to break down all of your processes. AI can help you do that. You can ask ChatGPT. Can you break down the steps of writing a research memo? And if it's missing steps, fill them in. There's a really great website that I've recently learned about called Goblin Tools. It's goblin tools and what Goblin tools does. Do you know it? Have you seen it?

29Fantastic. And what you do is you tell it what you want to do. You set

31Granular you want the process to be broken down by and it will make you a checklist. It will also estimate how long the task will take you. Now it's not built by lawyers, so it doesn't know what all of the particular steps of a legal task are, but it's a good starting place. So you need a process after you've developed that process. So there it is and play around with it. It's pretty neat. After you have a process, you also need to think about what's the task set. So this is an idea that I got from Professor David Badre who has written a book about what he calls cognitive control, which for all intents and purposes of this conversation is the same as executive function. A task set is all the things that you need to actually do the task. I'll give you a really simple example.

32I have tried four times maybe in the last two weeks to book flu shots for me and my daughter, but every time I go on the website, I forget that I need to have our OHIP cards to book the appointment. And that's such a pain because I'm like three floors removed from my purse that has our OHIP cards. I'm just not bringing the task set. And every time I go to do it, I forget that that was something I needed would be helpful to have a checklist, very simple example, but hopefully relatable. Then you need to actually have the time to get the task done. And it doesn't have to be one concentrated block of time. And I fully understand that in practice it's very hard to carve out a stretch of hours for what I would call deep work. And that's a term from Cal Newport who wrote a book called Deep Work.

33But that's not to say that you can't carve out 75 minutes first thing in the morning. You're more likely to get that unpleasant hard task done first thing in the morning than you are if you sort of open your inbox and just play ping pong with your messages all day. And then the final piece of this, and I think this is what people struggle with a lot these days, is that even if you've carved out the time, and even if you have your process and your task set, you need to focus your attention and our attention is pulled in so many directions. I have bad news for you, Pulat. Do you consider yourself a good multitasker

35Okay, newsflash, multitasking is not a neurobiological thing. It's just not a thing. What we think of as multitasking is actually task switching. And so when we switch our attention from one task to another without having completed that first task, what happens is a phenomenon that Professor Sophie Leroy has really aptly described as attention residue. Some part of our brains are stuck on the task that we switched from. And when we turn our attention to the task that we've switched to, our performance on that task will suffer and our performance on the task that we switch back to after that will also suffer. So it's this irony that, and I sort of think back to what about the practice of law as we've constructed our working lives now might be counterproductive. The idea that we always have to read the email the second it comes in, and that we usually have to respond to it right away in the service of good customer experience, maybe not always because what it means is that we are performing less well on the task that we were working on. That was presumably important to switch our attention. Now if you've got a deal going down, of course there are contexts specific considerations to how responsive you are, but I am not sure that we're doing ourselves a favor by setting the default as constantly available and immediately responsive.

37So you're not multitasking, you shifted your attention, which is fine, but just notice that you did that.

40Right, right. Well, so the experience that you're describing when you're writing a factum is what cognitive psychologists call flow and it feels wonderful, right? It's pleasurable to get into that flow state. What you're describing when you're doing all the little things, you're quite right. Task switching is exhausting. I'm going to give you a couple of practical tips. Would that be good?

42Okay, so first I'm going to suggest that you don't check social media on your work computer. It's helpful to have different devices and different locations for different things. So for example, I don't have social media on my work desktop, and I'm not saying that to virtue signal. I'm saying it because I learned that it's a time suck, and so I don't actually have the passwords saved on my desktop. I don't know what they are. So it's like I literally can't do it if I wanted to. That's number one. Number two, our brains have two modes. We have attention mode when we're actively paying attention to something and we have default mode when our brain is wandering and our brains sort of naturally toggle between these two modes. When we get tired or bored of something, we wander off into default mode. And that's not a bad thing because a lot of our creative thinking happens in default mode.

43So when your mind is wandering, that's why many of us do some of our best thinking in the shower, right? Because there's no distractions. The problem with using social media and news sites and email and all of those other things as a sort of mental break is that it still requires our brain to be in attention mode. It's just a more pleasurable form of attention mode. And so your brain is still going to need the break after it. The other thing to be really mindful of with social media is of course we know this. The algorithms are designed to upset us. That's what makes us stay on the sites. And so when it's not just that we end up spending way more time scrolling than we meant to, it's that we are activated, we get upset, we get aroused, our nervous systems are aroused. So it might be because it's very pleasurable and we're just scrolling video of Ernie Clement guilty as charged, or it can be we're despairing about the state of the world. Either way, it's impairing executive function because that emotional arousal is going to affect how we can pay attention and how we can process information. So Pulat, what should you do instead? Any thoughts? What do you think might be the better thing to do?

45Yes, that's the answer. That is the answer. So the studies are consistent, that fresh air is really important

46And walking is really helpful. And so the suggestion is not go take a 20 minute walk every time you need a break, but if you got up and stretched your legs and just walked around the block, you would be much better off. So I mean, this is why I joke that all judges at the time of their appointment should also get a dog because it's really helpful to be able to think through the thing that you're working on. The best thinking that we can do is on our feet. And if maybe walking around a big city block in downtown Toronto is not feasible, it would take too much time or it's cold or whatever, go get a cup of tea. Just something that interrupts what you've been working on, pulls you away from a screen and is physical. So part of the ritual, I had a colleague who would make nine cups of tea during the day, and it wasn't about the tea, it was about the ritual of the walk to steep the tea and to come back. He was ready to resume doing the cognitively demanding thing he was working on.

48For sure. But make sure you're drinking decaf at a certain point in your day. Well,

50Another book that I have found extremely helpful is Mindset by Professor Carol Dweck. This is an important insight for those of us who are X and millennial. It used to be that we thought that the adult brain was sort of fixed in place. It also used to be that we thought that skill and ability and talent were innate. And what we've learned because of what we now know about neuroplasticity, is that none of those things are true. Talent, ability and skill and intelligence are all things that can change, that we can work on. And that if we have a fixed mindset, I'm just good at this or I'm not good at this, we will achieve less than if we say, I'm not good at this yet, the word yet is transformative. And that's the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And so the story of, for example, and she talks about this in the book, Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team.

51A fixed mindset hears that story and it's about how stupid the coach was. A growth mindset hears that story, and it's about how resilient and tough and hardworking Michael Jordan was. That's the better message. I do think that some people are naturally better at figuring these things out than others. Part of the reason I became really interested in executive function is because I took these skills for granted, because they're a strength of mine. And when I had a child who really struggled, I sort of took myself to school to understand what was going on in her brain so that I could better support her. That said, I really think a lot of this is situational, and I'm very tired of all of the books. There's sort of a cottage industry of productivity, books and podcasts and TikTok accounts that have grown up around all of these ideas of productivity.

52And they are disproportionately men, and I would very much like to talk to their spouses. So if you have nothing else to do in your life, but work, yes, you are going to be better at this than somebody who is rushing home to care for a sick child or caring for an elderly parent, or is themselves experiencing some kind of personal stressor, which we all are at some point if we're doing it right, because who are we? But the connections that we have with other people. And so again, I don't want us to be too hard on ourselves. I want us to recognize what is within our control and what is not within our control, and to adjust accordingly. And when you're going through a stressful period of your life, you might not be as productive as a different time in your life when you are untethered and freer to do the things that some of these gentlemen suggest that we do. One of them, the advice is set your default to no. And that's just the most infuriating advice. Who has the luxury of setting their default to no if they have other people relying on them? So let's be realistic.

54You can reach out? My email is on my website, which is Mandell Coaching, M-A-N-D-E-L-L coaching.com. Pulat, I appreciate the opportunity. I really think that we should not despair. We should not feel alone. And there is help out there. And in my coaching practice, I work with judges, I work with adjudicators and arbitrators, I work with lawyers, I work with non-lawyers. And what I am there to do is to support people doing their best work, understanding what the legal content of that work is because I am a generalist coming from my years at the Court of Appeal. I'm a lawyer, I understand how to think through legal problems. I understand what are the steps that you need to do. But I also understand that of course, everybody intends to be clear and concise and persuasive. What can they do as part of their system to support that outcome?

56Thanks. Really great to see you.