The Nobel Prize-winning, little known author Winston Churchill wrote something in his memoirs that made me think he knew policing better than one might think. In a chapter about his time at Bangalore in the late 19th Century, he wrote of how he spent five hours a day ‘catching up’ on the reading that he’d never done at Harrow. He considered this to be the time when he was finally educated, studying some serious works. He addressed further education and suggested that a better way to make rounded people would be to ‘force’ 16-year-olds into a period of manual work and service, allied to well-considered leisure time involving ‘songs, dancing, drinking, drill and gymnastics’. And he wrote,
“Life must be nailed to a cross of Thought or Action.”
Bear with me. It made me think about how the policing career tends to work.
When new officers begin their careers, hey tend to do the Action work. They answer calls, deal with emergencies, and without wishing in any way to seem to demean front line staff, anything that is considered complicated gets passed on. And it gets passed on to the people who are further up the continuum from the Action ‘end’ and towards the ‘Thinking’ end. It certainly seems to match my career.
I was in uniform for 15 years, doing a lot of action-ing. Then I moved up the continuum to CID, and finally further up to specialisation in Fraud. Others moved up the promotion ladder, further away from action and much, much nearer to thinking. Of course, there are those who want to stay at the pointy end – good for them, I know I miss it (a bit). There are those who rush towards the thinking end – nothing wrong with that (as long as they don’t forget what it’s like at the pointy end). Most drift from one end towards the other. Some unfortunates go back and forth!
Anyway, something occurred to me that relates to my promotion of time management training.
The change of emphasis from action to ‘time for thinking’ means that the approach to time management must change. I cannot see how it can’t change. The manner and nature of the work itself changes, so the way it has to be managed must change, too.
And guess what? People untrained in any time management theory at all must still self-teach themselves how to change their behaviours to address their change in circumstances.
To my mind – and I acknowledge this to be a huge generalisation – the main change in the approach to self-management must be a transfer from the To-Do List to the Appointment Focus. You go from Action (and keeping a never-ending lost of things to do when not engaged in Action) to Thinking – making appointments, and having time to plan your work because you won’t be subject to a 999 call.
Which is quite a change in approach. But while a To Do List might work reasonably well for an appointment-oriented individual, the reverse won’t. Constant interruptions mean that even thinking about ‘work by appointment’ as a primary focus would be self-destructive. Cue Stress.
And yet – in my experience, only the Thinkers get any time management input. Around about Chief Inspector level.
The Action People don’t even have input on a better way to manage their To Do Lists, let alone the rest of their constantly interrupted time.
And the Action People are the ones with the more varied workload.
Life isn’t fair, is it?
Police Time Management 