One of my main criticisms of productivity literature is that the vast majority of it presupposes a Monday to Friday working week, with income related to productivity rather than availability, and an ability to delegate. Which is great for people who don’t, like police officers and staff, work on a rota system that is shift based and spread across weekends, where availability to deal with the unexpected is, er, expected, and in respect of which delegation is by request rather than via authority. (Ever tried demanding CSI come to ‘your’ burglary, first? 😊)
In the same vein, the demands by some ‘thought leaders’ (whatever they are) that everyone be allowed to work from home and have a four-day-week also get my goat. All completely based around their living and thinking in their own workstyle bubble.
Which is why I no longer promote planning weekly quite as passionately as I did when I was a weekday worker in a specialist role! Hypocrite – moi? There is a place for weekly planning for those whose weeks do follow the conventional format, and a hybrid version can still apply to the shift worker who just plans their 10-or-so day week at the beginning/end of a shift pattern, instead of on a Friday or Monday. (Or weekend, if that’s when they prefer.)
But the well-known process developed by consultant David Allen works for everyone, and that is the one I now utilise, and which I cover in my book Police Time Management in brief – in brief because I would advise you to buy Allen’s books Getting Things Done and the associated Workbook (as a means of being led through the process intelligently and quickly), and because I don’t want to be accused of copyright theft!
One of the attractions of this method is that it is based on lists – but if you think that your To-Do List is a practical tool you NEED to read these books to realise what an impractical tool your list is, compared to how incredibly versatile lists CAN be if you use his method.
Just to be clear, I have no commercial or social ties with GTD, I just find it incredibly effective.
One of the greatest benefits of the GTD method is that it tales into account appointments AND ‘things to be done’ and advises the practitioner how to organise both. BUT best of all, it teaches the practitioner how to deal with what police officers and staff deal with all the time – new stuff dumped on them at the drop of a hat. And not only does the GTD System provide a spectacular coping mechanism for dealing with interruptions, it also provides for dealing with the additional work that results from those interruptions. In that regard, this method is unlike any method I have studied.
I just regret that I didn’t find out until I retired.
So if you are suffering from an inability to cope with, manage or deal with all the stuff that comes your way by virtue of the fact you are a front-line staffer whose job IS to deal with everything, my advice is to overcome the reluctance you have to spending a couple of quid and go buy a book that can rescue you from the confusion that policing creates.
My book or David Allen’s* – I want you to be stress-less, so buy whichever suits you best. And then learn to apply it to the point at which you welcome new work because it’s fun to organise it!
Seriously, that’s how I feel about work, now.
(*Currently £6.01 on Amazon…..bargain!)
Police Time Management 