If you are a front line officer, or a civilian with responsibilities in a major incident room environment, then here’s a fact of time management life for you.
Most books don’t take the nature of your work into account.
Most books describe a 9-5 work-life. Most books describe as urgent ‘something to be done quickly’ but rarely, ever, take into account anything that has to be done ‘now’ – and even when it does, it usually means taking a telephone call, dealing with an irate customer and such like – I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book where the interruption takes up six months. That happened to me – taken away from one role to serve in a MIR on an organised crime murder investigation. Of course, not many interruptions are that invasive of your time!
Which is not to say that these books have no value. They have immense value, but you have to take what is written and use your intellect and experience to adapt them to your way of working, which is often based around shift patterns and constant interruptions. I managed to do that, and so can you.
The biggest mental hurdle to overcome when interrupted is the need to address the fact that Plan A just went out of the window.
Plan A had used up mental energy in deciding what to do, when and how to do it, and settling on being able to get to it as and when you expected to start. Then along came the interruption and you not only had consider how to reorganise Plan A, but now you had to apply mental energy to planning the new work, all while Plan A was screaming, “But you promised to do me!” The mental conflict is real.
All added to the organisation’s expectation that all priorities will be prioritised, particularly the special priorities. Doing Plan B because it’s a priority never changes the priority applied to Plan A – or C, D through to Z.
And of course you can apply the organisation’s time management training to the decision making process.
“Oh. That whole module of training must have taken place when I went for a wee.”
No, you didn’t miss it. There wasn’t any.
The fact is that when the interruption comes in, you have to do these things.
Put a tangible marker down to ensure you can get back to what you were doing, as soon as it’s possible to get back to that.
Give as much attention to the ‘new thing’ as is required to organise your thinking about what must be done NOW, what should be done NOW – and what can wait.
As soon as enough space exists to think, stop and organise your thinking about what needs to be done in respect of all of the projects are taking up space in your head.
Organise, regroup, and then start to execute your new plan.
The important things is that you CAN cope, even though, in the moment the interruption arose, you thought you couldn’t. But you MUST have a strategy for dealing with interruptions.
Because you’re in the police. That’s what we do.
Police Time Management 