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On Yesterday’s Theme – The Mental Approach to Challenges

“There are no problems, only projects.” David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

At the moment, that is one of my personal guidelines, if the not THE most important one. I use it because it massively reduces my stress levels when things come up which I care about, but aren’t really my problem.

I am apparent of four adult children, and grandfather to five infants. And like any such ‘ancestor’, I still care about their problems. Even the ones which really shouldn’t be my concern.

For example, one child recently bought a car. Every squeak and clunk is now a potential minefield, and I’m worrying about it more than they are.

Another paid for a delivery, in cash to the driver, and then the delivery company sent him a bill to pay that fee again. Made ME angry.

Quite the stress magnet, that situation. Feeling responsible for things that are in my Circle of Concern and potentially, but not rightfully, in my Circle of Influence.

All that on top of my own challenges.

But applying the ‘there are no problems, only projects’ approach takes the sting out of such challenges. A project is nothing more than an anticipated outcome to which a varied number of planned steps can be taken – you just need to know what they are.

Or to be more precise, you only need to know what the first step is. Once you know that and then act upon it, the next step manifests itself and off you go towards a solution.

And the ‘stress’ element of the challenge dissipates.

Try that approach.

It really works.

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Busy Does NOT Necessarily Mean Stressed. A Suggestion.

“Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.” Stephen Covey

Do you know someone who seems totally unfazed by any deluge of challenges, while you go nuts when one new task is asked of you by management or the CPS?

The input is the same. The demands upon the individual’s time are potentially the same. So how come it’s like water off a duck’s back to some, and an excuse for ‘stress-induced depression’ for others.

Their approach – or, more accurately, their pre-planning.

‘How can you plan for what hasn’t happened, yet?’ I hear you ask.

By having a system for dealing with it, I reply.

Years ago, I was blessed with a boss who knew what I learned a lot later. When input comes at you at light speed, catch it, stop it, write it down and deal with it at your speed. I swear on one evening shift about five or six jobs landed on our Divisional CID team of four plus this DS. Cue ‘WTF’ from four of us; but cue some careful, proactive decision-making on his. He made notes of what was to be dealt with, considered each in turn in terms of what might be required and which took priority, and then in partnership with us he delegated and instructed and motivated us all within a short space of time – and his lack of dismay gave us the opportunity to catch up with how deliberate and considered he was. And we coped.

Funny thing is, in the main we always cope with what comes at us – it’s just the initial rush of ‘stuff’ that we let cause our stress. Yes, I did use the expression ‘let cause’ because you can decide to NOT be stressed. Stress is often a default state based on the fact that we are constantly being told we are stressed.

For example: anyone over the age of 50 reading this will recall no occasion whatsoever when they were exam-stressed in school, because it hadn’t been invented, yet. Now every pupil is being excused exams because they are potentially stressed. Bless.

I’m not saying you aren’t busy – that is a consequence of the job. But being stressed is NOT an automatic by-product because someone says it should be. It need not be, and you can decide, now, not to be stressed. And you can serve that new approach by deciding how you are going to cope with all new input.

By writing it down and dealing with it calmly and appropriately, with the requisite attention and speed. Your speed. And the more you exercise that proactive approach to new input the better you will get at dealing with it, and the less busy you will feel.

I cannot emphasise enough how good input on time management – the physical and philosophical approaches to managing your workload – can reduce the feelings you experience about being busy.

I guarantee that David Walliams, comedian, raconteur, author, actor, judge and exponent of multiple other activities, is busier than you. His output suggests he’s on duty 24/7.

Are you not at least as good as him?

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Are You A Leader? Or Just A Manager?

“Management works IN the system; leadership works ON the system.” Stephen Covey

I alluded, yesterday, to the old adage utilised by many blind adherents to the status quo; “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” Such managers are following the old ways without thought, and are demanding that you do the same. Even when it is patently ineffective, or creates more work than is necessary. Work that stops you doing what is necessary, even essential.

I’m convinced that many of the stresses we endure are the creation of the bean-counters’ demand for numbers that serve little purpose, or the fear felt by those in power that they would be told off if that number wasn’t available. Or in the case of the CPS, that a failure to get an irrelevant piece of evidence might threaten their cosy conviction record so, safe in the knowledge that they can blame YOU if the trial date is pushed back because of their excessive demands, and that they don’t have to actually do the work, they create tasks for you.

Saying, “Get a statement off Fred Bloggs” is all well and good, but Fred might not be available, contactable, or willing. And if he is, his availability needs to match yours. And if he’s a vulnerable or significant witness, arranging a video interview could take weeks. But all the lawyer wrote was ‘Get a statement’, and her work was done. Now the delay is your fault.

(Write down the date the request was received, any observations you have on the need for it, and what you did to comply. Then, if the CPS slag you off, leak it to the Judge. But don’t tell them I said.)

Meanwhile, your less proactive managers, also scared of being criticised, meekly accept these demands and say, with a resigned sigh, “You have to do it.” Instead of creating a working party to look at the problem and either refuse to do it without a Court Order, or find a better way.

And while sighing, they pride themselves on calling themselves ‘leaders’. (I notice that senior management started calling itself Senior Leadership years ago, while still only managing.)

Leaders don’t blindly follow. They question, they research, they seek out the better way and they diligently and obstinately argue their case.

And there is nothing in that sentence that requires anyone doing those things to be in a supervisory role. Nothing.

Leadership, says Covey, is a choice, not a position.

The number of leaders I knew in the job who were ‘only’ first-level supervisors still impresses me to this day. They were the ones that led me to better things, who questioned instructions with wisdom and not stubbornness, and who created new and better ways of doing things. Some went further up the greasy pole: unfortunately, some started to follow the party line, but others maintained their leadership nous and made things better for everyone.

You can be a leader from right where you are. Question things, find out the reasons behind some protocols and practices and see, first, if what you are doing even complies with those motives. Then, if what you are doing doesn’t address the motives, point it out. If they do, then you can explore a better way that still complies with the intent, but is more streamlined.

People who follow without thought are never leaders. Even if that’s what their ego demands they call themselves.

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Take Time to Save Time: Know Your Work Better Than ‘Them’.

“It is not only a matter of when to do things, but whether or not to do them at all.”      Stephen Covey

Frustration, for me, happened most often when I was required to do a task that all my knowledge and training told me wasn’t even necessary. An example?

In the Major Incident Room, the practice is/was to list all documents submitted to that room. “Of course,” I hear you say. “That is the rule.”

No it isn’t.

The laws and codes of practice relating to disclosure required only the retention, recording and revelation of relevant material. “But it’s all relevant,” the uninformed may respond.

No it isn’t.

Understandably, even considerately, every time someone submitted a statement (relevant), they would also submit their leave plans for the next six months, on an MG10 form.

Notwithstanding that I couldn’t see how when anyone went on holiday would ever be relevant, until we actually arrested someone for the murder it was going to be a useless piece of paper within 6 months – long before the average murder trial.

But we were ‘required’ by the uninformed the spend a few minutes recording, assessing and filing these useless documents onto the HOLMES System ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’.

That may seem a minor matter but it is the first example that came to mind.

To be frank, opinion may differ on taking hearsay statements from 12 people who all heard someone say something in meeting, knowing that they are all inadmissible as evidence. One or two I can see a need for e.g. early complain confirmation; asking the others if they heard anything different I can understand. But 12 hours (plus travelling) to take 12 inadmissible statements? Don’t get me started.

But…..

If you are like me and you wish to argue for better task management by the powers that be, you MUST know the system, laws, practices and supporting principles well enough to argue your case for an alternative. You can’t just moan. Moaning implies you just don’t want to do it but you aren’t willing to justify a better way.

One good way of identifying great ways of saving time requires taking time to know the system well enough to promote change.

Every system change is a direct result of someone identifying a better way and convincing policy makers to adapt their thinking so as to make your (and everyone else’s) job easier to do well.

You can be ‘busy’ by digging holes and filling them in again, but if you’re going to be productive you ought to ask why you’re digging them in the first place. And if the answer is, “That’s they way we’ve always done it,” find a way of finding better leaders to follow.

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The Truly Great Teams Have Independent Members. Not Clones.

“Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make.” Stephen Covey

We all work in teams. Whether the team dynamic is flat (where everyone has the same level of authority, responsibility and accountability) or if it is hierarchical (with clear supervisory levels recognised by all involved), each party has a role to play within the team that affects its success. If one or more team members fail to perform, the success level is commensurate with that person’s or persons’ weaknesses. Fact.

Routinely, such weaknesses are initially ironed out during a training/mentorship phase, but this is usually (though not solely) focused on technical skills. But there is at least one other ‘skill’ that needs attention during the mentorship phase, and that is attitudinal.

As Covey puts it, the three elements of any habit are the what/why to do, the how to do, and the want to do. The first is often self-evident – the team knows why it has to do what it is doing. The second is the technical element, and the third is attitudinal.

That factor is really helped by acknowledging that the individual has to independently realise (through role-modelling and the adoption of appropriate values) that their attitude affects performance; the team’s, and their own.

You can’t have someone else’s great attitude for them.

That is the key to Covey’s statement, as outlined at the top of the page. Once the individual recognises, accepts, is trained for and wants to contribute – which requires independence.

Dependence is what the newbie has when they arrive. They have to be taught, shown and tempered on the how tos of their role in the team. That way they become able to work with less and less supervision, but that supervision must remain if their attitude isn’t appropriate. If they don’t want to perform, they have to be forced to do so, and this requires micro-management – which is never desirable and wastes a lot of otherwise productive time on the part of that mentor.

But once the individual is truly independent, they can be relied upon to perform, and to contribute much more effectively.

Most organisations have a structure for training which is based around this idea, but I wonder how many do it in a truly conscious fashion?

Or – get this – how many organisations TEACH the idea of dependence becoming independence, and how that independence creates inter-dependence, where the team gels and performs almost without conscious thought?

Many years ago, I was a proud member of a shift which was truly interdependent. If something happened, we just moved as a team towards dealing with it. Everyone knew their part and what they could contribute. On one occasion, on hearing us do that on a 999 call, the Control Room Inspector had to tell our (new) sergeant to leave us alone to get on with it! On another occasion a different sergeant, on hearing our team ‘get on with it’, asked politely over the air if he could have a say in what we were doing.

A truly great team contains a group of people all moving towards a common goal, using their own strengths towards the greater, interdependent good.

But it all starts with becoming independent, and having the want-to attitude.

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Time Management Can Save Your Career.

“Time management is really a misnomer. The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.” Stephen Covey

Every time management course, these days, opens with the reminder that ‘you can’t manage time’. We know this to be true – you can’t take this 5 minutes and put it over there – all you can do is utilise time to the maximum …… with a caveat.

A later time management expression is ‘attention management’. This could be defined as making plans so that you can maximise the attention being given to any task at the time in which you are doing it. It means avoiding distractions such as social media, the ping of constant email deliveries into your in-box, the television in the background, or Popmaster on Greatest Hits Radio now that the BBC stupidly disposed of it.

And a subset of that definition is that of Appropriateness.

The original time management writers often accidentally implied that if you weren’t ‘doing something’ then you weren’t being productive. The second set didn’t imply that you had to be on the go 24/7, but still suggested that activity should be taking place when your biorhythms were up and not down.

The smaller subset allows for inactivity, because, quite frankly, what you should be doing at any one time is not necessarily producing for the sake of producing, but doing what is the right thing in the right way at the right time. Which means if having a break and a walk about is the best thing to do right now, even if you ARE in the middle of an otherwise productive activity, then walking about is the appropriate thing to be doing.

Except – in the police service, appropriateness must be subordinate to attention management when you’re on a 999 call. You might feel a walk about is called for, but in the moment you really need to have all your managed attention on the task at hand.

The biggest challenge to attention management is – distraction. Distractions are the result of external and internal triggers that point your mindful focus away from what is in front of you, to the other things that your brain is storing. “Must get the cat to the vet; oh yes, cat food; and while I’m at it, a disc cutter from Aldi’s centre aisle, which reminds me that the wall needs fixing by Wednesday because I’m off on holiday – sugar, tickets!!!”

What to do? How do you get your attention back?

The perceived and effective wisdom is – write down what it is that just popped up, and then get back to the task at hand. Your brain is now settled – it knows you know, and doesn’t feel the need to remind you.

But you MUST make that note, if you can. If you don’t, the brain will resume shouting ‘OY!’ at you until you either acknowledge its input, or take the action that it is begging you to take. Which, in mid-fight, is inconvenient. And one might suggest that, occasionally, this distraction – and the frustration it creates by not being able to address it – is what causes the impatience that causes mistakes to be made, including the inappropriate use of force.

Think about the last time you lost patience about anything – was it because you had other things on your mind? If so – follow my advice; pause whenever you can, and then note the distraction for later attention.

Yes, folks – time/attention management can save you from making the big mistake that costs you your job through a momentary lapse of judgement.

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Don’t Solve A Problem By Just Doing; Solve It By Seeing It Differently.

“If at first you don’t succeed, find out why.” Stephen Covey

There is a propensity within the police service to reinvent the wheel with unerring regularity. While not wishing to diminish the importance of the field, a good example is the Domestic Violence Unit. Certainly, in my own force it wasn’t dealt with by specialists at all. They decided it was a priority in the mid-1990s and appointed a single officer in each sub-division to deal with DV. Later, under a new Chief, they went to the other extreme and had a 50-person department, castrating general CID in the process. The Chief moved on, and DV went back to be dealt with by the appropriate level of attention based on the injuries involved. Then along came the divisional High Priority DV department, who were accepting low priority DV cases within a week as they didn’t have much on.

I’m not exaggerating to make a point, and I emphasise that I am not belittling the importance of that role, but that is pretty much how it went.

What they were doing is what organisations commonly do. They don’t like the results they are getting in a certain sector, and so they change what they do and expect it to work.

What they seemed to spend little or no time doing, is finding out why what they were doing wasn’t working as they hoped.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey proposed a new approach. He called it the ‘See-Do-Get’ Paradigm. He suggested that successful change came about not when they changed WHAT they were doing, but when they changed the way they saw the problem.

(IMHO, part of the problem is/was the criminal justice system, which is a legal paradigm that has no truck with the policing system, which is about trying to stop crime. For example, charging prisoners with DV offences ‘on policy’ made no difference to the CPS, who want evidence. Usually a confession. Or the Courts, who have their own admissibility rules. You can have an arrest policy all you like, but if the other two teams ain’t playing, you’ll rarely win the game.)

 No, I don’t have the solution to the DV problem, because it really was not my forte. But looking at the purpose rather than the practice of DV investigations may have changed it from a prevention by prosecution paradigm to a prevention by other means paradigm.

But the point is that if we want to create meaningful improvements in our results (of any kind, personal, professional, whatever) then we should all stop just looking at what we did that made things go wrong, but also at what we were thinking and why we were thinking it.

No, that is not easy.

Think about a problem you have encountered in the past. Analyse what you did wrong, but then ask yourself why you did that. How did you see the problem that caused you to make the error? Was there an alternative perspective that would make you act differently, even change the whole process for dealing with a similar matter?

How else do you think policing improves? Well, the same concepts apply to you, too.

How you see the problem, can all to often be the problem.

Look at it another way. You may just find the answer.

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Trust Saves Time. Try It.

“Assume good intentions. Your deeply held beliefs about someone will create the tone for any interactions you have” Stephen Covey

Following on from yesterday’s article, where I addressed your being proactive and taking responsibility for the quality of your relationships as an ethical means of saving time lost through misunderstandings, part of that proactivity means being willing to be vulnerable and to trust the others in the relationship have the same or related intent towards the achievement of the outcomes you are looking to achieve.

How much time have you spent judging someone’s capabilities, intent, motivations and character based on a third party’s tittle tattle?

In the early 1980s, future World F1 Champion Nigel Mansell was contracted to drive for the Williams GP team, to partner ex-World Champion and Williams’ stalwart driver Keke Rosberg. Rosberg was clearly unhappy about the situation, but by the middle of their first season together Rosberg apologised to Mansell for listening to the bad-mouthing about Nigel that he had initially believed to be true. He found Nigel to be a brilliant team-mate, not the arrogant Englishman that others had professed him to be.

For many years – and I can relate the examples if called upon to do so – I suffered from such character assassination. I know this because the people I worked with and who actually witnessed what I was capable of, eventually told me the same thing. “We were told you were…… and now I know that you aren’t.” This went on when I was a ‘boy’ on a pop delivery round, when I was a uniformed police constable, and later again when I was first a divisional CID Detective and later a fraud specialist. I kept having to correct others’ misconceptions about me. And I did it by – just being me.

Now, imagine if that happened to you.

How would you feel about that?

And now ask yourself if you believe what other people are saying about someone you’ve yet to meet. How would that affect your first interaction?

And more to the point, could you start that relationship by saying to yourself, “I’m giving this person the same blank slate, respectful opportunity that I would like them to give me.”

Yes, sometimes that approach will kick you in the butt. But I am willing to bet that more often than not, the relationship will grow rather than diminish, just because you assumed positive intent and capability on the part of that new colleague.

Trust saves time. Try it.

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Proactivity in Relationships – the greatest time saver of all?

“Success is always inside-out.” Stephen Covey

In that quote, Stephen Covey was not writing about ‘success’ in terms of wealth creation, awards, plaudits or promotion. He was writing about the most important successes of all – the ones we create with other people. Again, what has that to do with time management?

I cannot emphasise enough the idea that success with people is the greatest success of all. I say this because everything we do, we do with people, for people, or because of people. So success with people is a precursor to success in all of the sub-sectors outlined in the first sentence of this blog.

But where does success with other people come from? What is the source of good relationships?

Every relationship that you have has an essential ingredient within it, without which the relationship would not exists. It is ……

You.

Which means that you have to take responsibility for the way you enter into, treat, develop and ultimately grow that relationship. You have to acknowledge that for all the things that you want from the other person or persons in the relationship, they are not going to provide it willingly unless you do your part to the best of your ability.

Which includes asking in the right way, acknowledging the importance of the other person, respecting their needs as much as you do your own, and clarifying expectations so that what you get and what they get is what was expected from both parties. Take responsibility for ensuring no later misunderstandings, and in the all-too-frequent event that mistakes are made, be willing to accept your own part in that misunderstanding.

That’s what Covey meant by ‘inside-out’. He meant you do your part first, and then the external, influenceable but not controllable other party can do their part.

In the same vein, when the other party is the one making the request, the inside-out approach means taking your own responsibility for making sure that there are no misunderstandings. You do that y asking clarifying questions, and making sure that the desired outcome, the resources, the accountabilities, and the potential consequences are all firmly discussed before action is taken.

How does that affect time management?

By preventing you having to do the ‘thing’ all over again; from having to take the time to correct mistakes; from having to explain to the Judge why you did/didn’t do what you did; or from explaining yourself at a disciplinary hearing.

Take responsibility in all your relationships, personal AND professional.

You know, in your heart, that it is the only way to make them great and productive.

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The Time Saved Through Congruence

“The responses of others reflect not only how they see us, but also how well they feel we do those things that are important to them.” Stephen Covey

This is an interesting quote, one which initially looks as though (again) it has no time management connotation. But it makes me think of all those criminals I dealt with, the ones who went from hating the police to actually liking me. A few come to mind, including the repeat juvenile offender who I arrested numerous times, who one day said to a colleague, “I like that PC Palmer – but don’t you tell him I said.”

Build a relationship with others that is based on congruence.

Charles R Hobbs, author or the original ‘TimePower’, proposed that when our behaviours are totally in keeping with our personal and professional values, we are congruent – which is another worked for integrity. We can be relied upon to act in a certain way, and thus we are seen to be trustworthy. Worthy of being trusted.

Within the confines of the police station it means colleagues and managers can rely upon us to do things in a way that they have come to expect – in a personal example my supervisors knew I was willing to question things, but they also knew that my questioning was always backed up with evidence. They knew I was ‘good’ with using computers to find out ‘stuff’ and they knew that when they asked me to do something I got it done (even if they had to get past my moaning about it, first).

The criminals also knew I was firm, but fair. I never lashed out, I always treated them by the book and if I promised something, they got it.

In both internal and external examples, the trusting nature of the relationships that developed saved immense amounts of ‘will he, won’t he’ thinking time. In light of Covey’s quote, their being treated consistently by me was as much the bedrock of the relationship as were the actual mechanics of the situation in which we were involved.

When someone knows they can ask you to do a certain thing, knowing you will do it well, then there is a lot of time saved in detailing the rules applicable to that request. And in the case of the suspects, there was a whole lot of interview time saved, as well.

My advice, therefore, is to be consistent in the way you behave towards people. Eventually – and trustworthiness takes time to be noticed – people will know you well enough to call upon you when they need something, and at the same time know what part they need to play in the relationship.

You see, I also noticed that being reliable and trustworthy towards others meant that they would give me the things I wanted and need, as well. Not because I was manipulative – that is something I never wished to develop – but because they wanted to provide me with what they felt I had earned.

Being congruent is rewarding.

Believe me.

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Feedback is NOT breakfast. But it’s just as important.

“Because of its value, some people have called feedback ‘the breakfast of champions’. But it isn’t the breakfast; it’s the lunch. Vision is the breakfast. Self-correction is the dinner.  Without the vision we have no context for feedback; we’re just responding to what someone else values or wants. (-) With a clear sense of vision and mission, we can use feedback to help us achieve a greater integrity.” Stephen Covey.

I have been a Public Speaker since 2006. I have mentored other speakers. I have won and judged local speech and evaluation competitions, I have won and lost competitions at local and national level. I have spoken at large and small gatherings, and I have taught Leadership to 104 13-year-olds in one go.

However, I was recently humbled by some ‘feedback’.

Having just completed the requirements of one particular speaking Award I was on a roll, so I decided that the next thing to do was to start working on the next qualification. I tried an ‘Impromptu Speech’, where I was given three alternative subjects to choose from, then ten minutes to prepare a 5-minute speech on the subject I selected. Easy peasy, done it before.

But I bombed. The feedback was not quite the glowing reference I expected.

My evaluator ripped me a new one. To say my flabber was ghasted, and my crest fell, would be an understatement. I listened to the critique, thinking, “I thought you were my friend!” as he tore apart my structure (there was one, I swear) and nearly everything else I’d done. To be clear, advice was given, to which I listened with a steely, blameworthy gaze that I pretended was my poker-face. I was, to say the least, abashed.

For about three minutes.

My abashment only lasted that long because – he was right.

After the meeting I went to my evaluator and told it like it was – that it was refreshing, for once, to hear a blunt, frank, critical evaluation that wasn’t tinged with an unwillingness to say what needed to be said.

That was the point of the evaluation. And it was also a sobering yet appropriate reminder that for all our experience and wonderfully ego-feeding successes, we all still have things to learn.

I still hate feedback. The same guy gave me feedback again, last night. And again, he provided some considered criticism. But (again) the dismay only lasted until I got over the emotion of being nagged because he was right, again, and I can take the information provided and use it to get better.

So I am better off. I learned something about speaking and about myself, as do we all when we listen to criticism without the filter of self-defence.

What has this got to do with time management? When we get better because we listen to feedback, we save the time needed to correct mistakes. We develop improved systems for dealing with inputs. We reduce the need for the same criticisms to be made and defended a second, third or fourth time. We get better so we get faster, and we get more productive without the stress. And we use less time to achieve the same desired outcomes.

As a result of the feedback, I now know that that every cloud has a silver lining. Which was, ironically, the subject I had to choose from the three. If only I’d had this story to put in the speech…………

For more on time management and stress-free productivity, read Police Time Management.

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Why People Sometimes Hate Good News

In the past couple of weeks, two events raised my awareness about why people occasionally resist what to others may appear to be an awesome opportunity. See if you can relate to this.

For many years, I was complaining to a colleague that I was bored. I’d written all the books I could think of at that point, I could only exercise ‘so much’, and while I was willing to work I was reluctant to apply for jobs for reasons which I won’t dwell upon, here. Basically, I was waiting for some event to come to me rather than making it happen. I know – not quite the personal development advice I give others, but I have my reasons and I’m not exactly on the breadline – I can be a little bit choosy.

Eventually, comes the call from the same colleague – would I like six weeks work, starting the following Monday?

My response dismayed him – “Yes, but I have things arranged so I have to sort those out and (so on).” We later chatted and he opined that after all this time of moaning about boredom, he was surprised and a tad irked that I hadn’t bitten his hand off in quite the anticipated fashion. Pause there.

This week, my son and his partner finally managed to find and rent a house. The original set moving in date was at the end of the month, but she got the call saying the landlord was eager to move them in (i.e. start earning, fair enough) and brought the moving date forward 10 days. Overjoyed, she rang my son who had just ‘passed out’ in his new job and was enjoying the shift-based work, which had a bit of a commute, and he’s still in his probationary period. I only caught her end of the conversation, but her response to whatever he said was much the same as my friend’s response was to what I had said. Lack of immediate and unrestrained joy.

That’s when it hit me. The reason for our reluctance and, I believe, the reason why people resist new impositions, and why they aren’t fond of even great change the moment it is announced.

We haven’t had time to make a plan and all we can see – in the moment – is that our commitments to ourselves and to others need to be rebalanced and that may involve disappointing people, altering appointments, changing personal plans, and other changes.

All of which we can actually do, but we need to time to think about how to do them.

In my case, I had to work out how to fit commitments I had made to family members into the proposed working week. It was do-able, and given time I could have done it. (As it was, the job was delayed two weeks and no changes were necessary.) In my son’s case, he had to take time to look at this shift pattern, see when he was available, and if leave was required, to ask for it. Again, in the event, no leave was needed. But between ‘here’s good news’ and ‘I’m all set, let’s go’ , there’s the momentary ‘oh-oh, I need to change my plans’ to be addressed.

When we make a commitment, either to ourselves or more importantly to others, we are putting our integrity on the line, even if only a little bit, and only if viewed subjectively. (Other people don’t care about our integrity if our lack of congruence suits their plans. As long as we don’t disappoint them, we are expected to disappoint others.)

We HATE doing that, and the sudden imposition or opportunity, and most specifically our ‘reluctant response’ to it, should be seen in that light. Yes, I have ‘objections’ but all they are, in the light of day, is us thinking out loud while we start to plan how to deal with the change. You can’t make that plan until you’ve identified the proble, which is all we are doing when outlining our ‘resistance’.

So, next time you announce something to somebody and their reaction isn’t quite the joyous whoop of delight you expected, just give them time to adjust. People invariably do – because they don’t want to disappoint you, either.

Just accept that their surprising reaction really isn’t that surprising at all. It’s just thinking out loud.

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Stop Complaining That You’re Busy If You Aren’t Willing To Do Anything About It

I’m curious.

Why?

Why do I get the impression that you aren’t doing what you know you should, but are resisting?

In his book “The Success Principles”, author Jack Canfield defines complaining as ‘seeing a better way but being unwilling to do anything about it.’ I know that’s true because I do it, too. He adds that we don’t complain about things we know we can do nothing about, because we ain’t daft. We only complain about things we could affect – but won’t/don’t.

(I was about to add can’t to that short list, but that would be a lie. We just use can’t as an excuse.)

Canfield suggests that our resistance to acting on our complaint is essentially a case of our being risk averse (ironically something we ALL complain is the case with the police service!). the risk is that we may have to commit and, in some cases, be open to criticism, have to change our firmly-set minds, put on a sweat, or experience some other discomfort.

In a lot of cases, we avoid all those things even when what is on their other side is something we know is better.

Question: At any time in the past month, in a personal or professional sense, have you said, “I don’t have time for…..” in the firm knowledge that you really DO have time – but simply aren’t willing to find it?

And yet….

If I followed that question up with, “What training or study into the management of time, or personal productivity, have you undertaken, been provided (and not implemented), or even considered?”

I was on a coaching call the other day, and someone mentioned how they had a goal of better managing their time. I asked, “What books or methods have you studied on time management, up until now?”

None. Not one. No wonder they couldn’t manage their time, they hadn’t taken the time to read even one of the many books on the subject. I recommended my current favourite, an immensely practical book (not mine).

So I ask another question: Are you complaining that you have too much to do and no time to do it – but haven’t done anything about your own ‘time management’, other than make that ever-expanding To Do List on a sheet of A4 or your smartphone?

That’s the ‘you’ equivalent of an administration saying that the new method WILL WORK even though they haven’t actually asked you – the expert – if it will work in your own situation. As once happened to me when, in a room full of desk-focused workers we were told that hot-desking would work. No it wouldn’t, no it didn’t. They hadn’t even assessed our working practices to see if that was so. So they pretended we were doing it, and left us alone.

So here’s a thought. If you are busy and complaining about it, consider doing something about it, even if it’s only spending a couple of quid on learning a better way.

There is no physical, reputational or organisational threat to doing so. I promise.

A book on time management specifically directed towards police officers and staff is available HERE at Amazon, only £12.99, as big as a Blackstone’s, with website support.

Will you do something about how busy you are - apart from complaining?
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Step Out To Be More Present

The open office is a blessing – and a curse.

As a means of socialising the workplace so that teams can bond, support each other and solve problems as a cohesive unit, an open plan workspace is second to none. People laugh together, hold each other accountable while being constantly on hand to help with advice and a spare pair of hands, and they can see when a colleague needs more than just presence, and needs to be provided with emotional support. Perfection!

As a means of engendering constant interruptions, enabling people to pass you telephone calls when you really don’t want one, and ensuring that you can hear the snorting of a cold-ridden colleague who swallows rather than blows his nose, it’s equally perfect.

I think it would be fair to say, as well, that it is front line staff who work in those environments, while the higher up the ladder you go, and the less ‘interruption-prone’ your work, the more likely that you will have a ‘door’ and ‘walls’ to help you avoid the aforementioned challenges. *  

I can’t change that. Hierarchies will always exist, and perhaps they exist for good reason.

The answer?

Your circumstances may hamper application of this idea, but if you can utilise it I guarantee a less stressful environment, albeit temporary.

Get out. Wherever I have worked, I have always been able to find and occupy an ‘empty room’. Consider where you work. Are there rooms you could use when their normal occupant/s are away?

  • CID offices during major incidents will have empty desks.
  • Administrators offices at weekends will invariably be empty.
  • Inspectors and other senior officers rooms are empty when they are on Rest days.
  • There’s probably a car that isn’t being used that you could take to a quiet car park and use the time productively.

(And yes, when you’re really overwhelmed, taking that car on a patrol specifically to have some self-serving quiet time is a perfectly valid use of that kit. Just don’t abuse the privilege.)

“But what if I am needed?” I hear you ask.

You have probably been equipped with a radio or smartphone that makes you available if something comes up that truly requires your input. But it’s amazing how your absence reduces the number of times you are ‘needed’ by other people. Suddenly, they take messages when people call. They seek help elsewhere. And you get more done so that when you do have time, it is time you can use to help others, too.

Yes, quiet time out of the office enables you to be more present when you have to be in the office.

It is actually a good thing to be elsewhere when you need to get things done.

Why else would WFH have been a (temporary) good thing?

*That said, I am equally amazed at how many office-dwellers complain about constant walk-ins. I once suggested to a Detective Sergeant that he close his office door to avoid ad-hoc visitors and he later told me it was the best time management advice he’d ever been given.

For more stress management idea, buy Police Time Management, available HERE at Amazon.

There is a simple answer to open-office challenges.
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It’s NOT Just A Phone

The smartphone age is still in its relative infancy, yet Gen Z police officers and staff are pretty much well up on how to use these infernal devices. But if I were to stereotype their use it would primarily be to suggest that their focus is on the communications capabilities and their use to research and pay for all the things that millennials want, like the coffee that they like to take for walks.

Anyway, just like the dinosaurs among us, what they don’t use them for is organising and planning. Or they don’t use them optimally. Now I can’t be all holier-than-thou because I’m only just getting better at that, myself, because I have been a paper planner for thirty years. But it is clear that smartphones are a very good, albeit expensive way to manage the four elements of time management – tasks, appointments, notes and contacts.

In my book Police Time Management, I cover how to run (weaponise?) your TANC utilising your smartphone. I learned by experimentation. Many policing organisations rely on you to do the same: I know my last laptop course included mention and promotion of, but absolutely no actual input on, Microsoft OneNote. ‘Learn that yourself’, seemed to be the idea, just as it was the training approach (at least for ‘my generation’) for MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other extremely valuable tools.

I suspect you will have to learn how to better use your phone the same way – hit, miss, adjust aim, try again. So my book will save you some of the heartache and stress that the DIY approach entails.

But just to provide you with a heads-up on how you might not be using your phone to its maximum (and remember that this advice applies to your personal as well as your work devices), I wonder how many of you use the Calendar app to its fullest.

Do you use, or even disable the alarm notification each time you make an appointment? Some need alarms, some don’t, but many users have a default position either way that causes stress, like a loud bonging in Crown Court Number 1, right in the middle of the Judge’s summing-up.

Do you add critical files to appointments as you make them, when you know you’ll need those documents at the appointment? Failing that, do you keep such files in OneNote or Evernote and create a link between the appointment and that entry (app permitting)? Do you add contact details relating to the appointment in the appointment entry – all suggestions which can result in a one-app approach to managing the calendar related activity.

And, from a data protection perspective, do you delete all ‘used’ information from an appointment – and the appointment itself – on completion of the work at hand? (I cover why that is Disclosure-compliant in the book, too.)

Finally, do/can you use an app that is available across platforms? I’m using Google Calendar (because I have an Android phone and Outlook just doesn’t quite cut it) and it means I can access that (and MS To-Do) on my desktop, laptop, tablet and phone, and all synch automatically so that what I need is always where I need it – in other words, wherever I happen to be, and therefore whenever something arises that needs recording, organising, executing or otherwise acting upon.

I might be preaching to the choir, I know. But seeing colleagues typing with their thumbs at infinity MPH would be impressive if they could manage their TANCs with as much dexterity. It’s not the fault of the individual (in the main), it’s the failure of the organisation to teach time management properly. But, as that individual, you can take responsibility for improving your self-management capabilities.

That’s entirely up to you.

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Dealing with Bottlenecks

Do you always wait patiently for a response to a communication? Probably not. You consider the delay to be a bottleneck that cramps your productivity, I bet. You try not to chase up too quickly because it appears impatient, even rude. At the same time, when you do chase up you do your best, through gritted teeth, to be polite. (Sometimes you fail, miserably.)

Second question. How quickly do you respond to e-mails and memoranda?

Oh.

You’re a potential bottleneck, too.

And you probably didn’t realise that until I pointed it out to you. Never mind, nobody’s perfect.

Author Edwin C. Bliss, in a book written in 1976 called Getting Things Done (a title David Allen borrowed for his 2001 book), wrote that typical bottlenecks are created by executives who won’t make a decision. On reflection, I agree with that assessment, although I think that the kind of decision being made is less about what to do as it is want to do. You aren’t so much ‘not deciding’ to do something (thus creating the bottleneck) as you are deciding not to do it. Bliss and I have identified a few reasons why this might be so. You have a task requiring action but:

You don’t want to do it. You are reluctant to make the call or speak to someone about ‘the task’ because you have had a bad experience with them, before. Or it’s a bit of a dull thing to have to do and you’re preference is for ‘interesting’. Answer: Get over it – like you, others have a responsibility to help, and you have a responsibility to act. And delay will cause your supervisor to have the ‘interesting’ conversation with you that you don’t want to have.

It looks to big and you’re busy. As per my last article on emails, the memo list 178 joblets all on one page. Psychologically, and this makes no sense but is often true, but the size of the ‘whole list’ makes you feel as though they all have to be done in one go – and they often don’t.  Answer: break the memo down into those 178 jobs, and do them one at a time. Same with any task really: you just have to ask yourself (in relation to the task) “What is the next action?” and act on the answer. You can only do one thing at a time, so plan the job with ‘one task at a time’ firmly in mind.

You don’t know how to do what is asked – but you’re too ashamed to identify that lack of knowledge out of fear of looking silly. Answer: Find a mentor you trust and ask them for advice and assistance.

You know what to do, but you’re NOT busy and you want to build up a workload you can do ‘all at once’. I was surprised at that one – but realise I was guilty of it, many years ago! I was approaching retirement, wasn’t being allocated much new work, and needed ‘something to do’ next week, so I waited……. You know the answer to that one.

Do that.

What about other people’s bottlenecks? You probably can’t make them act, but you can nudge them by putting a deadline on any request that you make of other people. Add a sentence at the end of your communication “I’ll need an answer by X so if you don’t mind I’ll check back with you on Y to see if there’s anything I can do to help if there are any problems.” (Smile.)

Final sarky note: Have you noticed how the CPS get’s three weeks to do anything, but they send you the memo on week two and expect a response by yesterday?

Let them know that you know. On any response, put, “Re your memo dated X and received Y, my response is as follows.” Disclosing that to the other side a few times might get them to speed up a bit……

That works with other people too. (Wink emoji)

For more advice on self-management, get my book HERE from Amazon. 300+ pages of advice on how to better manage yourself in the context of time and other people’s demands.

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You Are Doing E-Mail Badly: Everyone Is. There’s a Better Way.

Here’s a suggestion learned from the good people at Next Action Associates, a company that provides training in the famous Getting Things Done Method ‘created’ by author David Allen, a method which I respectfully suggest would help stressed out front-line officers and staff in the Service.

When I was Disclosure Officer on a major enquiry, it really bugged me that e-mail was the most used communications medium, and this meant (managers note) millions of emails and threads, all with multiple subjects, which had to be recorded and revealed. A massive and unnecessary undertaking when enquiries are already big enough! All when a phone call and notebook entry would/could have been more manageable. Rant over.

Back to the message from the good people. How often do you receive an e-mail with umpteen ‘things to do’ created within, all neatly bullet-pointed or numbered? How often does such an e-mail generate several bullet-point-specific responses? How many ‘To-Dos’ are created by one email, that have to be separately listed in your Task Manager (e.g. Outlook), but which can’t be dragged across from e-mail to the Tasks folder because they’re all lumped into one big block of text?

That’s the thing. A competent user of Outlook (Been on a course? No, me neither, learn it yourself seems to be the Police Policy) knows that an e-mail can be dragged and dropped into the tasks folder for attention as a at task. But….

It usually appears under that tasks folder by subject heading. Which means that a generic heading such as ‘For You’ is meaningless: and a multiple-tasking e-mail can only become one task in the Tasks folder despite the many tasks mentioned therein.

So their advice, and therefore mine, is three-fold.

  1. As a sender, send one email per action to be taken, and give it a subject heading that helps the recipient see what the task is when it is in their Tasks folder. For example, an e-mail headed ‘Statement Required from Joseph Bloggs’ can have the precise instructions in the body of the e-mail, but with a heading automatically creates a sensible name for the related task.
  2. As a recipient of multiple task e-mails headed ‘Actions to be Taken’, politely encourage the sender to re-send each ask as a separate e-mail with a more precise heading.
  3. As a manager, promote the concept of the one-subject, properly headed e-mail so that people can manage their time better.

Because you know what? When you send a multiple-task e-mail in the 21st Century, the first thing the untrained, stressed-out, busy recipient does is one, print out the entire email (and if it’s a thread, more joy is created). And two, they write down their list of To-Dos that you created, on a piece of A4 paper pinched from the photocopier.

Single-subject, properly titled e-mails can go straight into a Tasks folder, and be kept their until completed. In sight, but out of mind until action is possible and needed.

Imagine how you’d feel if everyone in your organisation did that?

Now lead the way.

For more on better use of e-mail, read Police Time Management, available on Amazon HERE.

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Churchill Understood Coppering

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?

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Think Harder About Communication

Several years ago, a well-meaning CID colleague proposed that the Division adopt a team-wide WhatsApp group for the purposes of enhancing communication between team members. Notwithstanding the potential security problems related to that particular app, which was not (as far as I know) available as an organisation-only, free from app designer access, secure communications platform, I respectfully suggested that adding another potential bleep into our lives would add stress to our lives, and it also meant that there would be another cumbersome demand on application of the Disclosure rules – it was bad enough trying to manage and disclose umpteen e-mail threads without trying to add WhatsApp threads to the mixture. I also suggested that for urgent communication between team members during investigations, we could utilise another equally accessible comms medium. I called it ‘the phone’.

It is a modern truth, and I find it amusing, that people have stopped talking to each other and insist on using time-consuming messaging apps to have conversations. A quick question-answer that could be done by calling the source of the knowledge and getting an immediate answer, followed by hanging up, is now replaced by laborious typing on a phone keyboard, followed by a long wait. During which the sender demands to know why his text hasn’t been answered immediately.

Another phenomena related to that one is the multiple-platform conversation, where an e-mail is answered on WhatsApp, queried by text, corrected by Facebook Messenger and finally dealt with on Skype.

Okay, I exaggerate a little for effect.

A lot of time could be saved at the outset of any enterprise, if the team had a chat at the outset and decided which medium would be the most appropriate for each type of communication.

E-mails do allow for retention, threading, probity and ultimate printing for recording purposes (oh, the trees, think of the trees). To be frank, nearly all other digital means of communication present several legal and practical problems, so I would propose that texts, WhatsApps (if even allowed) and other platforms supporting written communications be banned, and the ‘telephone call’ and associated notes be used for all other passing of instructions and reporting of progress. The OIC keeps the policy book, and everyone keeps notes in the appropriate device or book.

That’s TWO communication methods, a LOT of time saved, disclosure covered and responsibilities addressed, allocated and adhered to. And a lot less mental effort trying to remember how you contacted who about what, every time the question comes up.

Ultimately, the decision is yours.

I am only really proposing that you make a CONSCIOUS decision about how you will communicate important things, rather than (a) not thinking about it at all and/or (b) changing your comms method mid-conversation.

Have think – let me know your thoughts.

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I Wish I’d Known Then What I Know Now…….

I wish I could do it differently.

In his book TimePower, productivity consultant and teacher Charles R. Hobbs wrote,

“Interruptions are not your biggest time wasters; disunification is. Rationalising, and thus not living compatibly with (your) highest truths; that’s your greatest time waster. If, in your planning time, you work to bring performance into line with (your) unifying principles, then you are free to move on to other things, and you carry a power with you that you cannot get in any other way.”

The message is that performing in line with your highest personal standards, as set by yourself, wastes less time than fighting them. What do I mean, and where does the first line of this article relate?

I prided myself on doing a good job – I strove for excellence. But if you spoke to any of my managers, they would add the caveat that I visibly did that when I was doing what I wanted to be doing. If called upon to do something else – well, I’d do it, but there’d oft be much moaning and gnashing of teeth and procrastination.

That was because I failed to notice that sometimes ‘my job’ wasn’t just what I wanted to be doing, it was what my supervisors needed doing. My frustration at being interrupted flowed into plain sight.

Oh, that I could go back having noted Hobbs’ observation, and truly accepted it. That I could do the great job without the emotional weight of frustration that undermined my enjoyment of the work that I was doing, which was truly meaningful not just to me (if I’d paused to think about it objectively) but also the public and organisation that I served.

(Don’t get me wrong – I served them well, as far as they could see!)

Perhaps I was jaded by the reality that for every enjoyable task there is always a frustrating administrative side to it! And someone who found that as exciting as I did arresting criminals. And who felt it to be as important to them as I felt it unimportant to me. Perspectives.

Hobbs’ message, from a time management perspective, is

Do what needs to be done, in the way it needs to be done, at the time it needs to be done, whether you want to do it or not. And while acknowledging you don’t want to do it, do it with the same levels of effort and enthusiasm you do everything else – because the emotional weight of a negative approach just isn’t worth the strain.

And serve that intention to be happier with the dirty jobs by learning how to properly manage your work so that it isn’t stressful, because you have physical and emotional control over it.

I wish I’d said that in 2006………..

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Be Proactive ALL the Time.

I’m guessing you’ve probably been told bya supervisor to be more proactive, or you’ve heard about ‘proactive policing’ which technically isn’t proactive because it’s almost always a response to a problem and is therefore, by definition, reactive. But I am being a little bit semantic.

In a nutshell, proactivity is the opposite of reactivity in the sense that as humans and as professionals we have a tendency to get caught up in routines. Something happens and we deal with it the way we always have. In particular, with the same emotional response. Something that made us angry yesterday will make us angry today. Or, because we are in a poor emotional or mental stae, we auto-respond to an event with a resigned ‘here we go again’ and wonder WHY that same thing keeps happening – or why our response doesn’t seem to work the second time.

In his great books, author Stephen Covey described proactivity as the use of the gap between stimulus (an event) and response, and using our self-awareness, creative imagination, independent will and conscience to choose a better response, and not just react to that stimulus.

In illustrating the concept, Civey used examples which one might construe as being at the extremes, e.g. arguments, calamities, disasters, challenges, etc. There is nothing wrong with that – it is at times like that that we see more clearly how using the gap well may result in our successfully negotiating the challenge. And I’m sure we can all recall those occasions when we failed to use that gap and just lost control of an event – or ourselves.

But the idea of being proactive extends well beyond, or can be used successfully well this side of calamity. It can and should be used all the time.

It isn’t a calamity or disaster to pop into the fridge for a biscuit. But not taking in a biscuit is a better use of the gap between peckish and yum yum if you are trying to lose weight (or just don’t wish to gain any). Deciding to go for a run is a better use of the gap between ‘I really don’t want to’ and getting fit.

Deciding to do some computer work is a good example of being proactive when you aren’t in the mood. Not watching another YouTube dashcam video is a good use of your proactivity when ‘the TV is on anyway, so why not?’ Planning your day in advance is a supreme example of being proactive, as opposed to having another five minutes in bed. Deciding to get that MG file done today instead of putting it off again is another example.

Deciding not to lamp someone over the noggin with your ASP baton because he called you a Pig is also a proactive use of the Gap.

I suggest that ‘Be Proactive’ is not a motto or tenet or context to be applied only in times of extreme stress. It is an excellent way of responding at such times, of course – but the more frequently you apply proactivity in the most routine of contexts, the more likely it will be that you get what you want, spend less time feeling miserable, produce better work (even a tidy kitchen), have fewer arguments with loved ones, get slim, achieve the fitness levels you want, and create positive results in EVERYTHING.

Try Permanent Proactivity. Let me know how it works for you.

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Gnifeirb Sdrawkcab. (Work that out.)

In my book, Police Time Management, I propose an alternative way of conducting routine, start-of-duty briefings. It is a method intended to reduce the stress of continued imposition of new work that has to be juggled along with yesterday’s priorities, last week’s initiatives, next week’s court commitments, and the course you must attend or you’ll have forgotten how to hit someone with a metal bar because it’s the anniversary of when you were last told. I’ll not go into too much detail because it’s an idea that’s supposed to make you want to buy the book.

But you can imagine my smugness this week when I read that the famed ‘Getting Things Done’ pioneer, David Allen, thinks the same thing. In his deeper work, ‘Making It All Work’, he writes, “It’s a great idea, when starting meetings that are held regularly, whether in a department or a family, to have everyone contribute what primarily has their attention at the moment. (–) I learned that trying to move things forward without at least a nod to the issues pulling on everyone’s psyche is an exercise in futility.”

You’ve been there, probably. Overladen with work, and the first thing that is addressed at the morning briefing is how much new work you’re about to be allocated, you lucky thing, you. This is primarily the result of faulty thinking: not malevolent thinking, which would be designed to make you miserable, but thinking that is the result of unconscious responses to the reality of being an emergency service.

What happens is that something urgent happens, followed by something else that is also urgent. After a while, we conclude that the only way to deal with anything is to treat it as urgent, as ‘gotta be done NOW!’.

(Which would explain why, in my day, a crime complaint had to be completed by your end of tour on Friday at 5pm so it could sit in the post tray to be forwarded to arrive at Divisional HQ next Tuesday.)

We teach ourselves that we don’t have the time to anything because something ‘might’ happen that needs urgent attention. But the truth is – while the initial response to some things might be justifiably urgent, the post-urgent investigation and administration rarely is. It’ll take as long as it will take. But we see that list of those non-urgent tasks and they scream at us to be done now, just in case that next thing happens.

So the briefings routinely add to your work while manifestly failing to address the fact that your earlier urgencies have created routines that need to get done. But the new work might not be urgent enough to stall the taking of action on your current list of things that need to be done. Nevertheless, the briefing puts the new work ahead of the old work.

My advice, like that of Allen, is to think differently. Do it backwards. Allocate new work after the room has outlined its current commitments.

Granted, that will be a fluid approach. There will be times when ‘now means now’, but just being given the opportunity to the room to outline the occupants’ needs, before allocating new ones, will have an amazing effect on stress levels and productivity.

I go into more detail on m’book. But give this idea some thought, Sarge.

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Questioned! And Answered.

After I posted yesterday’s article called ‘Get a Grip – It’s Liberating’, I was intrigued by a reply sent to me by Stefan.

He wrote: “You could add one funny detail: once you listed it all, how “old” was the oldest item on the list? Once you clarify the related action, it often becomes clear that you did not do something for YEARS, because you did not spend 1 MINUTE to think about the first action, which would have started it…”

In answer to his first question, the reply is “I honestly can’t remember” because, having listed them on my smartphone To Do app, I deleted them on completion – I went from 39 home tasks to about five within 48 hours because they were there, in my face, and demanded attention. Some needed an hour’s attention, some even less. And in my defence as a time management writer, I was pretty up to speed with work as a whole.

As to the second sentence in Stefan’s comment, he makes a very good point. Quite often, we put something off for a somewhat longer time than we are prepared to admit. Some people have left things on their list for years, and months are probably a regular timeframe for ‘get to laters’.

Notwithstanding the fact that people regularly procrastinate acting on their task list because they don’t want to do them because of inconvenience or potential conflict, there are other things that go on To Do Lists that never get done for a different reason.

We never wanted to do them in the first place.

Sometimes, we add something to our lists because someone else has suggested it. In the moment we may want to do it. Or we feel obliged because of the relationship we have with the individual making the suggestion. Last year I accepted a challenge from friends to do a spectacular cycle ride in the Alps. In the moment, I was swept away by the idea. A month later, when overtraining (oops), I looked at the project in the light of day and realised not only how hard it was going to be (in a sport I exercise out of a need to be fit and not because I necessarily like it), but how much money it was going to cost me just to travel to the venue and stay a couple of nights – thousands. Just so I could say “I did that” to a disinterested audience. And it was money not spent on wife or family. It was certainly not going to be a holiday!

That’s a spectacularly over-played example, but it does show how we sometimes we put things on our lists that we want to do ‘in the moment’ but which, on reflection, will never get done. But the shame of deleting them from our list plays on our mind so we leave them there.

My advice is (work aside) that if you find something is on your list that you really don’t want to do – delete it. Forget about it. It’s just sapping your mental strength, because every time you see it undone you feel guilty and it takes up valuable thinking time. But if you do feel you can’t completely get rid of the task, put it on a  list called ‘Someday/Maybe’. It means you still like the idea but it’s no longer a commitment – it’s an If. No-one feels ashamed that they haven’t done something which is an If. Provided that the If means ‘If I ever want to’.

So, Stefan, that’s my answer. Nothing on my list was so old that I needed a minute to realise it needed to be done, and/or that I could have done it a long time ago. I still rely on the methods outlined in Police Time Management. But those methods include and are supplemented by the GTD® methods so I was pretty much ahead of the game. It was the smaller tasks that perhaps I didn’t realise needed attention until I did the Physical and Mind Sweeps that brought them to mind. And that was the thrust of my article – get on top of the things you’d forgotten needed attention.

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Get a Grip – It’s Liberating!

A little while ago I skirted with using the famed Getting Things Done method for planning tasks. Essentially (but not ‘just’) a list management process, it is a very popular productivity method, although the somewhat precocious reference by some to having a ‘GTD Practice’ as if they were medical or legal professionals, does smack a little of narcissism.

The method revolves in part around a philosophical statement which its founder, David Allen, uses. He says, “You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what it is.” That may well be a statement that addresses a cause of stress that is almost intangible in nature. Do you feel the most stress when you have so much to do that you can’t even begin to list them all? Cue Allen and GTD.

Allen suggests that the first thing any stressed producer should do (after setting up the office / workspace / home in preparation for the whole process) is capture everything that is on their mind. Everything. He starts by suggesting you go around whatever space you’re working on in the moment, and make notes about things that don’t belong where they are, in the condition they’re in, or need action taken I some other regard. That addresses the physical environment.

Next, he suggests a Mind Sweep, where you consider all the things on your mind. For police officers and staff, that’s your list of cases, projects, tasks, calls to make, people to see, appointments to make, and so on. (In his book, “Getting Things Done” Allen provides trigger words to help you remember such things.)

He suggests you note each separate ‘thing’ on separate sheets of paper, because once you’ve finished making the whole list you’ll have a lot. And they are easier to work with as separate sheets, than a list of umpteen things on one page.

NB: You aren’t allowed to DO anything about these discoveries at first – only list them.

Once that’s done, you go through your pile of paper and clarify what each one means, and what’s your next action. (GTD Specialists – I’m really breaking it down!) Now, at least, you know what you have to get done. As you do that, you organise those tasks into ‘where or when can I do them’ lists, like At Computer, At Office, At Home, At Phone, etc, but that’s for another blog.

Why do I mention this? For the first time, last week I did all that properly, and I took three days doing it. I walked around my house and listed the things in the wrong place or that needed action taken on them. I used the trigger list to do a sweep of my mind. I captured about 100 thoughts and used up 100 pages of an A5 notebook.  I then went through them all and decided where I’d have to be and what I’d have to do to get them done. I put them on the appropriate ‘At’ lists.

BTW, the initial sweeps I did on paper, but the final ‘At’ lists are on my ‘phones Microsoft To Do app, which synchs with all my devices, including my desktop. Which means they are with me everywhere I go ,so I can do some, or add to the lists, as tasks come to mind or opportunities arise to get them done. And I have a permanent ‘Errands’ list for shopping…….*

And in the two days since I did that, I have been so productive at getting them done (and capturing and clarifying more stuff as it arose) that I amazed myself. Half the resultant list is gone already, and the rest are awaiting the appropriate time, money or other resources needed to get them done.

Stress. Free.

Something new comes up – what is it, what is the next action, where/how/with what can I take that action? And act when you can. You know what you can and can’t do, you know what it is you still have to do, but you NEVER panic about what you’ve forgotten about – because you need never forget about anything.

I recommend this as one of the cures for what ails ya. Not the only one, but certainly a good one.

*And when the phone ‘pings’ because you’ve ticked off a task…..wow!

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Start the New Year ORGANISED. (Because other people don’t.)

The Christmas period is officially over, and the world kicks reluctantly back into motion. All those tasks you had to put off because other people weren’t available (either by choice or because ‘it’s Christmas, it can wait’) now proliferate your to do list – just as more work comes in that was itself generated by the Christmas period. Meanwhile, all those people who left you alone from the 20th of December are now demanding that you respond to their demands, ignorant of the fact that if they’d made them when they were ‘leaving it for after New Year’ then you’d have probably already done it. But now, they’ve reduced your timescale and will blame you if you can’t comply.

Aren’t people fun?

I know, from reading reports and social media posts, that many front line police officers and staff feel that they cannot cope. I think you can. The problem is less about feeling overwhelmed than it is the fact that you’re not being told how to whelm. (MS Word recognised ‘whelm’, much to my surprise!)

Think of it this way, with a bad analogy. In times of real challenge, like World war 2, people coped. People always do. So can you. You just need to organise your head. Which, of course, you can’t do. Your head is not an organised planning system. It can keep everything in itself, but it doesn’t do so in an organised system with a simple retrieval method. It’s just a library with books all over the place.

Instead of trying to keep everything in your head, keep it on paper. When something comes up, the immediate thought is ‘another thing for me to remember’. But once you write down what it is, you don’t have to remember, and you know you won’t forget. The stress reduces.

Next, you decide what you can do about it, now. And if the answer is ‘nothing’, it has to wait. If the answer is ‘plan’, then start making a plan.

David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, makes a salient point. You can’t ‘do’ a project: you can only do tasks or actions towards getting that project done. So your mindset shouldn’t be ‘I have to detect this immensely complicated fraud’: it needs to be ‘I have to visit the complainant.’ No more. Until that complainant is seen, there is no immensely complicated fraud.

Once the complainant has been seen, the next actions can be planned, and executed one at a time. And when they aren’t being planned or executed, they can be ignored, and your attention directed towards other things.

One at a time.

So when someone passes their festive season procrastination down the slippery slope to you, write it down, and only give it the appropriate attention. Not deep, angst-ridden, stress-inducing overthinking. Just. Enough. Attention. For. Now.

You can manage quite a serious workload if you do that. I currently have about 30 projects on the go at the moment. I know I can’t do everything about all of them every day. But, for some reason, many of you feel like you should.

You can’t. But you can know what those projects are and manage them effectively.

Just by doing what I suggested. And, perhaps, a little more. Seek out training on how to manage multiple tasks. You can buy my book Police Time Management, which addresses your particular situation in depth, or you can look at YouTube videos which proliferate on how to do what I have proposed.

It really isn’t complicated, once you understand you can do it.

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I Promised This Next Action, Didn’t I?

Moving on from my plagiarised advice about how to keep a list, I hereby come through upon my promise to address thing about a context list that needs to be considered IF you want to reduce stress, as per David Allen’s (etc) advice.

You recall how I suggested that the short list of projects the DC had was also a huge list? If not, refer back to my post and read it again. We all had lists, or something similar, kept on a computer or in a book or on a piece of photocopier paper. Items such as those listed on last week’s article would be called Projects – you might call them cases, or investigations, but in the end they are all Projects – things that are being done that need more than one step for completion. Remember that definition, because you have a lot of those.

But here’s David Allen’s key point when thinking about the mammoth size of any Project.

You can’t ‘do’ a Project – you can only do the Next Action towards its completion.

That really was worth pressing Ctrl+U and Ctrl+B, it’s that important. Allen is very focussed on the term ‘Next Action’ as being the key to stress-free productivity. (Yes, I know, no such thing but you can reduce the stress by thinking and acting like this.)

And here’s the funny thing. The Next Action is often the tiniest, simple, swiftly completed ‘thing’ to do.

For example: You are dealing with a rape. Huge. You need a victim interview. Big. It has to be done by a specialist. Fiddly, involves someone else. So what’s the next action?

Look up a specialist. A minute. Then contact them. Another minute. Then leave them to it, with your only responsibility in that vein being to wait for the result. (The @WaitingFor list you keep on your phone/computer/paper.)

When all is said, everything that’s peppering your list of Projects is a set of next actions, but it’s the perception that you have umpteen billion next actions that causes the stress. But they are predominantly tiny things that need doing which, when actually done, feel like a win. And then another win, and then another. Even an obstacle is nothing more than another project that contains a next action that can be identified, planned and then done.

You see how this works?

Change of mindset from a huge list of (thought to be) unmanageable projects to one of a lot of easy tasks that can be done when the context allows.

Remember: It may not feel like it, but you CAN only do one thing at a time, even if you have a lot to do. And you can only do them if you are at a place, or with a resource that enables you to do that one thing. And if another thing comes along (as it invariably will in policing), just add it to the Project List, and leave it. If it needs immediate attention, decide the next action and act on it or put it on the appropriate ‘where/when/with’ list for later. Then forget about it.

It really is that easy to understand. It may take a little longer to start using it and gain expertise to the degree that you finally become stress-free, but like driving a car it is nothing more than matter of practice.

I really wish I show you, face to face, but I can’t. But there’s a lot you can learn from YouTube. 😉

If you see value in these posts, please buy my book Police Time Management, which conmtains a lot of usable time management advice. Really. I wouldn’t lie, would I?

(Or buy David Allen’s Getting Things Done Workbook, which is a cracking step-by-step guide. But when you choose which to buy, remember he’s a millionaire and I aren’t.)

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The PolFed was right – partly.

In a recent post relating to five ways for overcoming stress, the Police Federation of England and Wales’ first suggestion was to make a list. I acknowledge that this is a great idea, but added that there is more to making a list than just making a list.

For example, imagine this list of a Divisional DC. (I know it doesn’t reflect reality!

  1. Evans rape allegation.
  2. Jones GBH allegation.
  3. Smith harassment investigation.
  4. R v Kane court case.
  5. Phipps fraud

Two things I’d say about such a list.

  1. It’s nice and short. Only 5 items, so the DC has a hold on what he or she is responsible for.
  2. It’s actually HUUUUGGGGGEEEEEE.

A list that reflects the reality of policing is not, and never could be, short. Each of those five items contains within or behind it a number of calls and tasks – quite a number, in fact. And each of those calls and tasks will likely create more calls and tasks. But (a) no-one is ever formally taught how to make a to-do list so (b) any to-do list they create is rarely anything more than a reminder of just how busy they are. And is therefore utterly, mind-numbingly morale sapping.

Another thing about a ‘simple’ to-do list is that as big as it is on Monday, and as much as you get done all week long, it’s often just as big, if not bigger, by Friday. A to-do list is the very definition of perpetual motion – it just keeps moving: all you get to do is change where you put it. More often than not, in my experience, on a bit of A4 paper whipped out of the photocopier.

All that said, there IS a way to create a more do-able to-do list, or rather to utilise a to-do system.

Promoted by David Allen of Getting Things Done and Graham Alcott, The Productivity Ninja (whose ideas are suspiciously similar…) and paraphrased by me in my own book, Police Time Management where I focus on how a busy police officer can use them, there is a better way.

They propose the idea that one to-do list is useless because it’s usually like my illustration – headings rather then details. Secondly, it is useless because it is not organised around context, in the sense that the tasks require you to be in different places, with different resources, at particular times or with particular people in order to move through them. So a list of tasks that have to be done with a computer when you’re on cell guard, or in Bristol when there are no cars available, or on the phone when you’re in a courtroom, or at home when you’re in work, or at work when you’re off duty – just looks like a confused, and therefore stress-inducing mass of stuff that needs doing, that you can’t do.

Allen et al propose the use of lists that address context. They use the ‘@’ symbol, so you may have @computer, @calls, @home office, @patrol – you decide the context, because you know your working and home needs. You now have a list that says you can do Task A, but don’t worry about Task B because you need to be somewhere else – note it, move back to what you can do.

To be frank, this is an absolutely minimal explanation that they and I provide in our books. (And they perhaps go deeper than officers need today, and a lot deeper that I can provide in about 500 words.)

But organising lists around context – and keeping them in some sort of system like your ‘phone’s listing app, or in a bound notebook – you can de-stress your to-do lists so that they don’t undermine what the PFEW is trying to encourage.

Next time, I’ll add a bit more depth to how you need to be more specific in listing your tasks so the list is effective, but not so big as to terrify you.

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Time Management is Common-sense. So you NEED to learn it.

Jim Collins, author of business books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” once wrote:

True discipline means channelling our best hours into first-order objectives.*

Just to be clear, he was not promoting blind obedience to the Empire’s replacement in the latter Star Wars movies. That’s not the First Order he meant.

He was promoting the idea that success in any venture is best achieved by making the best use of time available, and wasting as little as possible. He also suggested that the better use of time was a discipline. Not desirable. Required. And, by implication (if you define discipline accordingly), difficult.

The truth is that time management as a discipline isn’t physically hard. It’s just seen as mentally draining. The simplest time tech – the To Do List – is draining because it constantly expands and is a visible reminder of all the things we haven’t yet done, along with all the things we know we must do, but don’t want to.

However, like any discipline – and I am positive that I mean any discipline – once the basics are learned and applied there is less and less need for ‘discipline’, because it becomes second nature. But until it becomes second nature, it seems hard.

Returning to the quote – what is so profound? If you think about it, that’s one of the most common-sense pieces of advice you’ve probably ever heard. The more time you spend on ‘doing’ something directed towards ultimate success, the quicker that success will come about. But no one ever thinks that learning a methodology that will help you apply that common-sense, is common-sense. (Sorry to labour the point.)

Moreover, many public organisations don’t seem to think that training in time management should be made available to anyone earning less than £80k per annum, in my limited experience. They provide that kind of training only to people who can delegate their work downwards, meaning the people to whom that work is delegated – the front line, coal-face operative – aren’t provided with the training that they need in order to cope.

Of course, they could seek out time management input themselves, and I would encourage them to do so. But there is one problem – it isn’t common-sense.

My goodness, what a convoluted, Mobius Strip. “I don’t know I need this, but I need this, but I won’t learn this because it’s common-sense and therefore I am expected already to know it, but I don’t.” (Don’t analyse that sentence too deeply.)

I stress. Yes, it may seem to you that time management training is either unnecessary or too hard, but a workforce trained in time management, that is using common language in its respect, can massively improve productivity simply because it is psychologically committed to what it has been taught. Each individual empowered to say to another, “I need you to be proactive in how you deal with this. Begin with the End in Mind and do First Things First.” No need for further explanation if everyone knows what you mean.

But if all you do is say, “Make a list,” everyone knows what you mean – but hates you for it!

*In his foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

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The Challenge with Organisational Values

For those who haven’t heard of him, retired cop Alfie Moore has a comedy programme on Radio 4 entitled ‘It’s a Fair Cop’, where he addresses policing issues from a cop’s perspective, and with a sense of humour familiar to old hats like me. A week or so ago he covered the concept of the Student Officer, and I laughed for half an hour. But one thing he said, made me think.

He was speaking of his probationer’s thoughts on some issue, and he mentioned that it is ‘expected that your values will align with those of the organisation.’ Hmmm.

First of all, why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone work that hard to join an organisation that didn’t align with their values, or at least one with which they expected their personal values would be congruent. Malice aside, no-one joins an organisation that they would consider opposes their personal views and beliefs unless they wish to destroy it from within.

So they join in the belief that the organisation’s values align with their own, and the organisation expects that any small gaps will be closed, over time. This seems fair.

Except….

(Dinosaur warning.)

When I joined in 1986 we were a law enforcement agency. Laws were enforced and, first-time offending kids aside, there was no such thing as a caution for an offence committed. And even then, you only got one before you saw the inside of a Court. The smallest amount of drugs in your pocket resulted in a possession charge. The only discretion was, pretty much, at the first point of contact – if the cop didn’t ticket or nick you, that was the end of it.

By the 2000s, kids were getting caution after caution after caution. Thieves weren’t charged, they were ticketed – assuming the cop even went to the shop to deal with the shoplifter. Drugs were forgiven and pre-court diversion methods abounded. And then, the law enforcers started helping the druggies by giving them clean needles, thus implicitly aiding and abetting their possession. Yes, I know there are legal arguments against, but the point stands. Which is….

The organisation’s values had changed. But mine hadn’t.

And what is more, the organisation was being directed in this direction by politicos. (I shan’t explore the university education of the senior officer class and the possibility of their indoctrination by academia, which is notoriously left-wing. That’s a long debate.)

And what’s more, the old values with which many a copper had (a) already possessed and (b) were aligned with the law enforcement ethos of their organisation, were now being punished if they acted in accordance with the values that the organisation had, until then, been perfectly happy with.

That’s not to defend the poorer behaviours of some, such as overt racism, bullying and sexism. Although I didn’t see a lot of that, there was some as defined now. But what I saw was contradictory – you’d be sexist one minute, then risk your own welfare in defence of the person you’d just slagged off. ‘Twas ever thus.

When you impose changed values, you meet resistance because you changed the rules by which those upon whom the new rules had previously worked, quite happily.

So don’t blame them for resisting change. Question whether the change was worth alienating your best staff. And whether the reason you did it was self-serving or politically directed.

For a deeper discussion on personal and policing values, got to Chapters 17 and 18 of my book, Police Time Management.

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Overcoming Distraction

A question oft asked of people is “Do you find it hard to focus on what you need to get done?” A better question, which arguably leads straight to a workable solution, is “How easily do you get distracted?”

This morning I was in m’shed, exercising on my rather well-used, former clothes-hanging spin bike. Not one of those silly and over-priced but gadget-rich Peloton thingies. Just your basic £125, Chinese model with a read-out that shed damp has left barely legible, but useable in a pinch. The other advantage of this equipment is that rather than watching other, fitter people outride me, I can use an old Samsung tablet (other tablets are available) to watch YouTube videos. I watch personal development stuff and debates, but on Sunday and Monday mornings (if I’m not on my real bike) I watch Match of the Day. Which sounds bad but it means I do well over an hour on those mornings.

(Get to the point.)

Today’s video addressed the aforementioned question, and as I rode I realised the presenter was right because while I was focused on him, I suddenly noticed that a shed slat had been dislodged and risked admitting water if it rained. So having seen that problem I became concerned that, pedalling furiously as I was, I had nowhere to write down that I needed to address it, which made me think I should download a To Do app to the tablet, which I subsequently found I couldn’t do because the tablet was so old, so I had to go on-line and create an Internet bookmark so that I could note such things down as they came to mind. (And breathe.)

Then I found myself wondering what the presenter had said while I was thinking all that.

He was right. You could be thinking you are really ‘in the moment’ and suddenly something comes to mind which distracts you and fuzzes your focus on what you should be doing. And now you’re thinking about two things, which easily leads to three or more, and this is when you think you can’t cope. *

There is an answer, and it is implied in that long paragraph.

It is to pause, make a note of what distracted you and needs future attention, and then return to the task at hand.

Yes, it IS that simple. Me, I use the aforementioned To Do app (Microsoft’s, to be precise – other To Do apps blah blah blah). Something enters my mind that I can’t do anything about in two minutes or less, I put it on an appropriate list on my mobile phone or tablet (as they cross-pollinate), and check back in when I don’t need to be as focused.

This is the basis of the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s so mind-bogglingly simple, yet few people think of doing that.

In my case, my To Do Lists include At Computer (things to do when I need a computer); Book Stories that pop into my head (to go into my policing autobiography); Errands (for shopping and other out of home tasks); and Waiting For (a list of things I am, er, waiting for). If I am doing Thing One and Thing Two pops up, Thing Two immediately gets put onto the appropriate list and I resume Thing One. (Not Allen – Seuss.)

If you apply this method, as described in a lot more detail in my book Police Time Management, you can keep your mind clear and focused on the Now, secure in the knowledge that any interrupting thought has had enough of your valuable attention and will get acted upon when you can do something meaningful about it, and not before.

You can’t avoid distractions if you have an active brain. But you can redirect that distraction if you adopt a method that puts it back under your control.

Read my book or Allen’s. They’re both good, but mine is cheaper.

(*Reminds me of my first CID days, when we were dealing on the street with an alleged abduction. A local youth kept interfering and distracting us. Eventually I decided it was quicker to arrest him than try and convince him to go hence. More paperwork, but once he was in the van we could focus on the kidnap.)

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Be Your Best. Always.

“Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.” George Halas.

Okay, you’ve never heard of him in the UK. He was an American football and basketball player and coach, and like many such professionals acknowledged the truth of the saying that people who do their best usually get the results they seek. Although it may be fair to say that the people he was working with and coaching were pretty much ‘up there’ in terms of talent, ability and skill when he described them.

But the fact that they are at the top of their game and are paid good money to be their best, should not absolve or excuse you, underpaid as you are, from doing your best whenever you are called upon to do your job.

No, I wasn’t perfect.

Like you, I had days when I was tired. Periods when I was distracted by events outside of work, and days when in-work issues affected my performance. And a time when I made a huge mistake which cost me dearly.

But, in the main, I tried my best to do the best I could with what I had available to me at the time, including knowledge, ‘things’ supportive and colleagues. Sometimes colleagues didn’t support me – maybe they had their own things going on, too. Who actually ever asks?

Right now, the press has got it in for the police. I have my own observations about what’s going on, and question whether the compassionate, PR-focused approach has gone from being a sensible means of engaging the public to one that utterly undermines our ability to enforce laws and detect crime, and is beset by pandering more towards extra-loud, minority interests. (Without fear or favour…..)

But on a day-to-day basis, and in any one-to-one interaction, I still firmly believe that (without interference) the vast majority of you go to work every day intending to do your best.

And I salute you for it.

Which is why I wrote this book. I hope to help you be the best you can be by counselling you on methodologies designed to enable you to be your best in the moment, by managing those moments with the appropriate level of attention and priority.

If you can manage yourself in such a controlled fashion as to be able to give your best at any one point in time, can’t you do anything other than be your best in the moment?

Think about that.

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Two Kinds of Bottleneck. Them…..and You.

You know those days when you need something done and it isn’t happening as quickly as you would like? You need a reply to an e-mail quickly (try the phone, but hey-ho) but you haven’t received it? You’re on hold with someone or some company and you really need to be elsewhere? You need a piece of kit but the quartermaster is out of the office? That kind of thing.

The generic term for someone or something that is getting in the way of your productivity is Bottleneck. The stasis created by the other person involved in the transaction is preventing you from moving forward. Naturally, this disappoints or frustrates you – they mean different things – and you’re inclined to tell the world that X is preventing you progressing on something. They are your reason for the delay.

And do you know what?

I’m willing to be a week’s wages that somewhere, somebody is saying exactly the same thing about you. Somebody is likely explaining to a third party that they have sent you a memo/e-mail/letter and they can’t move until you reply, and therefore YOU are the bottleneck. And experience tells me that the bottleneck is sitting in your work tray begging to be answered but, in the moment, the five minutes it will likely take feel like the longest interruption to your day that you have ever received.

I’m guilty. Or at least I used to be. I’d look at an overly-long and pernickety demand from a retired-detective file-vetter, and put off working on it for as long as I could.*

That was until I discovered that – brace yourself for some serious wisdom here – I didn’t have to do everything on the memo at once. Instead of treating the memo as ‘A BIG THING’ I treated it as a ‘LIST OF SMALL THINGS’, none of which was as onerous as ‘THE BIG THING’ appeared to be. And in no time at all the little things were addressed in two-minute bursts, the memo was returned and a bottleneck was opened again.

Some things will take time, I realise that. But it’s our procrastination that annoys others as much as they procrastination of others, annoys us.

Try and remember that how you feel is how others feel if the situations were reversed, and act with respect for that reality when considering how much less of a bottleneck you can be. If you’re not freeing up your own bottleneck, you can surely be freeing someone else’s, and that freedom might just serve you later on.

The bottleneck you free me from, allows me to serve you, faster.

None of us lives and works in the vacuum we think we do. We all have bugs on our backs, biting us. Even the bugs have bugs.

Don’t be a Bottleneck while moaning about how long other people are taking to do what you need done. It’s hypocrisy, is that.

*Oddly, when I went from PC to DC, the pernickety requests lessened. And the requests were expressed in more polite terms. And on one occasion, said file-vetter wrote out all my charges for me. How elitist.

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Expect the Unexpected – And Deal With It Easily.

A great man once said (and I paraphrase) “Take my word for it. In the next three months, something unexpected is going to happen, and you are going to have to deal with. How well you deal with it will be a reflection of how prepared you are in terms of how you’re dealing with what you have on your plate now.”

He wasn’t predicting the future like some soothsayer. Furthermore, his intent was to tell everybody that anything could happen. He’d certainly be right more often than he is wrong. An event, hopefully not calamitous but which would require some positive action on your part, is en route to spoil your day.

What he wasn’t doing was addressing one reality of front-line policing life.

Something unexpected is, pretty much, the bread and butter of your day job. Never mind what might be “comin’ atcha” in your personal lives, you open every day with the likelihood that ‘an event’ is coming along to change your plans.

How do you deal with those challenges?

Think about it: when you started work as a police officer or staff member, everything was a challenge. When you began you learned to deal with things, initially by thinking hard about what to do and in what order. But as time passed and experience taught, you by-passed the ‘thinking’ and did everything that you had to do in the most effective and efficient way, in the right order, to get the outcome you expected.

Which is why I find it odd, occasionally, when people who have arrived at that level of competence in their working lives don’t notice that the same learning curve applies to their private lives, and therefore fail to spend their time planning their activities to the same degree they do their work. They don’t use the time and experience of just ‘being’ as a means to inform themselves how to prepare so that emergencies have a lesser impact on normality than they do on the unprepared mind.

I plan my week, every week. By accident as much as by design, my tasks are usually completed by lunchtime (yes, I AM lucky), which means my afternoons tend to be free to cope with the unexpected, the added-on, the challenging. But I am not so bound by my plans that I can’t work around or even drop them when something comes up that deserves more attention than ‘the plan’.

But here’s the thing: A To-Do List is not a Plan, as valuable as it is when compared to having no list at all. The best that you can hope for from a To-Do List is the knowledge that, having put everything on it, you won’t forget it needs doing. Of course, it will always need doing as long as it remains on the list. It hasn’t been planned.

You have to put the tasks on your list into a ‘proper’ plan, OR have a system for just deciding when, in the moment, you can do something off that list because you have a moment to spare in which to do it.

And for many things on such a list, you also need to know HOW to do it in the most efficient way possible, so that it doesn’t take longer than planned. That’s where a weekly plan can be of benefit. If you decide that, next Thursday, you are attending a training course, then you can add any pre-course necessities to Tuesday’s calendar and that day’s task list. Not only to an A4 sheet containing a random To-Do List – you’ll see that on Thursday morning just in time to say “Oops.”

 And ALL of that advice supports my contention that you can cope with the unexpected because if you learn and apply what I teach then you’ve already chosen when and where and how you are going to deal with the expectations that already exist on your Plan. No more thought is required for those things, which means your mind is now empty.  Which in turn means you can now use the spare mind-space for dealing with the unexpected, and do so with as much focus as is needed.

You can learn to cope with any personal emergency just like you did any work ‘emergency’: List what needs to be done, plan when and how to do it, and get it out of the way as soon as you can.

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Choose your Communication Method More Carefully – and Don’t be a Mobile Phone

You know how it is when you start seeing the same thing popping up again and again? It sticks in the mind unless addressed. Like the word ‘brouhaha’, which I’d never heard and then heard three times in a week. Suddenly, it was part of my own lexicon.

This week, he ‘thing’ that has repeatedly assaulted my mind has been the concept of synchronous and asynchronous communication. “What’s that?” I hear you not ask.

Synchronous communication requires that both parties to said communication be present and active at the same time, while asynchronous means that presence and immediacy are not required. Head gone, yet?

Talking is synchronous – radio and telephone comms are the most obvious examples, and on-line helplines are supposed to be examples,. As well, unless you’ve been stuck in one.

Examples of asynchronous communications should be letters, e-mail, texts and other social media messaging methods such as Messenger and WhatsApp. I say should be, because…..

Are you one of those people who sends an e-mail and wonders why the person hasn’t answered it within an hour? Do you send a text expecting an immediate reply? Are you like my children, who actually try to conduct conversations by asynchronous methods?

Then you’re a (deleted).

The purpose of this blog is to remind you of what you knew before the advent of digital communications, and that is that because when urgency is a concern the quickest way to get something done is to speak to the person you want to do it, then synchronous communication is the best way, supported by text/email/letter as a written confirmation of what was agreed.

When urgency is NOT a factor, then sending e-comms is perfectly acceptable. However, expecting, nay demanding that the other party attach urgency to that which you did not consider urgent (or failed to properly apply real urgency by using e-comms) is bloody rude. It’s also ineffective, because the relationship you damage by ‘expecting’ other people to drop everything at your whim will need repairing.

Now, it may be that you’re not the problem, and that those who communicate with you are. In which case, maybe it’s time to start a synchronous communication with them so that they stop expecting your immediate, unquestioned obedience to their diktats.

I am convinced that the mobile generation has resulted in a phenomenon I only used to see with infant children. I was once in a supermarket. At one end of the aisle, a supervisor was chatting to a team member. At the other end of the aisle was another team member – who started shouting the name of one of the other parties, evidently seeking attention despite the fact that the others were already engaged in their own chat. I se it time and time again – people just butt in, never patiently waiting for a suitable pause into which they can insert their desire for assistance with their own issue.

We have begun to expect that, like a mobile phone, people will drop their other conversation and put people – who are present – on hold for us!

I delve deeper into this phenomenon in my book Police Time Management, but for now I’d ask you to consider – what is the appropriate means of communication I should use for ‘this’ situation, and act accordingly. And try not to interrupt people when they are engaged with others – hopefully you will earn their undivided attention by their seeing you not dividing theirs.

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The Key to Success in EVERYTHING. Including the washing up.

This week I have been mostly taken by a concept that the ‘better’ coaching writers espouse as a specific, rather than ‘work it out for yourself’ idea. The oldest writing I find about this is from the 1930s in the name of Napoleon Hill. It was later reframed in 1989 by Stephen Covey, and Jack Canfield provides the same overarching advice in his 2005 book “The Success Principles”. It is an idea that underpins any level of success in business and personal relationships, and without it everything else fails.

Napoleon Hill, paraphrased it thus: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” Covey calls it ‘Be Proactive’ and Canfield calls it ‘Take 100% Responsibility.’ All have the same meaning.

They mean that in order for things to happen, it’s all down to you. You either do it, or you cause it to come about.

I have taught this in personal development classes and often met resistance. It was understandable: in reality, other people and circumstances do have an influence on what we do. In truth, our success relies on us making ourselves relevant, and it relies on us dealing with those external influences. Which is where the resistance loses the argument.

Whatever happens, we have a choice. That choice is to deal with the circumstance, fight it, or accept it. As Covey described it, we have Direct, Indirect, or No Control over what happens to us. Direct Control means we can deal with it ourselves, and overcome the challenge. Indirect Control means either we deal with it in concert with other people, or we nudge it in the direction we wish to go, adapting as we do so. No Control means we smilingly accept it, rather than waste time and emotion fighting the insurmountable.

But we aren’t only talking about severe challenge. We are also talking about little things, small annoyances. I can’t tell you how much emotional effort I find myself putting into the avoidance of a two-minute annoyance! This morning I have hoovered, dusted, stocked, emptied and sorted multiple little things that really have always been someone else’s responsibility. But today, I chose responsibility and it’s all been done.

Have I gone from serious stuff to trivialities? Maybe.

But how about you? What things are you avoiding because they are annoying, in the knowledge that the person responsible is you – but you really don’t want to do them? And is ‘not doing them’ creating the result you want to achieve?

Here’s an example. I am an introvert. I’m reluctant to mix. I have found that most people are: when a group of strangers assemble, there is abundant awkwardness until – I start the conversation and introductions. Me. Shy bloke. Until I, or someone like me, starts the mixing off, it’s awfully quiet. I take 100% (etc.) for communication.

What does this have to do with policing? Everything.

Think of other things: Paperwork. Cleaning. Maintenance. Shopping. ‘That’ conversation’. All yuk jobs, but all necessary for a smoother existence. All or some of which are things which you think you have delegated, but which the delegate ain’t doing.

Of course, I haven’t yet mentioned the moral victory when you make it plain that you’ve briefly, and pointedly, taken responsibility for someone else’s work. Rub it in their faces. Let it be known far and wide.

Sometimes, the mantra ‘I will take 100% Responsibility’ means doing the ‘thing’ so that you can move on from it, and move closer to your desired outcome. Even if that ‘thing’ just means clearing the dishes from the work surfaces you won’t need for three hours – but will now be clean and ready when you get there.

Take charge of as much as possible. Even if you don’t want to do it – do it.

And that really does apply to your policing role, even if you didn’t think so as you read this.

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French Lessons about Stress

At the moment, the Channel Tunnel access is chock-a-block with cars and lorries waiting to travel across to la Belle France, obstructed by the inability of les Francais to provide sufficient staff to man -sorry, resource – their side of the border control posts. As a consequence, X numbers of cars and lorries are having to try and get through X/2 passport checking facilities. Trying to get the normal amount of holiday traffic through half the usual number of access points is creating a blockage. There are only two possible solutions – open the closed posts with more people, or stop doing the checks. Neither of which is feasible in the circumstances.

This is a perfect example of one of the eternal truths – clogged systems create stress.

Recognise the parallel, yet? Yes, it is policing in a nutshell. Notwithstanding the reduction in the number of officers available to work at any given time, the fact is that unlike border crossings that fluctuate with holiday periods, the amount of work police officer – you – are expected to do never fluctuates, and has no controlling pinch-point to manage the flow of incoming ‘stuff’. It is coming whether you like it or not. While some events can be pre-planned, the vast majority of police work (crime, public disorder, traffic incidents and domestic violence) exists wholly outside of your control, and is not normally subject to weather/holidays/seasonal environments or sporting calendars. (There are some exceptions.)

So as bad as the border situation is, when the French get well, the situation will repair itself. But policing incidents ‘as arising’ won’t. Which, in turn, means that if your system for managing your work is clogged, there is no immediate expectation that it will unclog itself.

You need your own system for dealing with the waterfall of work, OR you need the organisation to create a system for you. And guess what? Despite the many reports from over twenty years ago that promote the training of such a dark art as time and task management, I know of no police organisation that trains people in time management (although I understand Devon and Cornwall have adopted a training course that included it, a bit).

Of course it’s a pitch for my book but you are not obliged to buy it.

What I am promoting is the idea that absent the training I think you should be given, you are not prevented from getting such training input yourself. There are books and courses out there (more expensive than mine, he smugly wrote) that will teach you great procedures for managing incoming and ongoing work better than you are managing all of that, now.

Such input can help you prevent the unnecessary clogging, manage the inevitable clogging, and free up some of the stuff that’s creating the clogging, all of which will (I guarantee) reduce the amount of stress that clogging creates.

I’m not sure I can guarantee that the stress will go away – you picked the wrong job for that. But, for example; the stress created by looking at your To Do List and wondering if it will ever go away can be lessened if you realise that having that list creates an element of control. Too many people look at the list and think they have no control, but they’re wrong – having a disorganised list is stressful, but having a considered list, and a process for managing it, is not.

You just need to know why that is so, and proper training can help you with that.

Stamping on a hose blocks it. Squeezing the end of a hose creates a massive jet. So yes, a clogged system creates stress, but knowing how to control that clogging, like any pressurised system, can result in a powerful force coming out of the other end – if you know how to create that.

Get some input.

This is one way.

Go HERE for this.

How the French can teach you about stressed systems.
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How to live on what you earn – Time Management style.

Following the Police Federation Conference there was a lot of media interest in the colleague who stated that her accountant had suggested she quit, work 22 hours a week and claim benefits because she couldn’t live on £40,000 a year. Of course, I don’t know her personal circumstances, but my first thought was – what the h377 is she spending her money on? I never earned that much and was the sole earner for a household of six, but I never (a) screamed poverty (even though I frequently screamed ‘skint’), and (b) could never have afforded an accountant. As I said, though, I do not know her circumstances and as such my knee-jerk response was a bit focused on my experience and not those of serving colleagues.

But.

While the cost of living has certainly rocketed of late, I’m not sure the Retail Price Index takes into account the Starbucks that people take for a drive/walk on the way to and from work, the factoring-in of the price of the less-than-five-year-old cars I see as normal in a police car park, nor the cost of an armful of tattoos – which my brief research suggests is easily £1,000 an armful (£700 for an 8×8 pic).

All of this research and personal experience underlined the fact(?) that people are not taught, in school, how to manage their income. This was a point also raised and mis-reported by MP Lee Anderson recently, where he suggested people were not taught that, nor how to cook. I know I never was, and nor were my children. Life lessons? In school? Heaven forfend, they need to know Welsh and Spanish!

So here is my advice, which I never took because I, too, liked ‘things’ unless and until I couldn’t afford them. But I learned this ugly truth.

There is a time management tool called the Time Matrix. It is divided into four quadrants, where how your time is used is identified by two criteria, Importance and Urgency. It looks like this.

I’ll not insult you by explaining it, although that can be done by reading my book Police Time Management, but as you can see, tasks in each quadrant are identified as (for example) Urgent AND Important, Urgent NOT Important, Important NOT Urgent, and neither.

Now consider your spending habits. What have you bought, recently? Where did that purchase sit? I recognise there are some value judgements to be made, here, but I would respectfully argue that some of the aforementioned purchases (e.g. a new or leased car as opposed to cheaper, paid for older model; tattoos; the latest iPhone; Starbucks other-expensive-luxury-coffee-brands-are-available drinks; nights on the lash) RARELY EVER hit the top half of the Matrix.

If you are struggling, you really have to decide for yourself where economies can be made – and your ego and feeling that self-worth is dictated by what other people think of your car/address/body art/coffee choice should be utterly ignored when making those decisions. Leasing a new car is great, except at the end of the lease period you don’t own a car that is an asset you can sell. Duh!

Until I retired and got my lump sum the average age of my car, by choice AND imposition, was 10-15 years. I got bank loans to pay for a 2k and (even) an £800 purchase of cars, when one car was all we could afford. When we needed two, they were also old. Even now, my mum’s estate paid for my (then) 5-year-old sports estate which I will run until it dies. (Which may be a while as it’s still only done 60,000 miles.) Of course, if I win a lottery, I may go nuts. But not until then. And I never left the UK between 1985 and 2015.

How about a mortgage? If you’re renting, find a house that the same monthly amount will buy (but wait until interest rates shrink). Read and listen to Martin Lewis moneysavingexpert.com stuff. But above all, don’t moan about the cost of living when you’re sitting on something that really was purchased from Quadrant D.

I’m sorry if these suggestions hurt your feelings. You earn money to spend it as you want, in a perfect world. But the facts don’t care about your feelings, and you know in your heart that blunt as I am, what I’ve suggested is common sense.

Think hard. It may not solve your problems in a week, but a new approach to spending will make life a little bit easier over time.

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Don’t Pull Your Own Trigger

(Bit of an add-on to my last blog, but important, anyway.)

It’s the week after Mental Health Awareness Week, which is the UK’s week-long answer to the American Mental Health Awareness Month – maybe a reflection of our shorter attention span or their inability to understand things quickly, who knows?

 During this period I have been inundated with posts on various social media where people have disclosed their struggles with mental health, and I have to admit to being torn. On the one hand, they are struggling. On the other hand, they seem to be saying ‘Look at me, I’ve got it bad’, as if having mental health (stress) challenges is a competitive sport and they’re winning, or at the very least they have got your attention for a minute or more.

Yes, I KNOW that seems unfeeling. But here’s the thing.

If you are genuinely suffering TALK TO SOMEONE. But Twitter isn’t someone. Twitter is a place to get attention.

(Incidentally, if a Twitter ‘friend’ discloses mental pressures, perhaps you should make sure that they WANT you to retweet to complete strangers. Moving on.)

Then I read a tweet from someone who disclosed that a third party had ‘triggered’ her, knowing that he was ‘triggering’ her, and there was, naturally, some sympathy expressed for her situation.

But I have read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and here’s Stephen Covey’s take on ‘being triggered’:

“It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well.”

Covey, Stephen R.. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (p. 95). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.”

I cannot know the poster’s situation. And I did not comment on the tweet, nor would I expect such counsel as this to be welcome. And I certainly don’t find it easy to act upon it, myself. But my own awareness of the idea that I can CHOOSE not to be ‘triggered’ does, occasionally, result in a better response than choosing to be miserable. And this is the advice I would like to offer to the offended (and to the easily offended, but that’s an argument you can’t win with those who are too busy being offended on behalf of those who aren’t offended by what SJWs are offended by).

  1. Choose not to be offended.
  2. Challenge those who are trying to offend you.
  3. Give them one chance to apologise.
  4. If they don’t, escalate it to someone, because these days there is someone to whom it can be escalated.

BUT FIRST, give them the chance to apologise because believe it or not, some people don’t realise they’re being offensive, in part because the rules on being offended have changed since COVID.

I gave a speech a while ago, and I bemoaned the fact that modern police organisations spend more time on diversity training than on criminal investigation training. Two people in the audience took offence. One, a diversity trainer, decided I was attacking diversity – I wasn’t, I was attacking my perception of an over-focus on it – and was really (excuse me) triggered. Her argument was made quite aggressively. She chose to be angry.

The other, a trans woman, was measured, and listened to what I was saying (which included an apology if my words hadn’t accurately expressed my intended meaning). I suggested that most people are good people and didn’t need extensive ‘be nice’ training. She was patient and just said, “Some people need to be taught how to be nice.”

And THAT was the more powerful argument. Made politely, gently, and all in one extremely profound sentence.

Two people, same trigger. Two different responses. And the patient, considered response won my heart.

So don’t ‘be triggered’. Choose your response and feel better for it.

And no, I don’t need to read about it on Twitter.

For more on ‘policing your own stress’ through better self-management, read ‘Police Time Management’ by David Palmer, Retired Fraud Squad and Divisional CID Detective, available HERE on Amazon.

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Stress Annoyance Month

Apparently, it’s Stress Awareness Month – which seems to last twelve. It’s an opportunity for people to pontificate about how wonderful they are at understanding stress when, in reality, they couldn’t give a hoot about that message in marketing and on social media posts when it isn’t that Month. And I have my own take on stress, born of my reading of some excellent works, and it is this.

Stress is self-inflicted.

Okay, that’s a blanket statement and there are a few qualifiers, but in this Twitter-led world of black-and-white, no-one’s interested in those qualifiers.

Stress is a mental and physical response to stimuli, and we have the ability to choose our response because we are intellectual beings with the ability to think about what we think about, so we can decide to think “Wow that bus nearly hit me! I could be DEAD!” or “Wow, that bus missed me! How lucky am I?” Most otherwise healthy people opt for the first response and start a downward spiral that would stop – if they just chose to take control.

Which is the primary benefit of the art that is called Time Management. Yes, managing the way you utilise your time has a great productivity benefit, but there is huge scientific opinion that being in control is the greatest vaccination against stress there could be. Of course, you can’t prevent nasty things happening, and no-one is pretending that making a positive choice is easy – but if you are clever enough to read, you’re clever enough to pause, consider, mull, and then decide that what happened or is happening will not control you – YOU will control your response to the event.

How do I know this is true? I know because not every war veteran gets PTSD, not every depressive commits suicide, some people thrive on being busy, and people can forgive some serious wrongs committed against them. The difference is not the event, it is the ability of the individual to deal, and they deal by taking charge. Some people’s ability to deal may well be compromised by any one of a number of good reasons, and they deserve sympathy, help, treatment where appropriate.

But if a man like Viktor Frankl can survive a concentration camp, and the experience of seeing his family killed by Nazis, you can cope with an excessive workload. And in that poor analogy, you cope by taking charge of the workload, by staring at it and thinking, “Poor Me.” That approach makes the problem bigger because inaction breeds work. The pile gets bigger if you leave it, not smaller.

(Although in my book Police Time Management I do mention an arguably unethical way I did reduce my workloads by inaction. Not sure I could do that, today. But it’s an interesting thought, surely?)

You want to suffer less stress?

Take charge.

End of.

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How To Complete EVERYTHING in Two Minutes

Admit it. There are occasions when you have a task to do, and you spend more time and effort in avoiding it than you would have done in doing it. Everybody I know does it, even the most productive people of all. But those last examples don’t do it anywhere near as often as most of us.

Of course, you ‘ve all heard of procrastination, so I won’t insult you by defining it. That would waste time. (LOL) You already know the meaning of something you routinely do.

The most effective answer is to apply a rule outlined by Getting Things Done author and productivity expert, David Allen. His rule is – if it will only take 2 minutes, just do it now. One caveat – if you have a 5-minute task, then do that if you have five minutes. Basically, the time span of the rule is dictated by your personal circumstances.

“But the things I do will take longer than two minutes!” I hear you cry. I know you thought that because I thought it, too. But here, as Shakespeare would say, is the Rub.

Starting anything always takes less than two minutes. The decision to stop procrastinating and to start taking action is instantaneous. Let me illustrate by example.

If you’re like me, you have a hatred of taking routine statements from witnesses – particularly the routine drivel that the CPS memo has demanded from you. The one that’ll take an hour but has no evidential, procedural or practical value whatsoever, but because the lawyer has stretched a reason for wanting it, you’re stuck with having to take it. You procrastinate. You find excuses to put it off because of more urgent tasks. Then there are night shifts, court commitments, training days and other reasons, and before long that one hour statement has taken two weeks and you haven’t even put pen to paper.

But then you decide to apply the two-minute rule. First moment – decide to do it. Next – find the contact number and call the witness to arrange a time. That’s the job progressed a short way, and you haven’t even left your chair. You have also created an appointment, thus managing that period of time. You are now in control of the job. That is enough to make you feel better about what you have to do. When the time comes for the statement to be made, you assemble the necessary documentation (if you haven’t already organised your ‘stuff’ so there’s always a S9 form to hand), travel and start, and it’s done.

I’ve written before about how small, unfinished joblets like this mount up, and that is one cause of stress. But “I’m too busy” is a poor justification for procrastinating, if procrastination is the reason you’re busy. Work doesn’t go away: left undone, it builds up.

You want to be known as a productivity wizard? Apply the 2-Minute Rule to get progress on all of your tasks and the rest happens almost by magic. (Metaphor stretched, sorry.)

In my book, Police Time Management, I tell of how CID colleagues made a critical mistake in terms of putting work off because more important work came up, thus creating unnecessary personal stress. I always organised my time so that my own work never got put aside for something bigger. I just organised myself so that I could do both. And it wasn’t tiring or tiresome. In fact, it was easy.

It only took two minutes to plan.

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Effective Memo Management

You’d be amazed how badly people deal with incoming mail. Not e-mail – that’s an essay in and of itself, but paperwork, including documentation received through electronic case management systems as well as internal memoranda and general mail. The main problem is a reluctance to deal with it, and that reluctance comes from the fact that you just know that opening it will lead to more work, and you have enough of that already.

This paralysing reluctance to dealing with mail is easily cured. You just need to create and apply a systematic process for dealing with this incoming ‘stuff’. Here are a few hints.

  1. If the memo/letter can be answered in a sentence, write that sentence on the original and send it back. But be polite. I once had a loooonnnngggg memo from a file vettor. I answered each point at the end of each point with comments like ‘attached’, ‘yes’, ‘no,’, and ‘not necessary’. He went ballistic.
  2. If it can be answered with a short e-mail, do that. Better still, if the circumstances permit, use the phone.
  3. If there are multiple tasks associated with the document, treat it as a To Do List of many separate items. This may seem odd, but that approach takes a huge mass of undoability and turns it into a list of completable tasks. The huge ‘build a car’ level memo turns into a ‘buy a tyre’ level of required effort.
  4. If it is a big list, get a manila folder, put the master document into it, and then do the work while inserting the completed work in the same folder, if appropriate. Keep it all together and watch your completion take place before your very eyes.
  5. If any item on the list is itself a big task, break that down into its own To Do List and start working through that.

Above all, do NOT fall into the trap of doing nothing, or managing what you ARE doing so badly that the resultant pile of paper becomes even more psychologically problematical that the original memo justified. Don’t let it fester while more memoranda come in to add to your stress. That, more than anything else, is the biggest time management trap into which so many of my colleagues fell. They thought that putting it off lessened the stress, but that method always creates more stress because our work is always replaced by new work, so incomplete work just builds up unless and until some action is taken.

In my book Police Time Management I go into copious detail about the creation, management and execution of To Do Lists, much more detail than I have put into this article. In fact, 16 pages on lists alone. That sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. What that chapter provides is enough information for you to develop your own approach to managing your workload and your productivity.

In fact, it becomes so easy if you apply it that you’ll wonder why you ever felt stressed about memos. Apart from the sheer stupidity of some of the requests from the CPS that you can’t believe came out of the mind of a qualified lawyer. Sorry, I can’t do anything about those.

Except suggest trying the ‘not doing that’ response I put on that vettor’s memo. Probably why he went bananas…..

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Cheaper than a Jack Reacher novel, and a lot more useful to YOU.

I believe there are a couple of challenges when it comes to convincing people they need ‘time management’ training. First of all, front line officers and staff see the word ‘management’ and think it isn’t for them because it has ‘management’ in the title. They don’t see themselves as managers and think it is a management task, therefore not for them. Secondly, the whole world is now focused on the buzzword ‘leadership’, which implies a hierarchical focus and one that is executed ‘from above’. Neither statement is true.

Tied in with both these misunderstandings is the fact that, as a rule and in my own experience, time management training is usually provided ONLY to higher level supervisors – who can delegate all their tasks (if not their decisions) down the proverbial pecking order. In other words, to the people who AREN’T provided with time management input. Who therefore assume that time management isn’t for them because only bosses get told how it’s done.

Let me change all that.

First of all, you are all leaders, because leadership is a choice, not a position. (S Covey) You can self-lead as much as you can be led by others of higher rank. You can influence, should you take the time to learn how. That is the main purpose of leadership, and many great initiatives have come from the shop floor.

And just as you can lead yourself and decide where you are going, you have to – have to – manage yourself in order to get there.

Which leads me to a third challenge with the term ‘time management’, and that is that you aren’t ‘managing time’, because you can’t. it’s impossible. You can’t take 3pm – 4pm and execute it at 7pm. It’s too late, it’s already happened three hours ago.

So don’t think ‘time management’. Instead, as Charles R. Hobbs and Hyrum W. Smith opined, use the expression ‘Event Control’. And in using that replacement terminology, recognise that it is all about taking what happens to you and choosing how and when you will deal with it.

Of course, some of the ‘event control’ will be dictated by the event itself, and some more will be dictated by systems and protocols and resource availability.

But how you deal with it in terms of your attitude, and where you can mould the way you deal with the current event in terms of all your other priorities, are found in the study of (back to the old term) time management.

My book, Police Time Management, is a 300+, A4 sized, compendium of mindsets, skill sets and toolsets about how to prioritise and execute your massive workload in such a way as to reduce stress, but it also covers self-leadership – about deciding where you want to go and how to go about getting there. It covers your working and personal lives. It’s cheaper than a (non-discounted) Jack Reacher novel and the benefits last much, much longer.

When I was in the job, ‘time management’ made a HUGE difference to my stress levels and to my productivity. I took on projects that weren’t strictly ‘mine’ because I found that I could learn, manage and execute better, all because I had developed a system for doing what had to be done, in the way it had to be done, at the best time for it to be done, without ‘it’ taking control of my ability to do it. (And later made money as a result. 😊 )

And at the same time, I watched other people take ‘emergency leave’ because their heads were about to explode, all because they hadn’t discovered or been taught the benefits of event control training. Which is why I took it upon myself to provide time/event management/control input to my former colleagues by putting all that I had learned into the policing context, and into print.

Because your organisations won’t. But I’m willing to help them if they change their minds……

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DC W.S. Churchill, 2005. How Auto-University Solved a Murder.

I’m not sure if it’s my age, my musical taste or any other issue but it drives me nuts when I am passed by a yoof in a car and all I can discern from the ‘music’ being played inside it is a rhythmic thudding, which is assaulting the occupant’s ears far more aggressively than Napoleon’s Austerlitz cannonades assailed the ears of the Austrian and Russian Armies. These drivers and their passengers WILL suffer poor hearing later, but their inability to actually hear the melody itself is painful now. (Or ‘Right Now’, which is American and Scottish for ‘now’.)

But that isn’t the only sadness that is evident in these circumstances, and the sadness I am about to impart may be one to which you, too, subject yourself, albeit with perhaps a little less gusto.

Music is something to be enjoyed, but there is an alternative sound that I would encourage you to listen to. Words.

I am student of personal development and I have CDs up the wazoo (a word Microsoft Office recognised) about self-improvement (which some may say was wasted money), and productivity. Hence my authoritative tone on those subjects. But when I travel anywhere, they are my go-to source of entertainment, or even infotainment. I regularly drive long distances accompanied by the great thinkers in these fields, where I will listen to whole training programmes. I even possess things called ‘cassette tapes’. Some of you may remember those.

As a result, what I hear through repeated playing gains a secure foothold in my psyche. I can produce some practical quotes, I can summon up speeches on the subjects at the drop of a hat, but above all I am learning.

I once had a DS who used Auto-University as a means to study material for his promotion exams. I anticipate you can get audio training for those exams, but you can always supplement anything purchased by creating your own audio using a book and a smartphone. (And if you can sing the definition of Theft to a well-known ditty, you can “Sing your way to Superintendent.” © )

And why stop at ‘organised’ education through your car’s audio-system? With the way mobile telephones are funded these days most of us can afford to access podcasts on any subject under the sun, and I listen to subjects and opinions that just aren’t getting any play through the main media routes. I fancy it makes for a slightly more objective and informed outlook on life.

And who knows – something you hear may well impact your work. Indeed, one such CD gave me a quote that I read to a murder suspect’s wife as she gave him an alibi. No lie. I had listened to her providing the killer’s alibi with some doubts as to its authenticity, when I used Churchill’s own words. I said, “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”

She paused, thought for a moment and said, “Will I get in trouble if I tell the truth?” Following which she said he’d come home on the relevant night and said he’d need an alibi, and his clothes washed. I tried not to dance around the room.

Of course you should listen to music in your car. It reduces stress and, if you’re like me, you love to belt out a ditty with the greats. I also do karaoke and am available for parties.

But might I make a suggestion? Listen to podcasts and audiobooks on a variety of subjects on your ride into work, and music on the way home. The one will get you ready for a serious approach to your work, the other will take your mind off it.

And as for the way police officers are being portrayed in the left-wing press these days? Ignore it, and as Churchill also said, “Keep Buggering On.”

For more on Police Time Management, please read my book, available HERE.

In-car entertainment is good, but in-car education is, too. And it can be surprisingly useful. Ask the Bargoed Park Killer.
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Push Their Stuff Away With Your Stuff -When You Can.

One of the key psychological barriers to stress-free living is the internal conflict that arises between what others require us to do and what we want to do. Most of the time and for most people, we choose our professions and we love to do what our professions require of us. Unfortunately, what we perceived our professions would require of us are rose-tinted. That is because while the operational element of our professional expectations usually meet our expectations, the administrative, legal and procedural realities don’t.

For example, as a copper I was fully prepared to catch the bad guys and send them forthwith to ‘Er Majesty’s ‘Otel. I probably realised that there would be some paperwork involved – I’d seen the files on Jack Regan’s desk in The Sweeney. But between 1986 when one piece of paper was occasionally all that was required for a pre-CPS guilty plea to a public order offence, to 2019 when I had to write War and Peace every time I spoke to a member of the public, the non-operational burdens soured my early professional expectations. And fun.

There are numerous reasons why all this happened, but one thing remains certain – a lot of the bars to enjoyment of our work result from new expectations laid upon us that are outside of our control.

And this was something I realised this week when I was feeling miserable. I was writing some journal notes, and found myself asking wondering why I wasn’t getting some of the results I wanted. I found that my thinking processes were jumbled, frantic, messy and disorganised. And that’s when it hit me.

I’m so busy thinking about other people’s stuff that they aren’t being displaced enough by MY stuff.

My focus on problems outside of my control was preventing me giving due consideration to the things I CAN do something about – but the changing of focus from THEM to ME is constantly thwarted by the attention seeking demands placed upon me by others. Even when I am finally giving myself the attention I deserve (and tell me this doesn’t happen to you) someone or something interrupts that train of thought and my brain moves its focus there, instead.

And what about when that interruption is ‘someone’? They come into the room and start explaining their discovery, demand, dilemma or whatever, without even a ‘have you got a minute?’. This is, I find, particularly routine withing familial relationships. Don’t you just feel obliged to grin and move your attention to them, just to be polite?

I guess the answers are to know what is important to you as an individual, and to be willing, when necessary, to state clearly that you’re busy and not willing to be interrupted, thank you. The exact words may be softer depending on the situation or relationship, but a verbal ‘Keep Out’ is the best way to retain a sense of mental control and focus on what you need to be doing now. Assuming that what you are focusing on is something that warrants that attention because it is truly important and (in the moment) requires your attention more than the relationship might.

And if the situation allows, a closed door is the softest way to say Keep Out. It’s funny, but if a door is closed, it rarely gets knocked or opened unless the interruption is truly important.

It’s a minefield, I know.

But if you want to give important things the mental attention they need, you have to prioritise them over other things that are less deserving. You have to put you first, whenever you can.

Getting other people’s stuff done first is nice, but if you never get your own needs met ….. Mental Health Awareness Week (month, year) is your only refuge.

For more on the subject, visit https://policetimemanagement.com .

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Help! I need input from those ‘young in service’ officers and staff.

Are you a relatively young-in-service officer, or a fresh member of the civilian support staff? If so, I’d love some feedback.

As a veteran in more than one sense of the word, my own experience of managing my time and productivity is based on a history that started when we had a single breasted, belted and multi-pocketed suit, a stick to defend ourselves and a whistle to decorate our breast pocket. Yes, we had radios. I’m not quite that old. There were some advantages, though.

 Owing to the reality that the fastest non-radio communication was a fax machine, we had time. No-one expected an immediate response to anything. They left you to it, and you did it. Statistics required laborious effort to collate figures, and so they were more ‘broadstroke’ than they became.

It ended with smartphones, instant communications and internet access, all the productivity hacks to make life easier – and a world that was busier than ever before. Every taks was measured and sub-divided and assessed through a number of prisms, so that you could tell who was detecting which kind of crime compared to anyone else in the team, the division, the force, cross-border and inter-force. How long it took and what they missed. No hiding place.

And more criticism, less understanding and more (arguably) unnecessary accountability than ever.

Yet still only the ’40-hour week’ in which to do all that was asked, and to maintain records so that other people could hit you over the head either with those figures, or when you hadn’t provided the data they could hit you with.

So my take on time management in the police service may seem a little out of date. But I don’t think so. I don’t think so because my methods are about an approach, not the tools.

For example, on a podcast yesterday I heard it said that people blame e-mail for interrupting, directing and overcomplicating their working lives. And the podcaster made the observation that this was like blaming the hammer because you have one too many cabinets to build this morning. It isn’t the tool – it is the mental approach to the work that makes the difference between happy and sad, productive and slothful, quality and quap. (J. Ross)

My book, Police Time Management, is as much about the mental approach to managing your time and life as it is about specific processes for using (for example) your smartphone to best effect and not just for tweeting. It’s about a method that starts with ‘why’, then ‘how’. Instead of ‘must I?’.

BUT I really want to know what the challenges facing new officers and staff actually are, just to be sure that the approach I propose is as effective as I would wish.

Towards the end of my career, someone in my office expressed wonder about how new officers coped with all the expanding pressures, practices and protocols being heaped upon them. I responded, “This is their normal. This has always been the way it is, for them. In ten years they’ll be asking the same question about their new colleagues.”

So I am asking that question of you, today.

How do you cope with your workload? How well trained are you in terms of Information Technology, for example? I know that MS Windows was introduced in the mid-1990s and I have still to  receive police training in its use.

And –  this is important – I want to know what methods you are being taught that helps you cope with your workload. If any.

Let me know at ipitrain@aol.com, or through LinkedIn.

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Brief Backwards – Put your Team before the Organisation

That’s a title that most managers would consider an anathema to good policing, but it really isn’t a threat to good order and effectiveness. In fact, I would argue it will enhance effectiveness big time. I shall explain.

The traditional operational briefing process starts with what’s new and needs attention, followed by some justified sighing and pleading on the part of the team whose members have just had yesterday’s priorities stamped on by today’s new priorities. This displeasure can be exacerbated if the teams are subject to different leaders every day, as I know some CID teams can be – DS Smith does things that way, but today DS Brown is team leader and she does things another way. It is an unfortunate fact of life that despite all the management training people are (not) given, there is a tendency, an unconscious bias (ooh, buzzword) towards decisions that favour some over others. But that’s not why you came.

I have a suggestion. Instead of leading with the bad news, open with a desire to see what the workload already is. When the team assembles, whether face to face or over Teams (what was wrong with Zoom?), don’t start with what is happening and needs attention – ask the team what they are dealing with and what their needs are. This has two effects.

Perhaps the most important, the team feels that its needs have been taken into consideration whatever happens next. That has a massive psychological benefit. People who are heard, listen. They feel so much better having been heard that they will then actively help to resolve the oncoming storm.

Which is the second benefit. Once people have been able to air their needs they become responsive to the organisation’s needs. Of course, the organisation could have demanded attention – but by identifying and acknowledging the teams needs first, the organisation engenders the use of patience, understanding, initiative and positivity by the team – and they start solving the prioritisation problem that has been presented.

In effect – and you’ll be amazed if you try it – the work on today’s priorities gets done in better humour and more effectively, while the team works its priorities around the organisations and BOTH get the appropriate amount of attention.

Just by swapping the order of attention from us to you, to you then us. Same, even better results, and happier team members.

Or you can just take the short cut, make your demands and then wonder why you spend so much time chasing people up for their failure to do the things your re-prioritisation method prevented them from doing.

I read a lot of LinkedIn posts about putting people first. I notice that a lot of policing professionals are on LinkedIn. I assume that they look at it now and then and read all about how putting your staff first is the Branson Way (Covey did it first) and happy staff create better results. Then, in the interests of efficiency, they make urgent demands that are not necessarily urgent, and could be requests if they just used their language and patience.

I had bosses like that, men and women who were leaders as much as they were managers, who got the organisations’ priorities done while recognising and allowing for the fact that, the very day before, they’d produced demands that their team members were still needing time to work on.

Now, if I can just convince the CPS to think along these lines….

For more on this idea, buy Police Time Management for £12.99 at Amazon. 300 A4 pages for that price…… beats Blackstone’s.

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I Told You So. But You Do Have Time. Happy New Year.

Well, did it happen? Did you put things off ‘until the New Year’ that are going to bite you this coming week? Or, if you didn’t put things off, are other people now chasing you up to take action on things that they could have asked you to do weeks ago but procrastinated because “You know, it’s Christmas”? Either way, shame. ITYS.

If either of those circumstances have arisen then things that were Important but Not Urgent are now Urgent. Congratulations! Now, your own Important but NOT Urgent projects just got firmly sent to the proverbial back burner while you engage with other peoples’ urgencies because of their unconscious (or occasionally deliberate) adherence to the ‘nothing gets done between the 20th of December and 4th of January’ approach to work.

All is not lost. I recognise that this depends on your position in the organisation, and/or your ability to formulate the words and sentences needed to engage with the following suggestion, but here it is, anyway.

“Unfortunately, your self-created urgency does not trump the importance of the tasks I didn’t put off until ‘after Christmas’ (air quotes needed if you’re in a face-to-face) and I will deal with your urgency at the appropriate time.”

You can amend this.

The less sassy version is this: “When do you need that done by?” if your relationship is a good one, and assuming that the request is not being made by a bully, then a deadline will be identified that means that while ‘now’ was implied in the request, ‘when you can manage it but before X’ is the new default. NOW you can manage your work with the new responsibility catered for, and without creating other pressures.

In this job, urgencies area a given. If you’re front-line, emergencies area daily event. If you’re fron office, urgencies are all you get because you can’t plan for the next attendee and their individual problems until they’ve made it to the front of the queue.

That doesn’t mean you surrender. It doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t plan. It means that you have to develop a strategy that means you can provide the appropriate response in the appropriate manner at the appropriate time. One way of doing that is to try, as far as is meaningfully possible, to deal with each event/thing as far as you reasonably can until its ‘next step’ is either out of your control, unreasonable given the next demand, or passed (correctly) into someone else’s care.

(That, dear Ops Room staff, does not mean ‘adding to someone’s list’ (see m’book) if they are busy. It means keeping it on your list until there is someone available. It’s just pixels on a  screen; it’s not an incoming Asagai chucked by a closing Zulu.)

Time management is Task Management. Yes, some tasks are drop-everything emergencies. Unfortunately, our work creates an incorrect psychological imperative that makes everything a NOW task when nine times out of then it really isn’t. Just take your time to allocate the appropriate level of attention to things rather than simply thinking if you don’t do it now, all the other stuff coming will get you.

There. Is. Enough. Time.

As you may have noticed when you prepare for a leave period and manage to tidy all your work up before you go home. Funny, that.

M’Book. Available at AMAZON. (Click the link)

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Christmas, all year long. Intrigued? Read on….

It’s a dichotomy, is what it is. This is you, during this period.

You have a deadline, the 25th of December. You have a list of relationships, a list of resources/items to acquire in respect of each. Some will need getting before others due to the need to anticipate delays in delivery. They will be obtainable from different sources. So you list the items, plan their collection – day, distance, transport means, funding as necessary. Then you execute the plan and trust that your operation will be a success. In between, you will be attending various ‘meetings’ of varying social circles and communities. Your kids, family, friends, customers (if any) and colleagues will all get their presents, or your attendance, on time. All this needs organising, and you do a grand job.

Then you go to work, and you emit the plaintive cry, “There’s so much to do and I can’t get a grip on it all!”

Hypocrites.

When you want to do something or feel obliged to put yourself out because the season demands it, you create and execute on plan to ‘get it done’.

When it’s work, it’s ‘all too much’.

I would argue it’s exactly the same.

You implement exactly the methodology for buying Christmas presents and attending social events as you do for your work, if you think about it. But for some reason you don’t let interruptions put you off your pressie-collecting. And drinkies – nothing will get in your way (unless you want it to, wink-wink).

I can’t do much about your mental approach to a workload, but I can tell you that there is a natural inclination to planning that most people can utilise to good effect, and there is a ‘master’ version for planning which is (a) based on the natural model and is therefore (b) easy to learn and implement if you choose to learn it.

If you are flummoxed by ‘stuff’, then it is in part because you either don’t realise that there is a natural planning method, or because you know there is such a method and you simply cannot, in the moment, be bothered to utilise it.

Yes, I’m nagging. And people only nag because the naggee simply isn’t acting on the sage advice they’ve been offered. They like the status quo, even when they don’t like the status quo. Well, whatever you want….. 😊

Use your common sense to make a plan to deal with things, or use your intellect to discover and utilise the ‘higher level’ of organisation that life management training can provide.

And don’t just have a Happy and Organised Christmas – have a content and well-managed LIFE.

Happy Christmas and a Well-Planned, Effective New Year to all My Colleagues, Past and Present.

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I did this today because it’s Christmas. Unlike you, I bet.

Right this minute, I KNOW you are procrastinating. I know this because it is the 6th of December. From pretty much this first Monday of the month through until the first Monday of the New Year, you will be using the expression “Let’s leave it until after Christmas” to justify not doing something, today, that would be better done, today. Even the two minute joblets.

Let me tell you what that means.

It means that all those joblets will mass, like a cancerous tumour, to give you nasty headaches from the 2nd of January, that’s what. That is because while your heart is telling you it will be alright, and your mind is justifying it, the world, the people in it and fate are all conspiring to have accidents, commit crimes, engage in arguments, overdo the alcohol (leading to the previous three problems) and generally create more problems to add to the ones whose solutions you are deferring for ‘later’ when you have some time.

You do it, the CPS does it, the Courts do it.

And then they all blame each other for their own procrastination strategies, all of which are based on the ‘good intent’ of managing their current workload better by slowing down the rate at which they deal with it. (Breathe.)

Every decision you put off, and every bogus action you add to someone else’s task list, doesn’t mean less work. It just means the same work gets done later.

And Christmas, like no other time of year, seems to cause more of this activity. And for the life of me I can’t think why.

You can’t shop for presents while you put the work off. You can’t put the decorations up at home, you can’t go to the pub any earlier. Your work day stays the same length right up until, and occasionally including Christmas Eve (where the occasional early finish may happen. Yet there you are, on the telephone, making an ‘appointment’ for January the umpteenth. And if you’re like the worst offenders, you cater for the deferred by making those appointments later in January than you otherwise might have (unethically) done.

Which means if you have a busy Christmas they’ll get done in February, and if you have a slack, uneventful one, you find you have nothing productive planned, anyway. Which is a paradox but you can’t rely on people behaving during the festive month-that-used-to-be-two-days.

You know, as do I (because I did it), that doing the work as soon as reasonably practicable after it arises is Best Practice. Always was, and always will be.

So keep your action lists up to date, do the small jobs the instant they come about, and plan blocks of time for the bigger stuff. Get them done as soon as you can because the next great big huge and humungous challenge/project/Major Crime is approaching, and your eyes will be ripped off the ball.

This is best practice because you know that those little tasks will still need doing, will become urgent because another department has decreed that their figures are more important than your service. And then instead of doing something you enjoy doing, you’ll be tied up involved in executing what you could have done before Christmas.

You know it makes sense.

Happy Christmas, folks!

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Utilising ‘Nothing To Do’ Time

Yes, I know. “What’s he on about, when do we have nothing to do?”

More than you think. For example, front office duties at night (assuming yours hasn’t been shut) or on early weekend mornings; scene guard ‘after hours’; that moment when you’ve arrived early for an appointment; waiting around in Court to give evidence just before you’re sent home again; that sort of time. Time when you can’t really commit to something that will take massive amounts of attention and input because the interruptions are inevitable or you simply don’t have the resources (although I again acknowledge that smartphones and individual-issue laptops do make some work possible).

You do have moments when you have gaps. Maybe not many, but you do.

How to fill them?

Use your imagination, first. On the basis that such times exist, you need a strategy that you can apply at a moment’s notice, because if you have to think about the gap too long, it’s over and the time’s been wasted. Decide, in advance, what you can do in those moments.

Here are some suggestions, but you need to use YOUR imagination, not mine.

  1. Make telephone calls that need making but aren’t necessarily planned for; for example, update the witnesses you didn’t have time to update in your original plan for the day, or make appointments that need to be made.
  2. Study. If you don’t have a study manual handy you can still go to the Web and read articles on your chosen area of study.
  3. Solve other problems. Again, Google and YouTube are amazing sources of education and personal development. I stress, here, that better use of your time does not include watching Strictly on iPlayer. LEARN. (It’s easier to explain surfing Legislation.go.uk, than it is using the iPlayer, too.)
  4. Meditate. Listen – I’m not the greatest advocate of ye Mindfulness obsession but having quiet time can recharge your batteries if you’re not quite the Type A productivity obsessive.
  5. Carry a book in your ‘stuff’. A thin one, maybe, one that educates or informs.
  6. Practice public speaking. Might make you look a bit weird of you’re talking to yourself at the scene of a murder but keep your voice down and imagine making a properly constructed presentation on an interesting case you’ve dealt with.

There is ALWAYS something you can be doing that isn’t just idly thinking about life in general.

That said, perhaps you’re really over-worked (or just think you are – which is psychologically the same thing with the same effect) and you need a chill. In which case, see (4) above as your first port of call. Or you could use affirmations – just repeat a mantra to yourself that serves you: for example, some staid old tenets, “This, too, shall pass”, “I am capable of this,” “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”. They may seem cheesy, I know, but these sayings invite your brain to think about HOW to make yourself more capable, better and more content. Which is the idea.

You never have nothing to do IF you have a sense of purpose, a personal vision or sense of where you want to be that you aren’t, already. You serve that vision by making sure that what you are doing in the moment pulls you towards it, rather than away.

Carpe Diem, as they say. Every Diem.

Why you get stressed at work

A strong reason for being stressed at work is the conflict that some work creates with your personal values.

In my time, I joined a police force, and paperwork was there, but kept to a practical minimum. Then the CPS took over, and the amount of paper required for a simple case went up from one page to six or more. When I finally left in 2019, Lee Child would have had trouble writing novels as big as the CPS wanted for the simplest assault.

So my value of ‘arresting bad guys’ was compromised by ‘writing a lot of things about bad guys’. If I wasn’t out and about catching villains, I got bored/stressed.

And bad guys included drug users. So when the police started giving them needles (what, potential dangers to searching officers, I hear you think) my values were again conflicted.

And if I’d been tasked with ‘allowing’ terrorist sympathisers to march on the Cenotaph while patriots were to be arrested for defending it –  I honestly think I’d have walked off plot and resigned.

Things changed, but my values didn’t change with them.

You may suggest that I should have adapted – but that’s not really how values and integrity work.

Integrity means you believe in something enough to stand for it. Values are different for everyone, and two people may interpret the same values ‘word’ differently, but they are important to you, to me, to everyone. Granted, you may have to suppress your beliefs for perfectly good reason, but suppressing them and acting in conflict with them are two different beasts.

When you feel stressed, consider this question:

What is it about this stressful situation that is in conflict with what I believe?

You may find the answer and act in such a way as to walk away from it, challenge it, or grudgingly comply.

But there is a second question you could ask.

What about this situation could I interpret as being totally in keeping with my values?

And here is the paperwork argument. An excellent piece of form filling could be the difference between a potential offender getting off scott-free, or  charges being brought and even a guilty plea being offered.

In which case, the value ‘arrest (and prosecute) bad guys’ is met through that annoying activity.

What do you find you have to do that conflicts with what you really want to be doing, and how can you deal with that conflict?

It might just mean reinterpretation of the activity in the context of what you really believe in.

And if the genuine answer is, “It never will”, start looking for a way to escape ever having to do it again.

For more, buy the Book.

The Training You Missed During A Toilet Break

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.

Overcome the Confusion that Police Work Creates

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!)

A ‘Corporate’ Idea ALL Teams Can Use

Mastermind Group. There’s an expression that smacks of management speak – but only if you’re one of those people prejudiced against an idea before you’ve even considered it.

A Mastermind Group is supposed to be a group of individuals of experience, intellect, academia, or other background whose opinions are sought on a project. The ideal Mastermind Group comes from a variety of backgrounds, each bringing an alternative perspective on the matter under discussion. They are utilised in business a lot, particularly entrepreneurial start-ups. Identify the potential problems, challenges and opportunities by seeking input from those who have boldly gone before.

What does this have to do with police time management?

Consider this: every team briefing COULD be a Mastermind Group, if you just consider this:

The people around the table all have different experiences, backgrounds and pastimes. They’ve read different books. They’ve been on different courses both within and beyond the organisation. They all have, potentially, brilliant alternative perspectives and abilities that they bring to the table.

Even if your briefing table is full of probationers which I gather is becoming the norm, what they did before they started serving may have a nugget of value for the matters at hand.

Ellie was a paralegal and knows how the defence lawyers think and work: Jimmy was a tyre mechanic and actually understands the definition of a defective tyre* and can explain it to others; Tahir was a social media specialist and can open-source investigate the pips out of a Facebook account; Jean was an accountant and those bank account records you have taken during a search need interpretation. You get the idea.

The people around the table have one thing in common – policing. But they equally have a diversity of experience and knowledge that could help the rest of the team if it is just acknowledged and utilised. Even the newbie, who might well have the most useful insight on something but is too shy to put themselves forward – until asked.

This potentially results in the saving of massive amounts of time seeking out ‘specialists’ who are far too important and busy to help. (Some are too busy, in fairness. None are too important.)

Find out what your team’s potential Mastermind Group input could be, if you haven’t already.

You’d probably be amazed at their enthusiasm if you gave them time to contribute.

(*I was once told what to write in a statement about a bald tyre and replied to the memo that I couldn’t say that in evidence because I didn’t understand it, it was so technical.)