You may think you’re a Widget-Cranker. You’re not.

And you aren’t (necessarily) an executive, with a secretary – sorry, personal assistant – to manage your tasks and appointments. You fall somewhere in between, and if you compare yourself to other professional service providers you’ll find that you can easily match your working style to other professionals whose work requires constantly managing appointments, tasks, interruptions etc,. For example, like a lawyer or a doctor.

But unlike them, without a dedicated administrator to manage those events. Or the money. When YOU get a case, YOU have to do the paperwork, YOU have to file it, YOU have to manage your appointments, YOU are responsible for your diary. Just YOU.

And at the same time, EVERYTHING that goes wrong will be YOUR FAULT.

That’s your policing existence. All the responsibility and accountability, but none of the physical assistance.

How do most colleagues manage this? With a To Do List which, despite the ever present mobile device is more than likely on a bit of A4 paper.

Regular reader of my posts will say I am banging on, but I make two ripostes to that criticism.

  1. Not everyone has read the earlier posts: and
  2. If YOU have read it and are still managing by A4, handwritten, poorly-managed To Do List – you aren’t heeding the advice.

As a front-line officer or entry-level staff member you might think you’re a widget-cranker, who just does whatever she is told, turns up, cranks widgets for the amount of contracted time and then goes home. You are unbelievably wrong. You are a thinker, a knowledge worker, someone whose opinions are important and impactive upon any given result. And when you aren’t at work, do you ‘crank’ your hobbies, relationships, social life, fitness efforts and so on? No. you don’t crank widgets at home.

What system do YOU use to manage yourself – at work or at home? Seat of the pants? Does that work for you?

“I like my freedom!”, you say. Freedom to be interrupted, inconvenienced, and perhaps punished for exercising freedom when duty was required from you? Thought not.

Planning serves freedom. It creates time you can use for yourself because all the duties have been ‘done’.

Bite the bullet. Learn and apply some kind of personal planning system. In a sense you already do that, but it is ad hoc, disorganised and precisely not systematic. It is the opposite of what you require from other professionals – it is not ‘excellent’, considered, progressive or professional. Would you like your pilot to stick his feet up on the dashboard, take off when he feels like it, go where he wants? Would you want your doctor to guess what is wrong with you, or go through a considered and systematic diagnostic process? Would you like your optician to just give you her glasses – after all, if they work for her they can work for you, she’s the expert.

Systems work. If you work a system.

Go look one up. (Hint….. http://policetimemanagement.com )

Overcoming Procrastination

Right, in 500 words, how to overcome procrastination.

Why do you procrastinate? Four reasons. 1. You don’t know what to do. 2. You know what to do but don’t know how. 3. You know what to do but fear doing it. 4. You know what to do but just don’t want to.

Cures.

  1. You don’t know what to do. There is no embarrassment in not knowing what to do. That’s what training is for! More often than not, people around you will acknowledge that a lack of training and/or experience is something that they, themselves have, er, experienced. Most people are willing to help, provided you time it right!
  2. You know what, but not how. There are resources aplenty in work and on the internet. I have recently got into the habit of doing my research for ‘things I don’t know’ through YouTube. Video instruction abounds! But you have colleagues, supervisors and whole departments that you can use as a resource to find out what you need to do. You ask if your computer isn’t doing what you want it to do – ask how other things work, as well.
  3. Fear – false expectation appearing real. You don’t fear doing, you fear failing. First of all, if you don’t do, you WILL fail. As Gary Player said, “I miss 100% of the shots I don’t try.” You fear making a mistake? We all do, that’s a common way of learning. You fear taking the time? Most people discover that ‘doing’ is a lot quicker than ‘not doing’, by some margin. In my book ‘Police Time Management’ I promote ‘Do It Now!’ as a motto that overcomes delay and improves productivity, because I discovered that putting things off means they build up for when I am REALLY busy – and as you are always REALLY busy you’re creating a rod for your own back by procrastinating when you need not. 10 pages just on that idea alone.
  4. You just don’t want to do it? You work in a service-orientated emergency-focused environment. The truth is that what you don’t want to do will always need doing, unfortunately. You really must accept that, and then use solution 3 to get past the immovable obstacle that ‘not wanting to’ creates.

To be frank, the only time procrastination works is when what you are expected to do – really shouldn’t be done at all. I’ll be frank. Such things are rare in policing. Every department thinks its priorities trump everyone else’s. but you can justifiably delay some truly useless stuff until you have a genuine ‘free’ hour to do the rubbish all at once – the PNC justifications, the follow-up RTC forms, the additional, purely procedural statement for a court case that’s still months away, and so on. But you must be good at assessing what you can delay, and for that reason my book also contains a chapter on making such an assessment.

Buy my book.

There – 500 words exactly. Bet you procrastinate counting them.

Like it or not, investigators are Project Managers.

Are you investigating anything? If you’re a police officer or a civilian investigator then the answer is, “Of course I am, what else do you think I do all day?”. And what is an investigation? It is a project. A project, as defined by the Project Management Institute, is a ‘temporary endeavour with a start and finish undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.’ You can take up the semantics, but while the finish may be a court date or ‘never’, this definition applies.

But you’re not a Project Manager. You haven’t been trained to manage projects. Well, you have been told how to conduct investigations (a bit), but you haven’t had it put to you as a project – to which Project Management method can (to some degree) be applied. But I’m not going to do that here – this article is about why projects fail, and therefore what challenges you can expect in investigations and other police work.

The challenges are routine. They happen in all projects. They include but are not restricted to:

Lack of communication – over-reliance on immediate responses to e-mail for a start. We used to use the phone, and although we now have one at our hands all the time we still tend to communicate through a medium that invites delay. Not to mention that it creates a HUGE disclosure nightmare…… Clarity in demands is an essential skill.

Unrealistic timelines – everything in policing has an artificial, poorly considered deadline. All paper must be submitted by the end of a tour, even if it isn’t going anywhere else for 3 days over a weekend.

Too many competing priorities – there is a huge difference in prioritisation capability between the front line and a specialist department, but their approaches are pretty much expected to be the same.

Poor planning – precisely because there are too many priorities, managing them is a problem. Particularly as (my beef here) no one is taught how to manage them. They are just expected to do that.

It is true that we have Standard Operating Procedures, which outline actions that we undertake that smooth the flow – do this, then that, consider this, dismiss that, and so on. But these SOPs are a template within which the aforementioned challenges arise. No SOP can address every problem, and new problems create new SOPs for the next job, which creates its own challenges ad infinitum.

All that said, though, there are some things an individual can do to mitigate all the above challenges.

Communication – use the phone, backed up by other media. Set a task, explain the expectation, agree deadlines based on two-way communication and respect for each others’ needs. (Chapter 12)

Competing priorities – objectively look at the competing tasks and assess them properly. Use Must, Should and Could assessment, and act accordingly. And be willing to do those Coulds in the gaps between the Musts and Shoulds, when you can (as outlined in the book), because they never, ever go away. (Chapter 4)

Timelines – understand the systems within which the timelines exist and use that knowledge. Plan that ‘over the weekend’ paperwork for arrival in the post tray for Monday, if doing it on Friday is a challenge. (Chapter 11)

Planning – learn to manage your time. No one teaches this properly, so invest some time and money and learn some methods for ensuring you can do and be your best as much as possible. People who say, “I don’t have time” frequently do so while chatting at the proverbial water fountain. (Chapter 18 and all the others, too.)

And if you really want to delve more deeply, read about Project Management Method. You might find that doing so frees up time so you can spend a bit more stress-free time on Wants while getting the Musts (etc) done effectively and efficiently.

Be Even MORE Specific With Your Goals.

We’ve all heard or read about the mnemonic SMART when it comes to goal setting, so I won’t go into that. You’ve probably all set specific (etc) goals in accordance with the instructions on the box, and you may have ensured that the goal is your goal and not somebody else’s (which is a primary cause of goals being missed), but then you may have later wondered (as I have) why you still haven’t made much progress on your objective. There is one simple reason.

Your plan isn’t as specific as your goal.

I am shortly going to undertake reassessment on a qualification I need in order to train others in my favourite pastime, advanced driving. Part of that assessment may include a knowledge/theory check and so I am required to get my head in the books and ensure I know the whys behind the whats and the hows. And despite listing study on my daily task list I was finding it hard to actually do the reading. And even when I did get the book out, the results were a little ad hoc – a page one day, three the next, all while keeping an ear out on the TV news and watching my dog watch me in case I moved and it might be walkies.

Then I changed tack. Instead of listing ‘Study’ on the list, I specifically wrote down what I was going to study – chapter 1, or pages 35-45, or the section on tourism signage, or to ‘learn IAMSAFE by heart’. This specificity meant that not only did I have a ‘starting’ objective, I also had an ‘ending’. And I find that to be a surprisingly effective planning and execution approach.

This method also bears some relationship to the successful Getting Things Done approach, designed by David Allen of www.davidco.com. He identified how big projects occasionally stall because they are too big for the mind to compute, insofar as ‘clean the garage’ is just too big a job to want to do. His mantra is the question, “What’s the next action?” and in the case of the garage it might just be ‘move that pile of spare parts from there to there’, which is a much smaller and less onerous job that clearing the whole garage.

In the majority of cases, that ‘one next action’ approach works like this: your next action may be ‘research Fred’s phone number’, which is easy – but immediately leads to ‘phone Fred’ which also adds ‘make the appropriate appointment’ which means you’re already well into whatever it was you needed to do with Fred. If Fred was going to help you clear the garage by providing a skip, looking up his number leads easily and inexorably towards an empty space into which you can actually drive your car.

In my case, ‘Study Roadcraft’ meant looking at a 260 page book. ‘Study chapter 6’ means 5 pages and a more easily focused 10 minutes or so.

This approach works on big projects, too. And psychologically, the small and incremental successes of each minor task is immensely satisfying inwardly, while exceptionally productive outwardly.

‘Think Specifics’ is an approach to every goal you have, that works. How about ‘find a recipe for a satisfying 250 calorie meal’ as a taskette that leads to ‘buy ingredients’ which leads to ‘eat for lunch routinely’ which leads to “Wow, you’ve lost so much weight!” (Three stone in lockdown I have lost. Jedi Smug Mode.)

How specific can you go with your longer term goals?

Use this form to find out.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

A question often asked in jest – in fact, a question usually asked only in jest – but a valuable enquiry all the same. It’s a valuable time management question. It’s a valuable question because asking it produces answers, and those answers create the opportunity to plan in such a way and to such a degree that the worst doesn’t happen. Or, if it does, its effects are lessened.

In 2006 I went to my dentist and casually mentioned a swelling on my palate. He x-rayed it and sent it off. I was then summonsed to an oral surgeon who diagnosed a swollen saliva gland and said he’d cut it out to stop it becoming something nastier. He cut it out and arranged weekly visits to change the dressing left in the big ‘ole he left behind. For the next 3 weeks I dutifully attended, and afterone of those visits a colleague said to me, “Aren’t you worried it was something awful?”

I replied, “Never worry until you have to.”

At the third visit the doctor said a biopsy revealed Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and I had an appointment at the nearest cancer specialist hospital ‘next week’. He must have thought I wasn’t listening because I took it so well. Halfway down the hospital car park I felt my knees going. When I got back to the Major Incident Room set up for the force’s biggest ever murder enquiry I was deathly quiet, although no-one mentioned it. I went home and gave the news to my family. Understandably, there were tears. I also pondered the appointment ‘next week’, thinking ‘What’s the rush?’ and declining to consider the answer!

Then my time management persona kicked in. and I went back to ‘Never worry until you have to’.

My specialist visit allayed some of my concerns and treatment was successful. I only told one supervisor, because I hate the hushed tones that accompany such news if it becomes a ‘thing’. People actually whisper about colleagues’ life-threatening illnesses when they aren’t even there. Which is weird.

But I also made a ‘plan’ about any worst-case scenario, which included taking the view that if nothing else, I’d been given notice and could ensure that things I needed – and wanted – to do, got done. Which is quite cathartic.

Since then I have ‘suffered’ a few professional challenges, and on every occasion I have asked the question and considered the statements – “What’s the worst that could happen?” and “Never worry until you have to” and as a result I have made decisions and I have taken actions that have served me well. Others may disagree, but I have been content with, and dignified about the decisions I have made.

Those may be ‘ultimate’ situations where the question applies, but the same can apply to any circumstance within which you find yourself. It can apply to any incident, and if you ask it early enough you can even deal with the event quickly and effectively to the degree at which ‘worry’ isn’t even an issue.

In the Seven Habits it’s called ‘Begin with the End in Mind’, and this promotes consideration at the outset of any venture/event/incident/required decision as to what is needed and what could be done to get the outcome desired. It can even apply to Life, as discussed in Chapter 19 of my book.   

I don’t want to promote ‘worry’. But ask yourself this – “What do I want, when do I want it, so how will I make it happen?” Even if worry is the initiating factor, answering those questions can turn that worry into effective action. Which is far better, don’t you think?

Self Respect and Time Management

I subscribe to an e-mail from a company marketing their wares as they pertain to time management and yesterday they sent me an email which opened, “Getting organized is a sign of self-respect.” That’s very much, in a nutshell, the raison d’etre for what I promote in this blog and m’book. Early work by Charles R. Hobbs, reproduced and expanded upon by Hyrum W. Smith and delved deeply into by Stephen R. Covey, reinforced the idea that being in control is a precursor to a life of reduced stress and heightened self-esteem. Therefore, one of the ways in which we can create and reinforce self-respect is to decide, here and now, that we will seek to be in control as much as we can within the reality that life represents, with its challenges, influences, experiences and – other people.

‘Self-respect is something that you possess when you believe you deserve it.’ Well, that is partly true. It is partly true in the sense that psychologically we are prone to putting ourselves down, but it is false in the sense that you can choose to respect yourself. You can decide that ‘you are worth it’, which means deciding to treat yourself properly. That means many things, and those ‘many things’ are included under the headings of self-leadership and self-management.

Once you choose self-respect you can also decide to ensure that, at the very least, you aren’t going to be the one to undermine it. You decide that what you do will be the best you can do for you, and that means living in accordance with your personal values (chapter 18), pursuing goals that represent and fulfil those values (chapter 19), and managing yourself in terms of how you spend your time in the framework of life (the rest of the book). Click one of the links, they all go to the same place. 😊

Whenever I see scruffy, I see a lack of self-worth. Even those who dress that way ‘cause it’s the trend are following rather than leading. There is a well-known YouTube video where a Special Forces Admiral promotes the idea of ‘just’ making your bed in the morning – because that first personal setting of a standard tends to endure through the rest of the day.

The same goes for a lack of punctuality – not when circumstances create lateness, but when it appears to be based around a lack of caring. You may think it doesn’t matter if you’re a ‘bit late’, but the person you’re disrespecting when you self-create delay thinks you don’t care about them, either. Your loved ones worry when you aren’t when you said you’d be. (Deliberate.) And tell the truth – how do you feel when someone you’re expecting, is late? Exackerly.

It is a fact of life that everything we do is a reflection of what we are. So an unplanned lifestyle, a poorly managed workload, a lack of workplace competence are (conditionally) reflections of a disorganised individual, and a disorganised individual demonstrates a lack of self-respect just as much as they demonstrate a lack of respect for others. I say conditionally because sometimes this (anagram) happens, but occasional, excusable, explainable mistakes happen. But when they happen all the time – like my dear friend who was always exactly 10minutes late for work and decried the idea he should leave ten minutes earlier – it reflects upon the party concerned.

It may seem unimportant – but one day it will bite you on the bum.

Self-respect demands and is served by self-organisation, and since training in the latter is not hard to come by it behoves you, the professional, to seek it out and apply it.

Because oddly, the organisation doesn’t seem to provide it for you.

Responding Faster – has slowed us all down.

The world has changed, but it has also remained the same. Recalling the motto, “Everything we do, we do with, for, or because of someone else,” we have always relied on other people to help us get done what we feel has to (could be or might) be done. Always. But in the pre-internet days, we also happily accepted that everything needed time. Then along came e-mail, texting and other IT tools and we forgot. And in forgetting, we changed as much as our world did.

An example: Hyrum Smith told a story which rings so true, these days. He said, “When my grandfather missed a train, he waited a day until the next train. When my father missed a plane, he waited an hour or two for the next one. When I miss a section in a revolving door, I go NUTS!”

Isn’t that true? I sometimes find myself frustrated because Google is taking a whole second – a WHOLE one – to return with an answer to a query. An answer that thirty years ago would have required a visit to the local library, searching for the right book, chapter and page before going back home again. But now, if my ISP is slow and it takes a second, I feel the blood boiling.

Having been trained by the wonders of t’Internet to expect an immediate response to any query, we expect the same of people. If they haven’t returned your text immediately, what are the ignorant swines doing? If I haven’t received a reply to my e-mail within a day – why are you ignoring me; I’m important.

Coincidentally, we see the emergence of the term Mindfulness. (Not to mention everyone in the world has written a book about it.) This is the AMAZING and INSIGHFUL and NEW ‘science’ of – sitting and waiting. Of not getting caught up in the hustle and bustle that we created in the first place. Of being patient and allowing things to just ‘be’.

Like they were in the early 1980s, a time when we HAD time. Expectations were still based around getting everything done as quick as reasonably possible, but the timescales were days and weeks, not ‘by the end of the shift’. And the world got by quite well. Paradoxically, as we live in a world where a lot of IT-related guff is available NOW, and communication is almost instant, we also see demands massively increased, ‘demand timescales’ shrunk to ‘I want it now’, and what has happened?

Trials take three years to get to court. DUH!

As Jeff Goldblum put it in the film ‘Jurassic Park’ (the first one, which is the same as the other five but at least it was original), “We are so busy doing things because we can, that we never give any thought about whether we should.” Don’t get me started on how disclosure demands went from ‘reasonable lines of enquiry in the case at hand’ to ‘everything everyone has ever thought of, ever’.

Meanwhile your time management/self-management training consists of

No, that’s not a misprint. That gap represents the entire time management input anyone below the rank of Inspector has ever got.

In a nutshell, then – everyone wants everything now, so you have to provide it ‘now’, and because you have occasionally provided it ‘now’, everyone thinks ‘now’ is not only possible, but routine. Everything is a priority – and as a result, nothing is a priority. It all has to be done yesterday.

They’re wrong. There is a massive amount of management and leadership material saying so. But that’s the management literature no-one seems to be reading.

Read my book, or one like it, learn to manage yourself in the context of time, or time will continue to manage you. And there are enough supervisors around without adding time.

Three Small Words That Make Life Easier.

“My name is David, I am an addict.” As a student of Stephen Covey’s wide-ranging and deep thinking on personal, interpersonal and organisational leadership I have a nasty habit, perhaps that of an investigator, of seeking to research behind the books, insofar as I have obtained copies of all his pre-7 Habits writing and historical copies of his company’s training materials. (I have temporarily banned myself from E-Bay following two rather costly purchases. But my collection is huge.)

The beauty of doing this research in the discovery of nuggets that were lost in later works, and this week was no exception. It wasn’t necessarily a hugely new nugget, but it was a hitherto unseen (by me) use of a metaphor which I thought bore some respect. It related to his tenet that the Compass is more important than the Clock, and the idea that where we are going is far more important than how quickly we get there. It was this.

When you’re out walking and using a (non-digital!) compass, you will be familiar with how the needle jiggles about. In my newest acquisition (a 1998 Facilitator’s Manual) Covey reminded the reader that when this happens the unthinking yet practical and sensible course of action taken by any rambler is to stop, and just stand still. To settle and be still for a moment while the necessary data is read, and a decision made. To Pause and Plan.

All too often, people – in particular police people – who are buffeted by the ‘now’, and who are therefore living from moment to moment in a permanent crisis mode, spend their time putting plasters on problems just to get through to the next challenge. This seems, in the moment, to be the appropriate thing to do, but all too often it is self-defeating. It doesn’t address the stress, it creates it. Just as you think you’ve solved a problem its nature changes, or an unconsidered element jumps out and shouts ‘AHA! You missed me!’ The problem re-asserts itself, but now with an added ‘you’re an idiot’ sub-plot.

Applying the simple, the profound, the decidedly common sense approach of Pause and Plan allows the exponent to stop, to take the time needed to consider ALL the issues and potential solutions, and to make a plan based on all available data, without emotion or self-imposed pressure.

And the Pause and Plan approach doesn’t just apply to this moment, the day’s challenges, the big project – it applies to your whole career, in fact your whole life. In my book Police Time Management I go into greater depth of the life plan idea but, for now, try this.

Plan your week. Look at all your appointments and projects for the next week using the Weekly Planner Page found HERE – I suggest the Landscape version. List the tasks you need to complete that you believe you must or should do, the ones which are truly important. That will include looking at appointments and considering things you need to plan in their respect, too. Once you have that overview of your week, focus as much of your effort as you can on making it come to pass. (If you have no appointments but a plethora of tasks, plan those tasks into the week as appointments, if you can.)

If you are challenged by events during that week, remember the motto – Pause and Plan. What is happening, what can you do about it, when do you need to do it, who can you ask to help you do it, what do you need to get it done. Only after the Pause, only after the Plan, should you start to act on what you decided.

Paus and Plan works for your life, your home, your career, your week, your day – and in the moment.

Try it.

This post proved my point, by accident.

Oh dear. I’ve started trying an electronic To Do List. Why ‘oh dear’?

It’s a good little system – it’s Microsoft To Do adapted for Android but synching with my laptop, like OneNote but without the complications (unless I want them, in which case my assessment is that all the Microsoft doodads seem to do the same things – but not necessarily in the same order). I can create ad hoc tasks and I can schedule and/or repeat them. Great so far. When I started using it, at this point the only downside (for me) was the potential for empty space in the Task List section of my paper planner.

Now the downside I discovered later. The satisfying ‘Ping’ when ticking of a completed task. Okay, I could probably turn it off but it is the truly fun part, initiating a dopamine hit when it goes off several times a day.

But you see, the ping is the final part of the biggest problem with the electronic system. In order to hear the ping I have to pick up the device. Which means that for the average user the ping is the instigator of a sudden desire to check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, other apps I’ve never even heard of, the news, e-mails and every other thing that jumps to mind the instant you pick up your electronic device. Add that to the inevitability of going through that routine every time the device pings for each of the notifications you don’t turn off, and you spend an inordinate amount of otherwise useful time just looking at your phone. Go to any restaurant and count the numbers of phones on the tables or, worse, in the hands of people ‘socialising by ignoring’.

I’m no saint. I reach for the phone every ad break, when the telly plot loses interest for me, when something said makes me think, “oooh…..” and the answer lies on the plastic and metal that costs hundreds of pounds (even though you could argue that the materials couldn’t possibly justify that cost).

And I hate myself for it. Not to mention I genuinely believe that an ache I have in my right arm is directly related to its constant use to ‘fingerprint password enter’, and the prod and poke at the screen to find out that Kim is divorcing Kanye – I’m not interested but the news media are, for some reason, and it’s at the top of the page.

Worse, this constant diversion of attention has an add-on effect that I can’t concentrate for meaningful periods on things that deserve my focused attention.

Which begs the question. If that is true of devices – all devices – is it any wonder that police officers and staff have their focus affected by the devices they are now duty-bound to carry and use? Digital devices are wonderful inventions but the way they work has resulted in an inability to focus on detail. They invite ‘quick’ entries, and some of the pocketbook-type entries and ‘statements’ I used to receive beggar belief in their lack of detail and, dare I say it, evident lack of effort in creating them because they were never meant to be laptops! They are stopgaps which have been given a role to which they were never suited, and instead of using them as temporary storage for the odd note, they have become the go-to place for details BUT because they are fiddly to use – and oh-too-accessible – details are the one thing that don’t get entered. People write in/on them while still engaged in the conversation creating the need for the note – attention deficit ensues.

OH GOD, I JUST INTERRUPTED THIS BLOG FOR A WHATSAPP NOTIFICATION!!! DAAAAAMMMMMNNNNN.

I’ll keep at it for a while with the ToDo App, but I think it’ll be non-intrusive, non-pinging paper planning that will win out in the end.

What say you?

Try my Paper Planning System for One Month HERE at Amazon

I Double Dare You To Try This.

Want to experiment? Let me help. I have made my arguments before about the benefits of using a paper-based planning system – paper has permanence, you use it all the time anyway, it doesn’t crash, it’s more adaptable than most apps, you can put the paper you receive into it, and it doesn’t cost £50 or more a month to maintain. But people are often reluctant to commit to using paper-based systems because buying a commercial system seems so expensive. I’ll get to that in a bit but, in fairness, no-one is going to invest umpteen quid in a Filofax (for example) if they don’t think it’ll work for them. So here’s my solution.

Try it for a month. I have published a One-Month Sample Planning System for you to try to see if it would be worth your while to try this method permanently. £5 plus postage (free if you’re a Prime member). That’s less cash than two pints.

This planner contains one-month of Daily Pages, three month planning pages, 3 master task lists, 4 goal-planning pages and 4 generic Project Lists. And it contains instructions on how to use it.

I am not proposing you buy a year’s worth. Just the one to see if it works for you in your situation.

If you use it and don’t like it, fine. You tried, and you probably learned something you can use in whatever system you prefer. If you try and it do like it, you can experiment either with finding a commercial version, or designing your own. (That’s another hint.) Or you can download the pages from the sample through my website HERE.  That way you just need a 4-ring binder to keep them in and your job might oblige, or you can get something good from a shop. To be blunt, if you take that option you might want to buy the book ‘Police Time Management’ for the full MO for using one but you can probably also work out how to do it for yourself. Buying the book saves time. 😊

About commercial systems. You can go to Filofax, FranklinPlanner or Daytimers (all .com) and pay for a diary system (c£30-£50) and a binder (circa £50-£150) for a handy A5-ish version, and a bit more for an A4 equivalent (although only Filofax does ‘proper’ A4 and A5). You can get binders via EBay for more sensible outlay, though. Using your imagination you can save buckets of beer money.

If you’re really clever, like wot I is, you can design your own, get Amazon to publish it via kdp.amazon.com and get them to publish a years’ worth of your own design, bound as a paperback, for silly money – and maybe someone else will buy it.

One of the benefits of this approach is that everything you receive in the post – and as attachments in e-mails – tends to be based on the A4 template, the size of paper you use in your printer and which you can buy cheaply. Which means you can punch the letter you get, or print and punch the e-mail attachment, slap it into the planning system in the appropriate place – and forget about it. It’ll appear just when you want it. Without having to remember which OneNote file, memory card or phone you put it on.

And it’s a lot easier to write any additional notes on a bit of paper than on the electronic version on your device. And then easier to file it safely for when you need to reference the contents in a few years.

Yes, I know digital is good. But how often have you had a hard-drive go pop having ‘forgotten’ to back up, DropBox, OneNote etc with a copy of that bit of ‘paper’ you now need? Yep, me too.

How good is paper? Well, how many ads have you seen for devices that are ‘just like paper’, which you can ‘write on’ and ‘print’ – which are advertised as cutting edge. ‘Nuff said.