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.

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.

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?

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.

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………..

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.