A Timely Reminder

I make no apologies for this reminder.

Right this minute, I KNOW you are procrastinating. I know this because it is the 12th 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!

THE Cure for the Productive Procrastinator

There is an unstated cause of procrastination. One seldom admitted to by anyone having any sense of self-esteem. It is often noticeable in the newest of recruits and staff but is nevertheless present in the most experienced of colleagues. But is a kind of ‘reverse-procrastination’ in that it does not cause the putting off of tasks. In fact, it does the opposite – it creates massive productivity. The trouble is, it’s the wrong kind of productivity.

This misdirection of effort is caused by people who have never asked this question.

“Does my desire to do a lot of things reflect a lack of confidence in my ability to do a few important things well?

This kind of thinking occurs when we haven’t quite mastered something. I recall when I first started in the Fraud Squad I had a debilitating attack of Imposter Syndrome. This resulted in my making offers to others to help them, and to do any menial task as long as I didn’t have to progress an investigation I was finding hard to fathom, while therefore not ‘having time’ to simply ask for help and thus reveal my inadequacy.

Busy people are often people who look as though they’re working hard, but they’re working hard at avoiding something else they should be doing.

And there is another sign of misdirected busy-ness. People who don’t ask themselves, “Do I get angry at interruptions because I lack confidence that I can manage my time well enough to deal with them?”

These people (and I suspect I was one of them) believe that everything they are asked to do must be done immediately, and is therefore a threat to their planned tasks. This, I believe, is partly the fault of an organisation that allows itself to believe that everything must be done NOW. This creates a sense of Urgency that is applied to everything regardless of its actual importance, and which also shoves more important or time-sensitive work into the background, where it awaits the day it can jump to the fore and shout, “Hah! I am URGENTT now, as well!” And it, too, becomes an interruption that it would not have been had you just stopped following the ‘Everything is Urgent’ mentality so debilitating to personal and organisational effectiveness.

Enter the Stimulus-Response Gap cure to both problems.

Now and then – whether looking at something that is initially terrifying, or which seems to demand attention you need to put elsewhere, and decide : What is he appropriate action to take, now?

In the former case, the only first action may be to do little more than seek the help or knowledge required to progress. And in the second case, it may be a chance to decide that, “No”, this can wait, or “Yes”, it needs attention. And that attention may be nothing more than to note what needs to be done so that it can be done latter.

Every problem – EVERY problem – can be addressed using that SR Gap. Just take the moment to THINK. And then the problem becomes a project, and we manage those all the time.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.