Do YOU carry a Personal Disorganiser?

I am an enthusiastic member of a couple of quasi-professional organisations that reflect my varied interests, and I am grateful to those dedicated individuals who spend their time diligently managing the various activities that these bodies provide. And in two of those, the ‘main men’ have a bad habit that amuses me.

The individuals concerned turn up at meeting after meeting with a formal looking briefcase. Weather-beaten, obviously well-used and of some sentimental value, these people carry bags. (Gotcha!) Seriously, these people carry cases that are weather-beaten, obviously well-used and of some sentimental value – or they’d have bought new ones.

Then they open the bag and what can I see?

Piles of paper. Not files, but piles.

During the subsequent meeting these individuals will either raise important issues, or they will be called upon to assist other members with the provision of material facts – and the search begins. “Where did I put that ………” followed by “It’s in here somewhere…”

(I frequently see them read relevant facts off a sheet of paper, the reverse of which is a gas bill, random note or page torn from a magazine. There is some serious recycling going on, here.)

Is that your method? Do you live with piles of unorganised paper? Is your work drawer, filing cabinet or portable form-carrying organiser, er, disorganised? Do you find yourself having to deeply delve every time you want something? And while having to do that drives you nuts, do you persist, presumably in the hope that this material will magically sort itself out?

Take a tip.

The organisation has lots and lots of stationery that is specifically purchased in order for officers and staff to organise its paperwork. Use it.

Those foolscap sized manila folders that are purchased without any thought having been given to the fact that the drawers they provide officers and staff are A4 – well, they can be cut to size. When you have a new project, grab such a folder, label it as best you can, and keep project related paperwork in that one place. Bigger projects, get a lever arch file and some divider pages, and organise things into evidence, admin, disclosure, and any other subset that comes up.

Do the same with computer ‘stuff’. Keep it properly filed into separate folders, and stop saving things with poor file names.

The time you save by properly administering and managing your paperwork – and the emotional upset you will prevent – will be very noticeable. Not to mention preventing the embarrassment of having to revisit an important witness and asking them if they wouldn’t mind making that lost statement again.

I realise that a lot of ‘paperwork’ is directly created on a computer, these days. But let’s be upfront about this, a lot of it isn’t.

Look, I hated working major investigations on HOLMES, but the one thing that the Major Incident Room does best is manage its paperwork. Their methodology, adapted for the individual, works marvels for efficiency. I cover it in depth in my book Police Time Management, so if you want more then consider that a relatively inexpensive investment.

It’s already paperback bound so you won’t lose it. I promise.

How Full Is Your Box?

Let me put something to you.

You open your e-mail account at work. There are a number of new emails present. You open each, in order, and read them. So far, so good.

Then you consider them fully read and understood, and you think “I really have to do something about ….”, your mind triggered by what each one has demanded from you.

And then you carry on either with whatever you intended to do before your routine perusal of the in-box, or you put all your effort into dealing with those emails.

Wrong on both counts, conditionally.

Wrong, because you’ve already failed the Importance/Urgency analysis required if you want to do the right thing in the right way at the right time for the right reasons. (Deep breath.)

E-mails are great, and e-mails are evil. They are great because they are a quick-ish way of communicating that which needs non-urgent attention, and they provide a detailed record of who said what and when. They are evil because they also replace faster, telephone calls where answers can be obtained in seconds, and decisions called for and made just as quickly. The problem is that because e-mails exist, few people give thought to whether or not they are the most effective means for communication. They (and other electronic methods such as Messenger and WhatsApp) have become the default contact media.

They are also evil because they come in clumps, and they have replaced the properly-assessed and prioritised To-Do List because unless and until you take the time to make that assessment, they are all staring you in the face – and one of the reasons for that is because you aren’t manging them properly.

Here, therefore, is my sage advice.

  1. If a call is quicker, and whenever you do need an immediate response – use the bloomin’ telephone – the speaky bit, not the texty bit.
  2. When you receive e-mails, read them one at a time, and decide on the action required as you read it. If the action takes 2-5 minutes or less, do that action before you read the next e-mail. This is because the next e-mail will split your attention, as will all the others you elect to read before acting on any of them.
  3. If the action required takes longer, plan the action required and move on to the next e-mail AFTER you make that plan (whether it be an appointment or a longer task).
  4. Once an e-mail has been dealt with, delete it if you can.
  5. If you can’t delete it, you need to manage it in a sensible, considered fashion. (I detail how to do that in my book, Police Time Management).

Above all, do NOT ‘convert’ your email in-box into an ever-expanding To Do List. By all means use it to trigger your planning, which you should do elsewhere (including on the programme in terms of making appointments and tasks in Outlook, for example), but once the trigger is pulled, get it out of there.

The biggest fault with an improperly managed and misused in-box is that each time you open it as it gets ever larger, your brain sees only a huge amount of incompletes. If you complete and delete (must TM that), or plan and file, then your head can manage the remainder – and the new – much better than when it sees ‘lots of stuff’.

As I write, my in-box is empty. How’s yours?

Popmaster Policing

In 2007 I was an involuntary part of a Major Incident Team. A man had died in hospital as the result of a beating, and although it transpired that the beating itself took place 170 miles away from the hospital in which he died, our tiny force’s SIO decided to keep what turned out to be our biggest ever murder enquiry, rather than pass it ‘back’ to the country’s biggest force – the Met. Hence I was kidnapped and allocated the sole Disclosure Officer position.

Unhappy as I was to be there, we had a little daily routine which alleviated the tension and stress. This routine took place at about 10.30am every weekday for the entire period, and it became evident that even when I left the Incident Room the ‘tradition’ continued for many, many years afterwards.

This tradition was joining in with Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 Popmaster Quiz. Ordinarily, contestants are individuals, but we entered as a team. I don’t think we were ever that successful, but it was 15 minutes away from the stresses that accompany the urgency and importance of a murder. (unfortunately, during the quiz it was hard to communicate to incoming callers that their timing was poor.)

Why mention this in a time management context? I mention it because while it may seem to have been an inefficient use of our time, it was an exceptionally effective use of our time. It was effective because it created an amusing, stress-reducing and team-bonding break. We laughed, we were competitive, we exercised our minds.

And then, we went back to work reinvigorated and, I would suggest, sufficiently more productive as to grossly outweigh our ‘absence’ from the grind. I believe that this absence was far more productive than the fag breaks and coffee breaks that were common at that time, too.

I have long advocated the ‘step away’ from work when it gets too much, and even the anticipatory step away when things are building up. You can be incredibly productive while stressed, right up until the point at which the stress actually breaks you – and you aren’t productive any more because you’re not even there.

This doesn’t excuse mickey-taking. A regular, routine step away can take into account the routines of your work. If you’re a Mon-Fri worker, and emergencies don’t impact on your routines, you can choose a time in the week when your team can relax together. If you’re responsible for your own case load, you can work around your planned work. If you’re front-line, Sunday morning can be a great time for the team to have a shift breakfast together before launching into the fray. Not every suggestion I make can be applied – you need to plan your own.

Don’t dismiss this idea – think deeply about how and when you can relax as an individual or team, and consider the benefits. And if you really can’t find time to step away in work, organise a team bonding event after work – five-a-side footy was another stress buster in which my colleagues and I indulged before our first night shift.

Do I do this?

This article was written while listening to Popmaster this morning. I got 3 and 12 points.

The combined score of 15 MIR staff was usually a lot better than that.

For more on taking a break at work, buy Police Time Management, available on Amazon HERE

Apres mon deux minutes, le deluge.

The organisation has its mission statement, and you may have your own. Hopefully, both are inspiring although the former tends to come across as a set of PR-drafted, pandering platitudes that have little to do with the actions you take at the front line. I recall reading one mission statement on LinkedIn that caused me to reply, “Beautiful mission – but what do you actually do?”

But there’s a problem bigger than the accuracy or floweriness of a mission statement. It is that no matter whether or not it is inspiring, its not the mission that takes precedence. Ever.

It’s the minutiae of ‘things to do’ that focuses your attention. Always.

For all the high-fallutin’ talk, your ‘mission’ is just the top of a peak that is made up of hundreds and thousands of old, current and future tasks. To paraphrase David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, you don’t ‘do’ a mission – you do all the tasks that lead to its success. Or you don’t.

Which is probably (possibly accidentally) why I wrote Police Time Management back to front. By that I mean that other TM books traditionally lead with the mission and setting of goals, and then go into the management of stuff. In PTM, I felt that you already have enough stuff that needs addressing NOW that I’d start with that and thus create the time you need for the higher level considerations.

Every day you walk in to work, if your experience is typical of police officers and staff that I worked with, the first thing you have to do is check your emails and other incoming notifications (e.g. NICHE and other management systems) that will either support the plans you had when you walked through the car park, or will scupper them completely. These are the tasks that others are demanding of you (top-down) begging of you (bottom up) or are the result of your own input (self-generated). The key to staying on top of this workload is possession and disciplined application of a system.

The tendency for most is to do the easy things first, but the trap for the undisciplined is that they never get to the important stuff. The strategy must be to look at everything, assess the time needed to do them, their importance, when they can be done (i.e. not how long but are the resources/people available) and therefore what you can fit in and what you simply can’t.

Once you’ve done that – assessed the whole load – only then can you do what Allen suggests, which is get all the two minute tasks done and dusted as long as they ARE 2-minute joblets and you still get the priorities done as well. By that, I mean that you can leave two minute tasks alone in order to do the important, bigger things because you know that a two minute task can be fitted in just about anywhere in your schedule. But doing them early has the benefit of easing you into work and providing some moderate wins for the day.

As I said, this clears up the minutiae which will, eventually, lead to the mission’s completion, while clearing your mind of the stress that the list caused when you first saw it. You feel the control that you’re experiencing as you work through your planning, and then your plan.

I’ve never seen a house built by plonking a completed domicile on a plot of land. They’re all designed, and then built brick, by brick, by brick. So is your organisation’s mission – lots of bricks. Some less important than others, maybe, but imagine if the brickie left out the bricks he thought were the less important ones.

In the same way, the Dambusters’ success started with an old man playing with a rubber band and some ball bearings on a garden pond.

Imagine if your next two-minute task was as important. It just might be.

Shhhh….It Happens

One of life’s little realities. You have a plan involving someone else, and they bail out unexpectedly. Perhaps you have a group appointment, set in agreement with the rest of the group, and then a key player suddenly announces they ‘made a mistake’ and can’t make the original, and the unstated result is the ‘can YOU do all the re-arranging, please?’. We have all been there. We may have been the cause of it.

Always the result of poor planning (if a genuine excuse) or absolute lies (if a better alternative for the other party arose and they didn’t want to tell you what it was). There’s not a lot I can advise about the latter, part from ‘have fun when you find out and let them know what a duplicitous imbecile they have been’, but I can provide some counsel on the former situation.

The obvious advice, first off, is to make sure, at the point at which the arrangement is made, that EVERYONE is asked to check their availability before they make the agreement. Ask if they have their diary to hand – if not, offer to call back when they do, or at least only pencil in the appointment pending later confirmation.

(I have noticed, many times, that the instant I make an appointment in my planner using ink, I get the call cancelling it.)

A bit of tangential advice – make the appointment as early in the day as you possibly can, so there is less of a likelihood of a conflict.

And the second piece of advice is – accept, based on your own experience, that (a) people aren’t perfect and (b) sometimes ‘it’ really does happen and as your priority may not be their priority, the least you can do is be understanding.

And accept, too, that rearranging things is seldom that much of a bother. A couple of minutes, more often than not. We tend to conflate things because we all tend to value order – particularly our own – and all that is really happening when an appointment needs to change is a values conflict between what we were set on, and what must now be.

And hard as it is, perhaps we can all just acknowledge that while one value (order) may be important, the relationship with the other party has value, too. Perhaps more.

 This article came about because a relative did that to me, on an important issue. But I realised, as I tutted, that the issue was already six months old and a minor change in an appointment really wasn’t going to stretch the project length a great deal.

Shhhh….it happens.

But it can easily be cleaned up.

Media Situation Normal

It’s our fault, again, as always.

Last week’s tragic events in Plymouth unfolded as they so often do. A madman goes on a violent spree. Police officers attend at speed, not knowing what they will face both in terms of their own personal safety, and in terms of the traumatic images they will be living with for some time to come. They deal with the immediate aftermath, doing so well what they’ve done for so long.

Then the press come in and within minutes they ‘ask questions’ about what the police did wrong. I write ‘ask questions’, but the unfortunate fact is that such questions imply fault immediately they are asked, and the more they are asked, the more assumptions guide them. The pot is well and truly stirred with no consequence to the asker except improved profile and profits, while those asked are assumed from the off to be covering something up.

And all the while, the uninformed public is convinced more and more that someone did something stupid. As if a licensing officer went, “Give this nutter his gun back, I don’t care.”

Never have I heard the question asked, “What laws were created that made this possible – you know, the laws that the police don’t really like but have to comply with?”

I see both sides, here, to be blunt.

First of all, legal precedent is binding, and all too often a higher court decision impacts the ability of those ‘below’ to act in any way other than blind compliance. There are things we can’t do anything about, and properly considered court decisions and precedents are one of those things.

But on the other hand, there is also a blind compliance born of unwillingness to question, to debate, to argue for alternatives. It’s one thing to say that (in this example) “A court decision meant I had to give his gun back”. It’s another to say, “He might sue us and that would cost us time and money”. Or worse, “I’d have to justify my decision and argue it in court. And I’m too weary/scared/unwilling to do that.”. That’s a get out. That’s surrender. That’s moral and ethical cowardice.

That, ladies, gentlemen and others, is an unwillingness to stand up for what you truly believe.

Standing up for what matters is often time consuming and can be expensive. But the quick and cheap alternatives are seldom any better.

NASA once had a motto: ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper!’. Some wag defaced one of their prolifically-placed posters with the expression, ‘Pick Any Two’. Think about that. You can have better and faster and it’ll cost you. You can have cheap but it won’t be good, even if it’s faster.

Now apply that thinking to what you believe. You can resolutely stand for something but it won’t be cheap in terms of time or money. Or you can take the quick route – but it won’t be better, and you might have to pay more. Or someone else will.

So when comes the time for the argument about whether or not what you’re being asked to do is quick/best/cheap, then stand up for the best, values-based option. Stand up firmly. Know the absolutes (unchangeable) and conditionals (debatable, changeable, influenceable). Know them better than those with whom you will have the aforementioned debate. Thereafter, if the decision goes against you (as it so often will) then at least you know you did your best. What happens afterwards is someone else’s responsibility.

And write it all down – when, where, to and with whom, and how it was said.

Never mind the time saved later – your conscience will be clear as well.

Why you’re barely managing – but also seldom leading.

I seem to be having a devil of a job convincing people of the importance of what I am trying to teach, so here’s a 5-minute article on exactly why I think it is important, and why you should seek out training, whether from me or another, though book or interactive learning. Here we go.

In our job, there are two ways to look at how you spend your time. Experience and our terminology will tell you what they are. We speak of Proactive Policing, and Reactive Policing. From any perspective – individual, team or organisation – you could look at those expressions in terms of self-generated work, and jobs coming in.

Proactive policing means you are doing something to deal with a  problem before, or as it happens. It means identifying trends and forming a plan to deal with those issues, and then putting that plan into action. It is patrolling where you know something is likely to happen that will need your attention. Reactive policing is waiting for things to happen, and then dealing with them. To be frank, there is an overlap between the two and there always has been. Proactive policing requires a trend to react to, surely? Or you’re guessing! And Standing Operating Procedures are the proactive result of reactive policing in the past – stuff happened, the old way didn’t work and a new way was developed.

Problem is – time doesn’t give a monkey’s about which mode you’re in when stuff happens. You want to be proactive when a murder happens, scuppering those carefully made plans. Or you’re allocated to a ‘reactive’ role for the day but are still reacting to the results of yesterday’s proactivity. As I write this it sounds like a comedy script in development, but that is exactly how front line policing is experienced. Plans are made, God pees itself laughing, and the pee falls on your chips, as they say.

Another way to look at the differences between proactive and reactive policing is to use a tried and tested time management concept, that of ‘Urgency v Importance’. Reactive policing is, by its very nature, firmly situated under the Urgency heading, while Proactive policing is by definition important. But never Urgent. The two compete for attention, but we all know (particularly in CID) which gets the attention – the squeaking wheel, the noisiest problem, the urgent. Yesterday’s Urgency is today’s Important but guess what – here’s another Urgency to replace it.

And the important keeps getting pushed back, rearranged and poorly done.

My book, Police Time Management, look at both of those factors, and further identifies other ‘headings’ under which either can exist – those of Leadership and Management. Leadership focuses on the Important, the proactive. Management focuses on the Urgent, the reactive. That is an valuable distinction.

Yes, to a degree the terms are interchangeable: Leadership is Proactive is Important, and Management is about Urgency and being Reactive. And the good news is that learning time management will underpin any effort to focus on the appropriate ‘thing’ at the appropriate time provided you are taught time management from a leadership, as well as a productivity perspective.

Like in my book. I am proud to say that I was able to address a lot of important stuff during urgent enquiries because I planned my time in order to do so, and that included planning on the hoof. I learned how and now I want to teach you how.

If you are, like I once was, running around just to stay still – take the time and invest in something that will help. I beg of you. Before you give up, give in, and leave the greatest job in the world.

Complaints and Time Management. And eye-pokery.

Time management applied to complaints? Nonsense! Or is it?

When I was a uniform PC during the Jurassic Era, I was ‘proud’ to be top of the force for the number of complaints I received in one month (or quarter, I may have been less productive….). I was also pleased that my own relief sergeant was third. We were busy, he and I. One time, we were complained about together. Ah, the good old days.

Like you, I suspect, in your early career the threat of a complaint devastated you, if you knew you’d done no wrong. By the day of my personal best, I understood the strategy of one particular solicitor was to get the client to initiate a complaint at the tiniest, even sub-atomic level of cause. It meant he could raise it in court. I learned to bounce them off him.

And I learned that the best way to deal with complaints was to be proactive.

If I was complained about, I made sure that I was prepared. I’d be so up on the law about the particular matter that the ‘other side’ couldn’t bamboozle me. I used to ache when I saw younger (in service) colleagues buckling at some veiled, nonsensical threat made by a legal advisor. Knowing the law and being confident in that knowledge is a massive time saver.

I was with a DC when we arrested someone for burglary, and on searching his home we found all the evidence of a drugs party. We told the legal adviser (non-qualified, social justice, ACAB type) and he said, in front of the custody sergeant, “If you arrest my client for allowing his premises to be used for the consumption of drugs we will make a complaint about you.”

At which the DC turned to the client and said, “ I am arresting you for allowing your premises to be used (etc.)” Then he looked at the runner and grinned. He knew what he was empowered to do, the lawyer (term used loosely) didn’t.

Know the law.

Next, assemble all ‘your’ evidence as diligently as you would any related to a criminal investigation.

And finally – and this one will blow your mind – chase up the Standards Dept and demand you be interviewed. They won’t be rushed, but there is a certain self-confidence to be gained by taking control of the situation. Give them everything they want, even before they ask for it. Make it clear that you’re ready when they are.

You see, another thing I eventually learned was that Professional Standards have a job to do, the same as you. If you’re innocent, they tend to find you innocent. There may be some advice – “Don’t put your gloved fingers in the suspect’s eye sockets and threaten to blind him, in case you slip” was one piece of advice that I was given. The good old days.

But psychologically, and they may deny it but it has an element of truth, a co-operative interviewee tends to be treated a lot more leniently than an obstructive and unhelpful one.

You know that, because you do it.

In conclusion, then.

Don’t misbehave deliberately, know what you can and cannot do. Document everything you possibly can – the Officer Safety Trainers are right in that – but also know the law so that omissions can be countered, e.g. “You didn’t write that you’d double locked your ‘cuffs” can be countered by “I didn’t write I used the toilet, either, but I assure you that I did.” An inference is hard to draw on an explained omission, like it or lump it.

Nevertheless, accurate records are always hard to counter so make sure yours are as good as theirs.

It saves so much time, and that allows you to apply your emotional focus to better things.

For more on this subject, buy Police Time Management at AMAZON. (Click the link)

Work Less, Produce More, Go Home. For 0%, why not?

That’s that, then. After 18 months of COVID, where your attention has been on working a lot harder just to stand still, and with having to adjust working practices to that end, you are going to have a 0% pay rise. And you also know one thing for certain.

All the stuff that was delayed or put off during this whole shebang will now effectively become additional work that will have to be done on top of what is going to come, and all for an extra 0p an hour. You will have to work harder and the only way to profit will be to work bucketloads of overtime.

IF the C-suite (commercial jargon for NPCC-level ranks) can, or is willing to, allow that. Experience suggests that the Home Office will NOT want to up the funding. Assuming the Treasury would even let them. Despite BoJo’s announcement, today, that crime will be important (again?). And the local ratepayers – which include you – can only be stretched so far, monetarily.

And they’ll also change the rules (laws and practices that used to work but need tinkering with, e.g. Bail and PACE), which means you’ll have to re-learn what you knew, on courses that are twice as long as they need to be OR aren’t even held.

Right then. Given that your income won’t go up (even if your rates and taxes do), and you’re unlikely to be given the time to do what needs to be done, you have one choice left.

To TAKE BACK the time you’re wasting. Calm down. I know.

But I also know that some time is wasted. It is wasted accidentally. It is wasted accidentally because you haven’t been trained to maximise its use, properly. And you, like me, occasionally fall into the procrastination trap created by a need to have a few minutes away from ‘things’ with colleagues who are all to eager to have a few minutes away from their ‘things’ too, only for neither of you to remember to kick back in as quickly as reasonable possible.

BUT that goes both ways. You also waste time when, instead of chilling because you genuinely need to, you continue working and make the silly mistakes that result in the work needing to be done again. I’m pretty confident that a good percentage of assault allegations (assaults by police) could be prevented if those colleagues hadn’t been wound up by the stresses created by the demand placed upon them.

It’s a double-edged sword. It’s not about ‘just’ being productive in the sense that you ought to be on the go 100% of the time. Police Time Management is about doing the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons and at the appropriate time. And if the right thing (etc.) is to stop, pause, break off and calm down, then that is productive. Whereas going from call to call in the vain hope that at the end of them all you’ll have time to make the notes you should have been making all along – ain’t.

We aren’t cranking widgets in a factory, an altogether automated process that requires no more thought than switching a machine on and off as targets are met. Our work requires thought – and therefore requires time to think, and while Joe Q Public might see your furrowed brow as inactivity, you know that thinking about your response to any incident or demand is the best way to deal with it properly the first time. And only that time, if appropriate. That way, you go home having earned a stress-free crust and your family doesn’t bear the brunt of your stress.

Wouldn’t it be great if you were taught this stuff on a  training day?

Tell your L&D Section.

You HAVE to Let It Lie.

This might not seem to be about policing, but bear with me because it really is.

I am executing a will. It is an easy will, but despite being a qualified legal executive (which was handy in police work, believe it or not) I have found the process to be somewhat wearing. Just as you think all is going well, another mole jumps up to be whacked. Yes, exactly like police work.

And here’s a mistake I made, and one which you may occasionally make yourself, and the ‘time management’ solution.

Of course, in this example there’s money involved, money needed by the estate’s heirs, and the letters tend to be ‘taking’ rather than ‘giving’. And you will be happy or completely uncaring to know that all the problems sorted themselves out quite amicably (so far).

Anyway, on the Friday I’d be made aware that another executor had received a brown envelope from the DWP or HMRC – it is utterly uncanny how many of those arrive on a Friday. So I’d open said letter in the early evening, see the demand, realise that there was a new workload to add to the overall project, further realise that addressing, even just researching the demand involved others – and that they’d all gone home for the weekend. So now I have a problem in my head about which I can do absolutely nothing for 72 hours.

My solution: when the next letter arrived – on a Friday – I let it lie. I put it on my desk and left it until Monday afternoon. Only then did I read it, and make the enquiry related to its content.

No stress, problem addressed while in a better state of mind, and therefore while not starting an argument with the poor messenger at their end.

It is a simple solution, although I acknowledge that it might initially be seen to be impossible at work. But here’s a thought.

If it is mail, in an envelope, then it IS NOT URGENT. It’s 2021. Even the sender knows it’ll take time to be responded to. Nothing urgent is now sent by snail mail. If you are busy doing other projects – and you always are – then, assuming you have planned your day as best you can as per my advice in earlier posts, opening the letter and adding further demands on your already full mind is almost guaranteed to be stressful.

And never, ever, EVER open a letter just before you go off duty or onto rest days. The content – not urgent, remember – will play on your mind when you can’t do anything about it.

Let it lie until you aren’t as busy, and you have the time you need to deal with whatever comes, with the people needed to deal with it, actually available.

I grant you this isn’t as easy with e-mails, which ping, but I still suggest that if you can possibly train yourself to do it, don’t open e-mails after the mid-point of your tour of duty unless it’s by pre-arrangement (you expect it and know what it’s about), or marked with a great big red exclamation mark that suggests the sender thinks it IS urgent. (£10 says it rarely is.)

But don’t tell your Inspector I told you. She will still be living under the old ‘do everything now’ mentality that is as ineffective now as it was in 1986, when I started.

For more on comms management, read this HUGE, cheap (£12.99) book and learn how to enjoy your work all over again.