Practices

At a check-in, only look. Where am I, what has slipped, what have I still not heard back on. Skim the inbox without opening anything.

The moment you answer one message the review is over, and you will not notice it ending. Keep a sheet beside you and write down what you spot instead…

Once a day, look at the whole day before it starts eating you. What is on, what is urgent, what is this day actually best used for. Morning or evening, whichever you will really do.

It takes about five minutes and it is the difference between a day you chose and a day chosen for you by whoever emailed first. Some people prefer…

Ask people how it went. How was that meeting, how am I doing, what did you make of it. Nobody enjoys asking, and the information is not available any other way.

Ask one specific person about one specific thing rather than the room in general. If your read on yourself has been bent out of shape by years of…

Someone who will tell you the part that was not good is someone whose 'that was fine' you can believe. That is what settles the doubt, not reassurance.

Blanket praise carries no information, so it slides off and the doubt is back within the hour. If you tend to worry about how you came across, ask…

One way to hold the whole thing: you feel now at full volume and later almost not at all. Putting things off, saying yes too often, spending, jumping in. One pattern rather than four separate faults.

It changes what you go looking for. Not more discipline in each area separately, but ways of making later louder across all of them. A deadline you…

A report due Friday puts a little pressure on somebody else's Monday. For you Monday feels like nothing at all, and then Thursday evening arrives carrying the whole of it.

It is worth drawing out honestly. One line sloping gently upwards all week, another staying flat and then going vertical. Once the shape is visible…

If the only real deadline is the fortnightly meeting, invent some smaller ones. A couple of short catch-ups a week will do more for the work than the formal review ever does.

Ask for them as something that helps you, because it is true and it also lands better: five minutes on Tuesday and Thursday keeps me pointed at the…

No single strategy fits every situation. When something that worked last year does nothing now, the fault is usually in the match rather than in you.

For anyone helping, this matters even more. When a sensible technique fails, the first question is which part of this person's week it did not fit,…

There are two ways to make something get noticed: make it louder, or quieten everything around it. The second is usually the one nobody has tried.

It applies to a desk and to a phone screen alike. Adding one more reminder into a busy field mostly adds to the field. Taking six things off the desk…

You are allowed to build the consequence rather than waiting for life to deliver one. Waiting is not more honest, it is only slower, and often it never arrives at all.

There is a quiet belief that arranged consequences are a kind of cheating and that real lessons have to come from real life. But if the timing means…

Put unassigned time in the calendar on purpose. Not as a gap that might survive, as an actual appointment, because unplanned work always arrives and it has to land somewhere.

A week booked solid is a week where every new thing knocks something else out, and that is where the scramble comes from. Two hours on a Wednesday…

Say the plan out loud to somebody. A manager, a colleague, your wife, a coach. Hearing yourself explain it does something that turning it over privately does not.

The listener does not need to be an expert in any of it. Talking forces you to put things in order, and the gaps tend to announce themselves halfway…

Mindfulness practice is good for most people, and may help a little more if you have ADHD. Treat it as something supportive rather than as the treatment itself.

The honest version is worth having, because being told it is the answer and then finding it is not tends to end with people dropping it entirely. If…

Once a week, both calendars open on the table. Who is doing scouts, who has football, what is happening on Thursday. Twice a week if the house is busy.

The point is finding the collisions while there is still time to sort them out, rather than at eight on Thursday morning with coats half on. Keep it…

Building a consequence on purpose beats waiting for life to hand you one. There is nothing more virtuous about the natural version. It just tends to arrive too late to teach anybody anything.

Take the five moves together: sooner, more often, held by someone else, big enough to notice, applied every time. Any one of them helps a bit. Two or…

Grief is tiring. Let yourself rest and return to small routines; this is not giving up on them.

Stepping back to eat, sleep, and do ordinary things is part of grieving, not a betrayal of it.

Your mind sorts fast and rough. It matches what is happening now against something it has met before, and in a bad moment it rounds a raised eyebrow up to contempt.

Most rows start with a misreading rather than with faulty reasoning, which is why picking your conclusions apart afterwards changes so little. The…

Picture a machine set to strike at anything that even slightly resembles a threat. It would hit the postman, the neighbour's dog and, sooner or later, a child in a muddy coat.

A low threshold feels like safety and is not. Every false alarm costs you something, and since the people nearest the sensor are the ones you live…

Catch the reflex on something small. A one-word reply to your message, and the first question your mind asks is what have I done.

That first question is the reflex, and it is far easier to see when nothing much is at stake. Practise there: notice the accusation your mind reached…

If someone can predict how you drew those circles, they are not reading your mind. We are all running much the same small programmes.

That is worth saying plainly, because the discovery lands as a personal indictment for a lot of people, and shame makes anger worse rather than…