Michael Tyndale advises on how to ensure a stress-free life and make a fortune in the process
Although being incredibly busy is a great way of offloading stress and controlling other people, some caution should be exercised.
From time to time (say once a month) you need to make a song and dance about being helpful to someone, while making them feel as guilty as possible about how they are using up your time. Otherwise you won’t be able to withhold their annual bonus because of their poor communication skills. And if something goes badly wrong, you won’t be able to say: “why didn’t you come and speak to me about it?”
GETTING HELP
You may need to ask people for help at a time when you don’t want to reciprocate.
- Use your secretary: Get your secretary or trainee to ask them for help. That will make it more difficult for them to get out of it, since if they try to argue the messenger will only say that he is doing what he is told and that you are too busy to enter into discussions.
- Use e-mail: Send them an e-mail just before disappearing for several days without your Blackberry. If it is date stamped late on a Sunday evening, so much the better.
- Body language: If absolutely necessary, approach them in their office, but use the right body language. You must be obviously in a tearing rush. Try speaking to them by popping your head around the door of their office, or if you do go in on no account sit down. Just say what needs to be said, get them to agree to it and then, before they have time to ask you to do anything in return, say “terribly sorry, must rush, incredibly busy”.
THE CANTEEN
Never eat in the canteen. First, it gives people the chance to come and sit next to you and talk about things you do not want to talk about. Second, it suggests that you have not got enough work to do or have not got somewhere much higher class to eat in instead, such as a meeting in a restaurant with a client or the partners’ dining room. Actually the conversation in the partners’ dining room is so excruciating that you stopped eating there years ago.
Instead stride purposefully into the canteen and ask for your meal to be put in a plastic box so that you can eat it at your desk. Yes, I know it will probably be cold by them, but that is the price that must be paid for projecting the right image. Smile condescendingly at any colleagues who are eating in the canteen.
The only exception which may be made to this rule is for those extremely rare occasions when you make a gesture of joining the hoi polloi for lunch in the canteen. These events should be as awkward and embarrassing as visits by HM the Queen to the Old Kent Road.
TAXIS
Always be late for appointments outside the office—having an important telephone call at the right time helps—so that your colleagues have to wait for you and are impressed by how busy you are. It also creates a good impression for clients when there is a long line of taxis outside the main entrance. And of course you don’t want to pander to the ego of taxi drivers by not making them wait for a suitable period. They might think the firm does not have enough work to do.
GETTING PEOPLE TO FEEL SORRY FOR YOU
Sounds difficult when you are earning a million a year, but it can be done.
First, prepare the ground by relying on the fact that you are incredibly busy to get out of boring family commitments: your child’s star performance in the school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, looking after him when he has the measles, taking him to school, meetings with your mother in-law, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, painting the house, washing up, family holidays and being at your wife’s bedside when she gives birth.
Then you can kill two birds with one stone by telling people at work, with a tear in your eye, that you have actually missed out on these instances of high quality family life—or some of them anyway—when in fact you have been doing things that you want to do.
WORK THAT YOU WANT TO DO
Work will from time to time come up which you actually want to do—usually things best calculated to increase your wealth and power—you do want to be a multi-millionaire, don’t you? You handle that by accepting that there are occasional chinks of time when you are not busy. However, they rapidly come to an end when you have taken on the job you want to do. You then need to put your armour back on by being incredibly busy again.
ALCOHOL
What happens if you need a break? Suppose a leaving party at the pub is organised at a moment’s notice and you want to drop everything? Is there not a risk of this suggesting that you are not incredibly busy? No again. The need for regular alcoholic refreshment is universally accepted in the legal profession and it is scientifically proven that booze is good for you. Anyway, everyone will be too busy getting in as many drinks as possible to worry about whether or not you should be there.
A drinks party is also a good pretext for leaving meetings early in the afternoon. People do have a sense for what are the true priorities. If you do not get to the party on time you will not get as many drinks as you might otherwise do. And people don’t talk shop in the pub. After the second drink they are usually incapable of doing so. So issues that you are too busy to talk about at work and would like to have swept under the carpet are likely to remain there, while you focus on trivialities.
Michael Tyndale is a consultant in legal stress management. E-mail: michaelt519@hotmail.com
