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1. Make lists. Getting complex thoughts out of your head and into list form can help to organise your workflow, prioritise tasks and remove time-wasting nuance and subtlety. Psychologists have found that the human brain responds to bullet points almost as dramatically as it responds to actual bullets; the time taken selecting exactly the right graphic to use at the head of each bullet point will always pay you back double in PRODUCTIVITY. You should aim to spend at least 25% of your day making lists of things to do.

2. Meeting expectations. Have you ever noticed how much time gets used up in meetings just getting everybody onto the same page? Rather than wasting ages talking at cross purposes or getting everybody up to speed, plan ahead: write up a clear agenda for the meeting in advance, laying out the topics for discussion, the goals being aimed for, the conclusions you will come to and what actions will be decided upon. If anybody tries to deviate from this agenda, don’t be afraid to ignore them, or to pretend you can’t understand what they’re saying.

3. Language is a tool. Use it wisely. Most words that people use in their professional and private lives are unnecessary. Linguists from the the University of Illinois at Chicago have identified adjectives as the most useless words, followed by adverbs and indefinite articles. Remove them from your speech. Verbs are powerful, activity words – try only using them. If you must use nouns as well, make a list of no more than fifty essential nouns you really need to talk about, and stick to it. Remember, while “productive” may look like an adjective, it is actually one of a recently discovered category of words called “superverbs”, which are even more powerful than ordinary verbs.

4. Don’t be a slave to email. Email should be an aid to productivity, not the killer of it. But studies have found that many workers spend upwards of 20% of their time responding to emails unnecessarily. Use an email client with a Bayesian spam filter to manage your inbox – simply marking anything with the phrases “Urgent”, “ASAP” or “by the close of play today” as spam will quickly teach it to hide away those intrusive emails along with the v14gr4 ads and Nigerian begging letters, allowing you to claim in all innocence that you never got it, and freeing you up to attend to other tasks.

5. Hell’s kitchen. Research from the University of Manchester has shown that the average man spends up to 12 minutes every day standing in the kitchen wondering what he went in there for. This is time that could be better spent being PRODUCTIVE, so fill your kitchen up with fast-setting concrete and wall it off to ensure this never happens again.

6. Waste of time. A voluntarily-attached colostomy bag is an excellent way to win back the 25 minutes or more that other people – lesser people – would quite literally be shitting away. While your competitors are in the head, you’re at your desk using your head. Also makes a useful weapon in tense business meetings.

7. Standing in the park on a spring day, soaking up the warm glow of the sun and listening to the happy cries of children as they frolic merrily, chasing butterflies and collecting flowers that give off a scent so pure and unsullied that it takes you back to more innocent times, where none of your worries and fears can find you. That’s five minutes you’re not getting back, loser.

8. Sekhmet. The Egyptian goddess of war and destruction, long thought vanished but in fact merely dormant and biding her hideous time, can be summoned by an act of bloodletting during the process of copulating with a lioness. Appease her with the flayed bodies of the weak – about 7 a day is considered appropriate – and she will grant you the strength of will and the infernal power to crush your enemies into the sand, grind their remains beneath your iron sandal, and feast upon the still-quivering flesh of their children. This should save you at least half an hour every day.

9. Hack hack. Use a service like Yahoo! Pipes or Feed Rinse to ensure that, as you read through del.icio.us popular or the Digg front page, anything with the word “hacks” in it is automatically deleted. Research shows that you’re a stupid fucking cunt who wastes most of their time reading shoddily compiled “productivity” self-help tracts online, when in fact you’d just be better off accepting that you’re a schlubby middle-achiever whose biggest barrier to success lies not in the fact you’re losing 42 minutes available time every day, but that you are simply a profoundly mediocre person destined for a life of moderate achievement and partial victories. Jesus Christ, just come to terms with this and you’ll be happy. You don’t have to be one of those hollow-eyed vampire people constantly striving to outdo the malevolent ghosts in their head… just be you. Look – Heroes is on TV soon. Just sit on your damn sofa and watch it.

Officer In the US Navy, or Priest Name Said By Mrs Doyle In An Attempt To Guess Father Todd Unctious’s Real Name In The Father Ted Christmas Special?

1. Hank Tree
2. John Stufflebeem
3. Jemima Racktouey
4. Lothrop Little
5. Canabrana Lammer
6. Peewee Stairmaster
7. Flex Plexico
8. John Hoop
9. Jock Stirrup
10. Neil Hannon
11. Mike Kafka
12. Dennis Woofter
13. James Wisecup
14. Hairy Cakelinum
15. Tight Head Lips

Answers
US Navy: 2,4,7,11,12,13
Priest: 1,3,5,6,8,10,14,15 (see here)
Neither: 9 (Sir Jock Stirrup, British Chief of the Defence Staff)

Dear rotating woman,

Fuck you.

Don’t think I don’t mean it. Fuck you, rotating woman. Fuck every degree of your rotation, fuck your pretentious oh-so-casual arm-dangling pose, and fuck fuck fuck the greyscale background you rotated in on.

“You’re overreacting,” you say. “You’re just angry.” Well, hell yes, I’m angry. There’s poverty in this world, there’s injustice, there’s a war on in Iraq, and what do you do? You rotate. You turn. You circumvolve. You are, in microcosm, everything that is apathetic and self-centred and vile about our generation. You epitomise every “look-at-me” impulse and casual abdication of responsibility that ever degraded the world another notch. You are part of the problem, and the stench of death surrounds you like a miasma.

And what’s more, it’s clearly bollocks that you can look like you’re rotating either way.

You’re obviously going clockwise, you dreadful harridan, so don’t try to pretend otherwise. You wonder why I’m angry? I’m angry that everywhere I go, your revolving silhouette smirks back at me (I cannot see you face, but I know you are smirking). I’m angry that you haunt that precious, fragile space between sleeping and waking. And yes, I’m angry that I spent the best part of twenty minutes staring like a fuckwit at a blurry point several inches below your feet because Jason Kottke told me to. And still – still - you didn’t turn round and spin the other way.

Not only are you purest evil made manifest, but you’re plain stubborn with it.

I sometimes wonder to myself: what would it have been like if things had been different; if you had suddenly started going anti-clockwise? Might I have caught something different, something endearing in your manner – a different tilt of the head, a certain charming lopsidedness in your stance, a carefree flick of your ponytail? Maybe that single frame where the outline of your nipple is visible would have seemed enticing and coquettish, rather than cheap and slutty… Maybe. If you’d just been open to change. But you weren’t.

So, to return to my earlier point: fuck you, rotating woman. We could have had something beautiful together. But no, no, you just couldn’t stop spinning long enough to see it.

I feel this letter from today’s Metro needs to be preserved for posterity:

In response to Debby Wakeham’s comments about a fair trial for potential suicide bombers in light of the case of the mistaken identity of Jean Charles de Menezes (Metro, Thu), she seems to forget that these suicide bombers do not have consideration for anyone.

So, personally, yes, I would prefer the police to take action rather than give a suicide bomber a fair trial after he had killed innocent people – particularly when there is a possibility he might get away with it and do it again.

S Huson, Essex

I’d love to be able to tell you that this is a spoof. Sadly, I’ve no idea if it is or not.