More than 130 episodes in (and counting…), BBC’s The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast makes for compelling listening. If ever there was a perfect example of the BBC’s remit, it’s this podcast, giving a weekly summary of what took place during the previous five days of evidence. The traumatic and grief-laden early episodes — hearing from those who escaped the inferno and their distraught relatives — have since…

OK, so I’m slightly nerdy in that I keep track of all the books I’ve read in a calendar year. I’ve been doing it since the early 2010s, during which time I’ve got through more than 400 books of varying shapes and lengths. I’ve averaged just over a book a…

We all have our own favourite songs. The ones we can listen to over and over again, seemingly never bored by their repetition. And, for me, one of the best bits about revisiting those favourites is isolating the small, often second-long elements that make that tune stand out even more. …

Many of you will have watched The Social Dilemma since its arrival on Netflix at the end of August. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a documentary/drama sounding the alarm on our use of social media platforms from the people who know best — the tech experts who previously worked for them. I’ll be honest, it didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already probably know — the…

Imagine the following scenario: you’re walking down the street and something about a shop intrigues you, so you head through the door. You’ve barely made it over the threshold when a member of staff approaches you with a piece of paper to sign, explaining that they’ll use your movements in the store to help them do better business. If you choose not to sign the piece of paper there and then, you…

A friend’s daughter is moving school and, over the summer, told her group of friends from the old school she was moving. The deed was done using the most obvious 2019 form of communication — WhatsApp — and, within seconds of sending the update, the teenager was inundated with heartfelt messages saying how much she’d be missed and how wonderful she was. All very lovely, you may be thinking, except for one…

We all have bad days. The ones where you sleep through the alarm. When the traffic’s awful or your train’s cancelled. When you get to work to discover you’re wearing completely mismatched clothes. Those days when a client bawls you out for producing sub-standard work, your boss moans because you made her look like an idiot, or a team member screws up monumentally — no, you screw up monumentally. And you know what? It’s good to have those days, no matter how diabolical…

After a quarter of a century with my nose to the grindstone, here are some life lessons I’ve picked up along the way — I recently realised I’ll have been working for 25 years this summer, which caused me to reflect. What have I actually learned in that time? Have I just been going through the motions? Have I learned anything from which others might benefit? I went over some particular situations where things haven’t gone quite as anticipated during my career, and from those, I’ve come up with the following…

This post is adapted from an original piece on robmansfield.net Apparently, the UK Government is set to offer guidance on how we sleep. It’s about time they woke up to the sleep issue. The way we sleep affects us all. Even the most settled of snoozers can suffer and the effect a disturbed night has on the body is quite disturbing. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s excellent book The Organized Mind* is very good on…