The View | It pays to sit down and take stock sometimes, even it’s been forced on you by a typhoon

Business ground to a halt last Friday after the No.8 typhoon signal was hoisted. At first glance this appears to be a bit of body blow for companies that lost a day’s trading but there are grounds for celebrating this enforced shutdown.

First in line to celebrate were employees who got a day off and had the added benefit of it coming at the beginning of a weekend, thus providing an unexpected long break. Hopefully employers will not begrudge giving their hard working staff a bit of extra holiday.

Other employees who had to work should have received a bonus for braving the elements; it is to be hoped that employers did the honourable thing here.

So far, so obvious but in my book this enforced break produced other advantages. Some of them were lurking on my desk piled high with boring paperwork. I strongly suspect I am not alone in this respect. The pile grows and is only diminished as more urgent tasks edge closer to their due date and are thus reluctantly dealt with.

Less pressing but frankly equally necessary bits of paperwork mature at the bottom of the pile on the spurious grounds that there is so much happening on a daily basis that there simply is no time to deal with these other matters.

This is a mendacious excuse because a well organised person allocates time to deal with matters requiring immediate attention and then earmarks other chunks of time to handle less pressing matters.