Most of what is useful in this area is, in the end, routine. The reviewing of which accounts the principal holds, at what addresses, with what protections, on which recovery routes. The closing of what is no longer needed. The strengthening of what remains. The quiet checking of what the world finds when it searches for the principal, and the considered correction of what it finds.

The routine is not dramatic. It does not announce itself; it does not require alarm; it does not produce, on most days, anything visible. On the day that something matters, however, it tends to produce the position the principal would have wanted to be in.

What the routine looks like in practice varies by the principal. For some it is a quarterly review, half a day, with a small number of corrections each time. For others it is more frequent, more particular, embedded in the way the principal handles their accounts in the ordinary course. For all of them, the discipline is more or less the same: that the question is not addressed only when it has become urgent.

The principal who handles this without help can do so. The principal who prefers it to be handled, by people whose work it is, can have it handled. The substance is the same; the time it takes from the principal is the difference. In most cases the desk handles the substantive work and reports periodically; the principal is asked to attend only to the decisions that they would, in any case, want to make themselves.

The result, after some years of this routine, is that the principal's relationship with their own identity is calm. The questions that occasionally arise are handled quickly because the foundation has been kept in order. The position is, in the most literal sense, kept.