Time management in healthcare professions is no easy task. If you work in a hospital setting with difficult hours, it’s especially hard to maintain a healthy work-life balance. By managing your time better, you can be more efficient in your care of patients. In this blogpost, I’m highlighting why time management in healthcare is crucial and 4 tips to help optimize your balance!
Why is time management in healthcare so important?
A lot of our clients are healthcare professionals. Similarly, they tend to also be very type A, planners – same! Because I’m also a type A planner myself, I recognize the hard work many healthcare professionals put in to crafting a healthy work-life balance.
Time management in healthcare is so important because it has a direct correlation to the outcome of their days and thus, their patients mental wellbeing. By having an effective time management technique, healthcare professionals are able to prioritize tasks that are of more importance and craft a better outcome for their days!
4 time management tips for healthcare professionals
While I’m not a healthcare professional myself, I have spent nearly 10 years finding time management tactics to allow myself optimal output of work AND a healthy personal life.
Whether you are a nurse, dietitian, chiropractor, PT or other clinician, these tips can be applicable across any industry and are guaranteed to help you navigate your work!
- Plan out a summary of your day the night (or day) before
- Readily have a calendar to reference
- Prioritize breaks
- Write down all accomplishments at end of day
1. Plan out a summary of your day the night (or day) before.
Whether you work in a clinical setting or from the couch as an entrepreneur, healthcare professionals need to be amazing at time management. Something that really helps me throughout my week is planning a summary of my day the night beforehand.
In fact, we’ve created a system within our studio that is completely optimized for this type of work flow. You can download our BOD / EOD Template HERE. Let’s dive more into what this is below.
BOD = beginning of day, EOD = end of day.
At the end of every day, we post everything we’ve completed, anything we didn’t get to and any questions we may have for team members that’s outstanding. In addition, we also list out our action items for the next day in our EOD list. Here’s a sample:
By completing a BOD/EOD report, you are setting yourself up for success by a) seeing all the things you’ve accomplished and b) understanding your workload for the next day.
2. Readily have a calendar to reference.
In correlation to a schedule, it’s also important to readily have a calendar to reference your tasks for the day. Preferably, we like to use Google Calendar.
We have many blogposts on time management, and this one focuses mostly on time-blocking which is the process I’m referencing here.
As you craft your daily list of to-do’s, you’ll want to create a timeline and/or schedule of your day with those tasks scheduled on the calendar. Why? This allows maximum usage of time and optimization for understanding how long each task may take you.
After a few weeks of implementing a time blocking schedule, you’ll gain an idea of how long something takes you which creates for better planning!
3. Prioritize breaks throughout your day.
If you work in the clinical setting, breaks are especially important. Nobody wants to sit inside with those florescent lights all day – do they?!
Being a work-from-home individual, I prioritize breaks throughout my workday to have better time management. I’ve learned that on days I didn’t make space for breaks, I feel more rushed and work gets sloppier.
Instead, I’d recommend scheduling in some of the following:
- Outdoor walks
- Life-giving activities – i.e. reading, listening to a podcast
- Laundry (yes – this can be a break!)
- Eating
- Exercising
Some of these “breaks” might seem obvious to you, but to some – they aren’t! For example, I used to be the entrepreneur who would work through lunch and “forget” to eat. When working through lunch, I would dismiss my hunger cues and say “I’m just not hungry”.
After working with my dietitian, I found that this was very unhealthy and now, I force stop to eat lunch!
4. Write down all accomplishments at end of day.
Circling back to point number one, I highly recommend crafting an end-of-day accomplishment list. This can sometimes be referred to as a gratitude list.
Spend 15 to 20 minutes at the end of your work day to decompress all of the items from your brain to paper (or phone). Think about work items you accomplished but also non-work items.
Maybe you spent some time going to lunch with a friend and got to catch up on life.
Or, you were able to run a few errands in town so you don’t have to do them over the weekend.
Whatever this is for you – write it down. Often when we see our accomplishments on paper (or phone) we recognize how hard we worked and will “reward” ourselves with rest.
Note here: you do not have to work harder to earn rest. As humans, it’s our nature to want to do this, but know you are fully allowed to take time off!
Conclusion
As you learn more about time management in healthcare, you’ll find new ways to better optimize your time during your day. Hopefully in this post I’ve provided you with four new and easy ways you can begin implementing tools to make the most use of your days!
