One Hour to Your Best Service Week Yet!

Service weeks can feel difficult. We know patient care is the priority, but the in-hospital and out-of-hospital world doesn’t stop. This guide assumes your service week starts on Monday, but you can modify it however you need to for your service schedule. With that, here’s how to have your best service week yet!

1) The Friday before, put your out of office automatic response up on your email. Work towards not checking your email at all until your service week is over.

a. Hate seeing emails pop into your inbox even when your out of office response is on? Turn your email to “work offline” and emails sent to you won’t even show up in your inbox until you turn it off. Here’s what it looks like in Outlook:

2) The Sunday before:

a. Do what you need to do to feel prepared for patient care (review charts, etc.)

Here’s where the “One Hour to Your Best Service Week Yet” starts!

b. Get a blank piece of paper out and write down all the non-work things that you:

i. Must get done (ex: mortgage payment needs to get sent on Weds)

ii. Want to get done (ex: prep your lunches every evening) We’ll generically call this your “to do list”

c. Open your work calendar and choose which meetings you’ll go to when you have more than one in a spot, which (in Outlook) looks like this:

You may feel anxious deleting one of these meetings, hearing your brain say, “Well, what if the one you choose gets cancelled and then you’ve deleted the information for the other one you could have gone to?!” It will be okay, I promise. Your choosing which meetings you’ll commit to while on service will be a bit of a learning process and your choices for subsequent service weeks will be guided by what you’re learning now.

Why is this step important? Choosing which meeting you’ll commit to ahead of time frees up the mental energy you’d spend choosing right before the meeting (while you’re on service and trying to focus mainly on patient care). Free mental energy is gold when you’re on service.

d. After you only have one meeting in each spot, delete meetings that you know there’s no way you’re going to get to (ex: 9a staff meeting when your rounds are usually 8a – 11a)

Why is this step important? Leaving meetings that you know you’ll never get to is unnecessary clutter on your calendar and also gives you a reason to beat yourself up. For example, from above: “Ugh, I’m missing the staff meeting.” Lovely friend, you were never going to get to the staff meeting anyway. Minimizing the opportunities to beat yourself up frees up mental energy and free mental energy is gold when you’re on service.

e. Then, delete meetings that it’d be a stretch to get to (ex: if your rounds end at 11a, delete the 1115a meeting that’s only held in person in a conference room not located in your unit)

Why is this step important? When patient care is your priority, having a meeting right after rounds creates a feeling of time scarcity that leads to rushing rounds, which could give you a reason to beat yourself up (“Ugh, I’m trying to get through rounds quickly and if I leave now I’ll only be 3min late for the meeting…hmmmm, the family has questions so now I’ll be 5min late for the meeting…”). Just make your schedule realistic ahead of time and delete the meeting.

Are some of the meetings you’re looking at deleting actually crucial? Plan how you’re going to deal with it now. You can break rounds, have your fellow round on “easy patients” without you while you’re at the meeting, etc.

Now you can look at your schedule and see what blocks of time you have for your to do list.

f. Look at your schedule and block of time to complete items on your to do list

i. Be generous with how much time you estimate things will take (ex: if it usually takes 30min to get to your child’s school for a recital, block off 45min)

ii. If you run out of spots on your schedule to finish the items on your to do list, your choices are:

1. Delete a work meeting from your schedule to free up time
2. Delegate the item to somebody else
3. Forgo the item getting done
I’ve put the choices in the order in which I utilize them.

Now, the only thing to do is stick to what you’ve scheduled for yourself.

Taking this hour to plan your service week 1) frees up your mental energy 2) decreases the opportunities to feel badly when things don’t get done (especially things that were realistically never going to get done anyway) and 3) will increase your productivity on service because you’ll accomplish tasks with a calm and clear mind.