Where Does My Time Even Go?!
How many times has this thought crossed your mind? I can start the day with the best of intentions and then get to the end of the day feeling that I haven’t accomplished a single thing (even when “the end of the day” comes an hour and a half after I’d intended the day to end). On these days, I knew I spent the entire day doing things: tackling emails, answering questions from coders in the electronic medical record, division meetings, teaching sessions, checking items off of the “work” and “home” to do lists, and finding wonky, inconsistent chunks of time for scholarly work. So I was doing things but wasn’t accomplishing much at all. I was collecting CME hand over fist. I routinely got my inbox to zero but didn’t have anything to show for it. My to do lists were self-regenerating because, for every one thing I would check off, I would put two things in its place. Progress on scholarly work came in jarring fits and starts (and then I’d loathe picking it up again when I had a spot of time months later because I knew I’d have to spend at least 20 minutes re-orienting myself to the work I’d already done). And I just felt tired. Really, really tired. And I felt deeply unfulfilled, which just added insult to injury.
COVID allowed me to figure out how I work best when I’m off clinical service (“do not disturb” mode is critical), and then coming back to the office showed me all the unhelpful habits I’d picked up working from home (throwing in that load of laundry actually did impede my work progress for the day). So, want to know where your time goes? For two weeks straight, do these five things:
Stop multitasking. Multitasking is just rapid-focus-shifting, a profoundly inefficient process that drains your mental energy. Because we cannot focus on multiple things equally, the single thing you choose to focus on will likely get done faster (and better), which frees up time to focus on another single thing (and then maybe another).
Manage your meetings. Have lots of meetings you’re supposed to attend? Get very honest with yourself about which ones are helping you achieve one of your goals. Cancel the ones that do not help you achieve your goals; you should use that time on other things. When you’re the one setting up the meeting, make it for 30 minutes, not an hour. Our electronic calendars auto-populate hour-long meetings for no actual good reason. Try setting a low-stakes meeting up as a half hour instead of the auto-populated hour (meeting a possible mentee for the first time is a perfect place to start), You’ll be amazed at how productive it is, and it’ll prompt you to start making more of your meetings 30 minutes. The short meeting times also decrease the opportunity for unconscious multitasking, which leads me to…
Email is a tool that you use, not something that controls you. Every day, block off 30 minutes to manage your email and stay out of your inbox for the other 23 hours and 30 minutes. It feels productive to scroll through our inboxes “just to weed out” inapplicable informational emails, SPAM, and “things I can answer real quick.” But this is multitasking, which divides our focus, depletes our mental energy, contributes to brain fatigue, and then leads to our feeling exhausted and as if we didn’t accomplish anything at the end of the day. And the “things I can answer real quick”? I can’t quantify it, but I know it to be true: emails beget emails. You can’t clean those “answer real quick” emails out of your inbox because the answer you send will generate at least one other email from the sender. It may be even more than one email if you “real quick” answered an email with a reply-all to multiple people. Even if it’s just a closed-loop “Thank you!” it’s still another email.
a.) Switching your email to “Work Offline” is the trick for those who cannot help but scratch the itch of logging into our emails. Unsure how to do this? See step 1a of my guide, “One Hour to Your Best Service Week Yet.
b.) Same tip but a different flavor. If you feel the pull of social media, block off 30 minutes on your calendar once a day to check those feeds. Many apps restrict your time on apps and websites that you’re trying to cut back on; take a look here: businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-block-social-media-apps-from-yourself.Turn your phone, tablet, and computer to “Do Not Disturb.” When our friends and family text us, they don’t mean to interrupt your flow state (or your relaxation time)! Turning your devices to “Do Not Disturb” allows those in your “Favorites” list to get through to you immediately, and everybody else gets a notification that you’re in “Do Not Disturb” mode and provides instructions for how to get through to you if it’s an emergency. I do this when I want to focus on what I’m doing, but I also do it when I just want to relax deeply at home.
Be very honest about where and when you work best. I loved working from home during COVID lockdowns, but throwing in a load of laundry before a Zoom meeting became a mechanism to distract myself from work. “Well, I’ll just do chores in-between writing sections of that manuscript,” became, “I’ve got the super rough draft of half of the introduction done, and the dishes washed, and sheets changed, and closet cleaned out….” So I learned that I just work better from, well, work. When I’m not on service, I give myself a couple of days a week to work from home and a couple of days a week to work from the office—best of both worlds. I have also found that when I am out of the unit, I am not of the “rise and grind” personality. When not on service and working from home, I wake up around 8:00 and leisurely drink a pot of coffee while reading before I start the work day. So I just plan to do that, making the rest of the day much better. Are you a night owl? Don’t force yourself to become a lark because “larks are more productive.” It’s like going to the gym: the workout that works is the one you’ll do. Most creative at 3a? Take advantage, and those emails you send will be ready for their recipients bright and early the next, er, less early that day.
After two weeks of practicing these five steps, you’ll have a much better idea of where your time goes. Now, are you interested in really seeing where your time goes? With data?!
Bonus step:
Conduct a time audit. Documenting how much time you spend doing things shows you the reality of how you’re spending your time. There are many ways to do this, but my favorite is the Toggl Track app. It’s free, easy to use, discreet, and it only takes a couple of days to get into the habit of using it. You can’t change what you don’t measure, and if you have the inkling that you’re spending far too much time on one particular task, measuring how much time you spend on that task per week will help you make data-driven decisions toward change. That, and you’ll be able to answer the question, “Where does my time even go?!” with a pretty graphic full of data. And in academic medicine, we love pretty graphics full of data ;)