Time Management is a Myth – Manage THIS instead

by Dike Drummond

time management myth and time saving tips for doctorsTime Management is a Myth

There is no such thing as time management.

You and I get 24 hours in each day – 168 of them in a week. No more and no less. The seconds in an hour are a fixed resource that no one can manipulate or manage or finagle or cajole or multiply. So let’s all stop focusing on ” time management ” and do something MUCH more productive instead.

Manage Your Priorities and Intentions Instead
- and create more work-life balance this week.

Does this feel familiar. ..

You have had a very busy week filled with LOTS of activity – at work and at home. And as you sit here on the weekend you reflect on “Gee, I sure wish I could have had a date night with my spouse/significant other this week” and you begin to judge yourself or your career because that didn’t happen?

You may find yourself longing to

  • Exercise more frequently
  • Read a book
  • Have some alone time with each of your children
  • Take a vacation
  • Go for a walk
  • Plant or weed your garden
  • (fill in your desires here ____________ )

The reasons these things did not happen has nothing to do with your skills at Time Management.

Let me go out on a limb and make a bet with you here. I will bet that you long for these things and have not made them a priority. You didn’t set a conscious intention to put them into this week and they did not appear anywhere on your schedule/calendar as the days rolled by.

“Be assured that you’ll always have time for the things you put first.”
~ Liane Steele

4 Steps to Get More of What You Really Want This Week
with Priority Management

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Batch Processing and Patient Flow – Get Home On Time This Week

by Dike Drummond

sorry i'm late with batch processing for better patient flowBatch Processing, Patient Flow and the science of how to Get Home On Time

Do you find yourself spending too much time on things that have nothing to do with seeing patients – and then getting home later than you would like?

Do you notice that for every 15 minutes you spend with a patient you spend WAY more than that messing around in the EMR and being distracted by things like prescription refills, test results and a hundred other forms of two bit clerical work in your day?

Does your organization expect you to access your EMR from home to complete chart notes in the evenings after you have tucked your kids into bed? ARRRGGGGHHH !   :-(

I wish I had a chance to shadow you in your office, because there are a number small changes you can make right now that will shave hours off of your “non-clinical activities”.

They don’t teach these things in residency … so let me share the top two tools I have found to get you home on time – with your charts done – more often. If you are not doing these two simple tasks every day in the office you are working WAY too hard and getting home at least an hour later than you have to.

NOTE:
There is no way to get home on time every single day – much as our perfectionist tendencies would like that to be the case – and 75 – 85% is a worthy goal to aim for. Just because these things don’t work on every single office day – don’t let that stop you from doing them every day. They will make every day better that if you DON’T use them. I will promise you that for sure.

 

Home-on-time tool #1
The BID Team Huddle (when done well)

Here is a full training on BID Team Huddle Technology

 

Home-on-time tool #2
Batch Processing (don’t be a dog)

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Physician Burnout Can Kill You – CHD is just one way

by Dike Drummond

physician burnout and coronary heart diseasePhysician Burnout and the risk of CHD

A new research paper published in the journal “Psychosomatic Medicine” in 2012 is showing a solid link between Burnout and the risk of CHD for the first time. This new information proves a connection that has been suspected for decades and adds to the list of ways burnout can actually kill.

Previous research has shown a correlation between burnout and the following

  • Risk of Type II Diabetes
  • Sleep disturbance
  • Musculoskeletal pain
  • Impaired fertility
  • All cause mortality
  • Dyslipidemia, metabolic syndrome and inflammation biomarkers
  • Alcoholism and drug addiction
  • higher rates of suicide

The current study is:
“Burnout and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A prospective study of 8838 Employees“
Psychosomatic Medicine 74:840-847 (2012)

They studied a cohort of 8838 healthy, white collar workers in Israel for an average of 3.4 years.

At baseline they measured burnout using a validated instrument called the Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure. This is a tool similar to the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

They adjusted their analysis to eliminate risk differences for all of the following:
age, gender, workload (subjective and by hours worked), depression, physical activity, smoking, body mass index, family history, blood pressure and fasting blood sugar.

Burnout emerged as an independent risk factor for CHD when the individuals with the top 20% of burnout scores were compared to the rest of the cohort.

The increase in risk from burnout for this “top quintile” was 79% (hazard ratio = 1.79)

Note that this study is not specifically about burnout in physicians or healthcare workers. It is in a relatively healthy, white collar group of workers. The authors expressed the concern that a more normal worker cross section might have shown an even stronger correlation.

A landmark study in 2012 showed that burnout is more prevalent in doctors than the general population making this study a shot across the bow for doctors suffering from physician burnout as well.

Burnout is bad for you, your family, your patients … this is just another indicator of how deep and wide burnout’s negative effects extend.

physician burnout prevention matrix report dike drummond physician coach

 

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Physician Burnout and the Enlightened CFO

April 12, 2013

Physician Burnout and the Power of an Enlightened CFO What your CFO doesn’t know about physician burnout is hurting you right now. They are pounding the boardroom table for projects that only increase the stress for the front line care providers. We must teach them the financial impact of burnout because an enlightened CFO can [...]

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Prevent Physician Burnout With These Mobile Apps

April 7, 2013

Prevent Physician Burnout with a Mobile App? … you betcha … here are my two favorites Forget Angry Birds and other mobile apps that do a great job of helping you waste time. And set aside for now the apps that help you find information and practice clinical medicine more efficiently. It was only a [...]

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Physician Burnout – Pathophysiology and 2 Main Prevention Techniques

April 6, 2013

Learn Physician Burnout Pathophysiology and 2 Main Prevention Methods in this brief video => How physician burnout drains your energy and pulls you into the downward spiral => What you can do to stop the drain => Why this has NOTHING to do with the Energizer Bunny => Why there are only 2 ways to [...]

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Physician Wellness – Why It’s Such a Struggle

March 23, 2013

Physician Wellness – Let’s abandon the struggle and just let doctors do what they do best. In response to the chronic epidemic of physician burnout, there is a lot of talk about Physician Wellness these days. Hospitals and groups are being encouraged to establish a physician wellness committee and do something, anything, for the doctors. [...]

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The Physician Friendly Organization Scorecard

March 17, 2013

Physician Friendly Organization Scorecard Is YOUR organization Physician Friendly? In my work helping hundreds of over-stressed doctors recover from burnout here is one of the hardest parts: A coaching client and I work together to stop the downward spiral and get their energy and attitude back … and yet they continue to spend 10 hours [...]

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Physician Survey 2013 – Physician Burnout and Stress in Healthcare

March 10, 2013

Physician Survey 2013 Results Last month we surveyed our HappyMD community on a number of physician burnout and stress in healthcare related questions. Thank you for your participation and here are the results. I am personally fascinated by your answers about your anticipation of stress and burnout being an issue, the frequency of job changes [...]

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Disruptive Physician Toolkit

March 3, 2013

Disruptive Physician Toolkit – how to raise your concerns and avoid being labeled “Disruptive Physician” is one of the most misused terms in healthcare these days. In many organizations, those two words have become the c-suite’s trump card to quash any physician resistance to new administrative programs. These programs are often have purely financial motives [...]

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