Time is a precious commodity for anyone who works in healthcare, especially surgeons. People’s livelihood depends on these experts, making it crucial for them to prioritize their daily tasks. Surgeons can’t afford to have an inefficient schedule, but several practices can help ensure they optimize it more efficiently.
Time Management Tips for Surgeons
Time management tips for surgeons include the following:
- Look at Your Long-Term Schedule
- Keep Your Patients in the Loop
- Prioritize Your Workday
- Delegate to Your Coworkers/Staff
- Capitalize on the Resources Around You
Look at Your Long-Term Schedule
Surgeons often struggle to look beyond the present time, making it difficult to maintain a long-term vision. Setting incremental goals is a great way to counteract this tendency for your career and personal life. These practices can include getting more sleep and exercising everyday.
For help with time management, contact us today!
Keep Your Patients in the Loop
Keeping patients informed about their condition concisely requires interpersonal skills like listening with empathy and observing body language. It’s also important to think before speaking and refrain from interrupting.
Furthermore, surgeons should identify barriers in communication and take steps to overcome them when speaking to patients. For example, you should minimize medical jargon and ensure the room is free of distractions.
Prioritize Your Workday
You must complete certain tasks during each workday, so you should start them as soon as possible. Begin each morning by prioritizing the tasks you need to finish by the end of the day. Maintain this list throughout the day, and check items off as you complete them. This process can give you the sense of accomplishment you need to continue this momentum.
Delegate to Your Coworkers/Staff
Delegating tasks to your staff is essential for minimizing the time necessary to complete them. In addition to making the workload more manageable for you, delegation can increase status, improve morale and help develop the skill sets of your staff members. However, assigning tasks to team members with the required qualifications is essential rather than simply handing out assignments ad hoc due to inadequate staffing.
Capitalize on the Resources Around You
Healthcare is a highly dynamic environment where a patient’s needs can quickly change. As a result, resources can, at times, be limited, requiring you to use available resources as efficiently as possible. This process should include cognitive stacking, in which healthcare professionals determine the necessary, possible care and the best way to deliver that care with the resources available.
Benefits of Implementing Effective Time Management Practices
In addition to creating more time to care for patients, effective time management also provides surgeons with personal benefits. These include less stress and a better work/life balance.
- Less stress. Poor time management is a common cause of rushing a procedure, often leading to stress. However, you can change your schedule to accomplish the same number of tasks in the same time period but with less stress. For example, you should schedule the most critical procedures during the time of day when you’re most productive. You may also be able to allocate more time for a task than allowed by the original schedule, helping you remain calm while still completing the task on time.
- Healthy work/life balance. Maintaining a healthy work/life balance should be a common goal for surgeons, although it’s often neglected. Time management techniques may include setting up a separate room in your house as a remote office. This approach allows more time for leisure activities, especially when you have a long commute to your regular office. It also helps prevent burnout, a common cause of premature retirement in healthcare.
Finding Balance in Your Life
NexGen helps surgeons implement time management practices to promote an efficient workplace and a healthy workload. We can find career opportunities to help you find the right balance between work and your personal life while allowing you to practice the type of medicine you want. We can build a position around your needs based on your specialty. Our staff will handle administrative tasks like staffing, billing and payroll so that you can focus on patient care.
Contact us online or call 844-592-0802 today to learn more ways of improving your work/life balance.
