EP47
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to what is now our Time Management Deep dive. My name is Stacy Mann and I am here from the Academic Medicine Strategy Podcast, and we are talking about why your best cognitive hours are wasted on email and what to do about it. Last week we addressed the time crisis in academic medicine and the core issue is not volume.
You are not gonna find more time. It is not lost. It's that we treat all work. As equivalent. All that work time in reactive work and deep work and collaborative work, and it's not a 15 minute gap between meetings is not the same as a two hour protected time in the morning or whenever you have your best energy and responding to email while you're half listening to a research meeting or grand rounds is not the same as a focus collaboration.
Trying to write your manuscript at 7:00 PM after a full clinical day is also not the same as writing during your peak cognitive hours. So when we fail to distinguish between the different types of work and the time they require, we end up [00:01:00] constantly busy, constantly tired, often overwhelmed, but rarely strategic.
So I want to really get into the three types of time framework today and how we solve this problem. So we wanna categorize all of our academic work into three types. Oops. I hit my glasses. And each requires a different cognitive states, a different time structure, and a different protection strategy. So here's the first one.
Deep Work you may have heard of. There's a book out there called Deep Work. It's fantastic. I really enjoy it. It actually takes deep work time to read it 'cause it's dense, but it's basically the cognitive demanding time that requires that. Sustain uninterrupted focus. So this might be writing the grant, it might be writing a paper, it might be designing a study or developing a grant proposal or writing a curriculum, whatever it is.
That is the stuff that's deep work for you and. It's the work that builds your academic reputation and it determines your promotion. This is your narrative. [00:02:00] This is your niche. This is your story, especially by the way, if you're doing it in your niche.
And if you haven't heard anything about that, we will connect to the one about finding your niche in the story notes. But deep work does not happen for most of us in scattered 15 minute increments. I did hear about a writer who successfully wrote his book in 15 minute blocks. I cannot do that. I am so impressed with that person.
Most of us require some immersion. And I can tell you, I, I even tried a technique where I would do 25 minutes and then five minutes break and 25 minutes and five minutes, and I found I needed longer than 25 minutes. 'cause for many of us, it can take between five and 23 minutes to get into flow. And flow.
Is that state where you're like, okay, I'm getting this going. It feels good, I'm rolling. Where you want no interruptions, because what happens? You hit that interruption and you're like, ah, now I gotta start over. I got, where was I? What was I working on? You almost have to re refresh yourself on the project.
And so those deep. Complex tasks really want deep, long blocks so that you don't have to reset the clock, you don't have to reset your [00:03:00] brain, and if you actually get constantly interrupted, you often never get into that flow state where your best thinking happens. Now, the second time of type of work is that collaborative work time.
This requires real time interaction with other people. Collaboration, so this includes things like patient care potentially, but it's a lot of times about things like teaching or working with your research team or mentoring grant discussions. Talking to your mentors or the people you're mentor or the collaborators that you work on who are in other specialties or within your specialty who do other parts of the project.
It is valuable and necessary and may absolutely contribute to your promotion, but it is externally scheduled and subject to everybody's availability and. It's really hard to batch for some of us now, if you can try and batch it so that you have all your meetings in a row. One of the things I like to do is start scheduling from the end of the day forward.
'cause I'm smarter in the morning. So if I have a free day, I'm gonna put my meetings at four o'clock and then three o'clock and then two o'clock or even better four 30. [00:04:00] Four and three 30. And then the other thing I started doing is stealing the first five minutes of all those blocks. So actually they start at 4 35 and I have a break from four 30 to 4 35 and they start at 4 0 5 and 3 35.
So that you actually get a little bit of time to reboot, reframe about what you're supposed to be talking about and get a bio break if you need it. Now reactive work is the area where many of us get stuck. 'cause there's so much of it and we are so good at it in medicine. And that is responding to all those incoming demands.
This is the email. The EMR messages, the results, the minor clinical questions, the routine paperwork, the scheduling, and some maybe most of our meetings and everything feels urgent 'cause somebody else is waiting for it. But a lot of times it's not urgent for me. It's not as important for me and it's definitely not the stuff that's gonna get me promoted.
That reactive work is endless. There's a concept called Inbox V zero, and I think a lot of the concepts are really useful. But if I spent all my [00:05:00] time trying to get the end of all my email boxes, I would be literally doing reactive work all the time. So it may be that you're not gonna get to zero, but you're gonna figure out how to sort and filter those things so that you're not looking at all of it all the time.
And if you allow reactive work to fill your schedule, it will consume every second. Most of us work backwards. We work with reactive worst work first, whether that's clinic or, I'm just gonna check this box and figure this out. And we do that throughout the day. There's administrative requests, they have implicit urgency, those email notifications, there's always something constantly pinging us.
And I had a fantastic moment with a coaching client this week who told me her life had changed, and you know what changed her life? She turned off her EMR notifications on her personal phone, so she wasn't getting constantly pinged. In her off time, which she didn't even really plan to be working on it, but it was constantly interrupting her brain that this was something that had to be done.
And so you get rid of that stuff. And I will tell you, I've turned off most of the notifications on my computer. I don't know when an email comes in. I don't [00:06:00] know. When I get invited to a meeting and I look at it. In regular intervals, but it doesn't ping me in real time, so I don't lose the brain power in between.
Now after that, we oftentimes will have collaborative work gets scheduled, and it may be sent by a department. It may be sent by somebody we're working with and maybe research or clinical teaching time. But then the deep work is somehow is supposed to find its way in those like 15 minute blocks we have, or the half a day.
But there's a meeting every 30 minutes, but here's a 30 minute and there's a 20 minute, or honestly, it gets pushed to the weekends and the evenings 'cause we don't have any time. There is no block on our calendar that allows us to do it. And I have so many people who I know who took that administrative time and it looks pockmarked.
They don't have any time to put in the deep time. And so that's why I'm saying it's backwards because what we should be doing is scheduling the deep work. First, I'm gonna say it one more time. I want you to schedule your deep work. First, I want you to be intentional about what you put there. I want you to think about the fact this is what's gonna move your career forward.
[00:07:00] Honestly, this is probably the stuff that made you wanna go into medicine. You wanted to learn something. There's some discovery out there. Even if you don't like research, you don't have to like research, but you probably have to do a little bit of it in order to be promoted and work on the stuff you care about.
If you have clinical questions that you wanna know the answer to for your patients. That should be the work. Or if you're like, Hey, this is really interesting and I wanna build a curriculum 'cause I love teaching. That's the work. As long as you publish the curriculum or you measure something pre and post, if you like doing Qi.
Then all we have to do is turn it into scholarship, but do the work. Do the stuff you care about, but schedule it first so it gets done and you understand the flow and you feel like you finished something. I don't know about you, but I, there's many days where I feel like I started a million things and I finished nothing, and it's because I didn't have enough time.
I didn't have a big enough block to really finish it some uninterrupted time. And I wanted to tell you this shift is the biggest thing that will skyrocket your career. This is what I did when I went from [00:08:00] writing three or four papers a year to 10 to 20 papers a year. I know 10 to 20 sounds crazy. I had a lot more time than a lot of people.
I was 50% clinical. I. If I hadn't protected the time, it wouldn't have mattered. It wouldn't have happened, but I made it non-negotiable. And I'll tell you, I used to close my door and people told me it wasn't very social. They were right. This was my deep time. This was my protected time.
If my door was closed, I was doing the deep work. I don't need to close my door to finish a clinic note. I need to close my door to think about the data analysis or think about how to code it, or, come up with the introduction to my paper or write the lecture that's gonna be presented at a national meeting.
So for years, I worked in that default pattern where I always got interrupted and I responded to everything and I attended every meeting and I felt. Productive, but it wasn't moving my career forward. In fact, when I was talking to my chair three to four years out, I wasn't on track at all. I thought I was so busy.
I was so productive. I wasn't, I was just trying to squeeze everything in time that was left at the end of the day and it wasn't really left. So I was doing it at [00:09:00] home without, toddlers and small children. And I was productive, but I was not building anything intentionally. My best cognitive hours are spent on that reactive work.
My deepest work happened when I was almost completely depleted. I could barely make a decision again. I hated figuring out what to make for dinner. And the shift happened when I started scheduling my deep work intentionally in this other backwards order that I'm telling you is the right one. And that accelerated my promotion in a way that was incredible.
Seven years to associate professor, three years to full professor. So when I scheduled that deep work first before clinical time was set, sure I knew when my clinic and my or was, but there was no add-on. There was no add-on case, and I definitely didn't allow my administrative time in that administrative day to get moved out.
And I blocked that time before a meeting, got an added on. And quite honestly, I tried to push those meetings together. I tried to have a lab meeting so as many of those could come in at the same time. And during those blocks, I worked on one thing. It wasn't always the same thing. It might've been the [00:10:00] grant, it might've been the paper, it might've been the data analysis.
But one thing I really tried to get deep into the thing that was most important this week that was gonna move my career forward. Not the reactive work, but what I thought mattered. And I batched the collaborative work when I could, like I said, I tried to put it in a lab meeting or if I had three research meetings in a week, I tried to put 'em in one day and I protected preparation time the day before teaching sessions rather than scrambling at the last minute.
A reactive time had to move to specified times, and this was the big difference. So many of us are doing it all the time and we're checking in between this and we're looking at our phone and we're like, oh, I have an email. I have an EMR message, I have a notification. I stopped doing that. I actually scheduled to look at all that in the morning.
I would look at the afternoon, I would not look at my results, but I would try and do my results in between cases in the OR because that wasn't gonna be good deep work anyway, so it was a good time to add reactive work. I processed things a few times a day, or I got into that results box when I was like, oh, great, I have 20 minutes right now.
I'm gonna do as many of those as I can and get those all sent off. Administrative tasks [00:11:00] got batched into a single designated admin block, so I didn't give all my admin time to deep work Sometimes. I said, I need a block to do this stuff, but I gave myself a block and I stopped when it stopped, even if it wasn't all completely done.
As long as most of it was done and if something was urgent, I told people they had to let me know. I did results and email requests in the afternoon because my brain was tired by then anyway, or in the operating room and in this framework that I teach my coaching clients now, it's not about working fewer hours, it's about allocating that time based on the kind of work you need to get done.
So number one, protect your deep work time. Deep work is fragile. It requires sustained focus and attention. Those little interruptions, even if it seems like just one can completely ruin the flow and your ability to get real work done, so protect it. Schedule it during your peak cognitive hours if you can.
If you're smartest in the morning, do it in the morning. If you're smartest at two in the afternoon, do it at two in the afternoon. But don't wait till the end of the day if that's when you're really emotionally exhausted. And some people [00:12:00] have a reboot time, like at 11 o'clock at night. They're incredibly smart.
I work with somebody who is cranking at 11 o'clock at night and good for her, but that is not my time. Close your email, turn off your notifications, whether it's on your phone or it's on your computer, and I want you to know it's not selfish. Just let your team know how to get you if it's really urgent, and let them know what really urgent means.
It's not just the latest results that came up and it's not just 'cause somebody made a phone call. It's stuff that really is urgent and protect the collaborative time. If you can make it real time interaction, try and put it all together. If you can create like a group meeting. You and all your partners get together, talk about all the projects at one time, that works great.
Try and set it for a set time so you can plan on it. And the reason that's also important is if I know every Wednesday I'm gonna get to talk to you about research. I'm not gonna ping you on Tuesday and Sunday and Thursday. I know I have one place where I can ask all my questions at once. So it actually reduces the number of times that people are pinging you [00:13:00] and then protect reactive work time.
The key thing here is honestly to contain that reactive work time, batch things like email and results, or do it during times that, you don't have time for deep work anyway, whether it's between cases or if you have 15 minutes left before the clinic at the end of lunch and know that urgency is implied, but oftentimes it's manufactured and not real in those.
So this week I want you to review your calendar for one peak. Cognitive time. Oftentimes for us it's morning when you can work and it might be you go in at six to work for two hours, or it might be you have an administrative day and you go in from eight to 10 or whatever works for you. But I want you to block one two hour work session at least an hour.
But please try and do two hours during that time and decide exactly what you're gonna work on, not work on a paper, but like the introduction for X paper, or I'm going to do the data analysis for X project. Try and batch at least two meetings into the same day if [00:14:00] it's possible, so you can protect full days from deep work.
This is easier as you move along and you're the one setting the meetings and then spec. Set specific time for email and try not to cheat. And then I want you to track what happens. Did your deep work get displaced? How often did you check your email? Like just keep track of it for a week. Figure out what's coming up, what's getting in the way.
And if you need help, talk to a mentor, talk to a colleague, talk to a coach, we'd be happy to help you because the best laid pan lands get thrown off course if we're not really intentional at looking at why and then figuring out how to fix those. And I want you to remember that what changes when time is strategically allocated is that you start to have time to work on the things that matter most and that your narrative starts to become your actual story.
You can tell people and then they can see, oh yeah, this is what she works on. This is what she's known for, this is what she does. Manuscripts that have been sitting in draft form for months get finished within weeks. Grant [00:15:00] proposals that felt totally overwhelming all of a sudden become manageable and.
Those education lectures and presentations that you've been waiting to put together become doable because you've broken them into parts and you know what you need for each section. And quite honestly, sometimes you can ask others for help or jump in and figure out how open evidence works so that you don't have to do as much of that work manually.
The real active work will get done. Don't worry. Email will still get answered. Administrative tasks will still come your way, but they don't consume your whole day, and a lot of it gets done. People realize that they can do some of it too. And the one copy I'm gonna give there is if you get the same question over and over, it may be that you are not the one who has to answer it.
Here is the answer for that question. Every time that question comes in, I want you to send this response. If that doesn't work, then come to me, can save a ton of time, and you can do that one question at a time and create what is a list of frequently asked questions or standard questions for your team.
And then the truth about that time allocation is you can't create more hours in a day, but you can control them. [00:16:00] So I am gonna challenge you this week to set a system to control them and then just keep track. Did it work? What gets in the way and how can we do it better next week? If this resonates, please contact us about presenting the most effective time management strategies at your institution and share this with your faculty development leadership.
These are not individual problems to solve alone. These are system problems, chairs and deans. Please bring systematic faculty support to your institutions with our ferry program at the a me sg.com/ferry, or just look for department coaching on the website. Thank you so much. Please share this with somebody else if you found it useful, and rate and review so more people get to hear about us.
Thank you so much.
