august 3 2026 podcast why time management is important
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Academic Medicine Strategy podcast. I'm doing a solo episode today 'cause I wanna talk about a great question that was asked of me this week. I was talking to the CMO of a medical system, and she was asking me what are the most common things that I talk to people about in one-on-one coaching or as we onboard people through our FERI program or our Faculty Excellence and Retention program.
Speaker: There was a couple really common themes. One of them, and really the number one, was time management. Everybody was trying to figure out how to fit everything in that they wanted to do, whether it was more time for home or more time for the CMO job versus clinical work, or how to make sure that we don't take too much of our mental energy in one space versus another how to get my promotion packet fixed or finished.
Speaker: And I will tell you for me, it was how do I get the book written? And that was the example I'm gonna give you today because one of the aims I had for this year was to write about time management for [00:01:00] physicians so that I could help everybody learn many of the things that I talk about when I speak at academic institutions.
Speaker: And to be able to give everybody sort of a quick and easy resource so that we can all get some of this information from the beginning. I gave this talk this week at Geisinger and the chair said to me, "Gosh, I wish I'd had all of these tips 20 years ago." So my goal is to do that. But I have the same question everybody else does.
Speaker: How do I fit this in my day? Where do I find the time? And as we all know, you make time, you don't find it. And so I wanna talk a little bit about that tension because many of us feel like we don't have the time for whatever it is that we do think is important And what turns out is many of our priorities are spoken for by other people.
Speaker: They're the emails that pop in or the messages in the EMR. It's things from other people's agendas that end up being at the top of ours. And so I wanna talk about how in the midst of having [00:02:00] a part-time clinical job and a full-time CMO job and building the academic medicine strategy group and doing way more than I would like in my real estate business, I found the time to write a book.
Speaker: And by write, I didn't actually write anything. I spoke the book, and I used a technique that was given to me by a fantastic woman named Joy O'Neill, and I'll get back to her whose strategy is to talk your book. And so I used time that was previously not really spoken for, and I spoke my book. I created a list of really, like almost 100 of them, where I could talk through stories and examples and what I'd learned and add in the evidence that I knew, and then make notes for the things I needed to add later.
Speaker: And how without having to take time from my family or my work I was able to use things like commuting time or, sitting there waiting for something to start for 15 [00:03:00] minutes or the 10 minutes when I just had 10 minutes of mental space. So one of the things I wanna talk about is why time management is not a one-time fix.
Speaker: Most of us didn't figure it out in residency or as our first faculty meeting, but... or even, honestly, I'm not even sure I figured out when I became a full professor. But it resets at every stage is the other thing to keep in mind. So it was working really well as a fellow. I thought I'd hit, had it all in line.
Speaker: Seemed like I had to throw out the door when I started as a new assistant professor and as I moved my way along and I moved into the CMO job. It was like a whole new world. All the things that I'd done before that were so effective, I had to readjust. Honestly, the first time I had to figure out how to take my kids to school in the morning when somebody else had been doing that for ages, I couldn't even figure out how to get to the gym for a few weeks until I'd figured out a new schedule and figured out how things would work for me.
Speaker: Now, early in my career, I was really working hard to try and protect research time against the clinical demands, and I highly encourage you, if you're just starting your [00:04:00] first job, do not worry about getting clinically busy. I have yet to meet the doctor who is not clinically busy. There are plenty of patients out there.
Speaker: There's plenty to be done. Do try and focus on the thing that you love the most, and if it's patient care, you're in the perfect place. But if it's research or education or discovery or administration, make sure you carve out the time And in mid-career, many of us find that a lot of the service starts to multiply, whether it's a committee, whether it is working with mentees, whether it's administrative roles.
Speaker: They all tar- start landing on you, especially if the person who says yes, and that was me in my career. I said yes to everything for quite a long time. And then as you move into your full professor years, the myth is that it gets easier, and it does in some ways. You can say no to things that you were doing purely to get to that point.
Speaker: So I think I've talked before, I was on five editorial boards be- before I became a full professor, and I recognized the import of those, but it turns out I didn't [00:05:00] like the work. And so it wasn't a great use of my time and mental energy 'cause it drained me, and I didn't enjoy it. And so it was an opportunity at that point to say, "Okay, this makes sense for something I want-- don't want to do."
Speaker: But the requests oftentimes get bigger in other arenas. The stakes go up. I was running the International Surgical Sleep Society for seven years in the midst of COVID for what was really supposed to be a three-year term. So even if things don't go completely sideways like that, there are big obligations that we oftentimes take on as we move into that full professor stage.
Speaker: And as you keep going up, division director, chair, dean, all of those roles start taking on larger and larger amounts of time with huge consequences for the decisions and the types of things that we're doing And the real cost that we have to watch out for is burnout. And I used to think I was immune to burnout because I really loved what I was doing.
Speaker: And so when I took it home, it didn't really feel like work. In full honesty, I loved writing the papers. I loved doing data analysis the [00:06:00] most. But what happens after a time is if there's no boundaries between the two, you do begin to recognize that you're not getting where you wanna be, and some of that resentment can turn the job that you love into a job that you tolerate, and that is not what I want for anyone.
Speaker: This is oftentimes why chairs and deans lose good faculty, and why faculty quietly check out even when they stay. So I want to just make clear that when I talk about time management here, I don't want it to be a productivity hack, although good if it helps. But it's really a skill that we have to learn to build into our career and to reassess regularly so that we can keep making sure we're focused on the right things and that we have a path going forward.
Speaker: Now, I wanna get back to the book, and not because everybody should write a book, although I helped co-edit a beautiful one on essential sleep medicine at one point. This one is more about how to support physicians, and it wasn't something I'd done before. I've done a lot of academic writing. I hadn't written a book for physicians to read in order to help their own careers.
Speaker: It wasn't [00:07:00] knowledge in terms of the clinical knowledge that I'm used to imparting. And so as many of you may know, I work a week a month clinically and then I run the Academic Medicine Strategy Group. I also am the CMO. I coach clients. I help work on faculty development projects. We do some organizational development with places.
Speaker: And I am still writing in terms of doing a little bit of the academic output and research Now, I did also know, and I found it frustrating, I do a lot of commuting. I work at a clinical job that's two hours from my home. I work remotely most of the time in my CMO job, but it is an hour and a half commute when I do have to go.
Speaker: And so that time in the car I hadn't figured out how to harness. And so I had this lovely conversation with a woman named Jory O'Neil, who wrote a book called Talk Your Book: Say It, Shape It, and Share It. And it was super useful 'cause it said, "Help me come up with the prompts," and I used AI to do that, and then it just asked me the questions.
Speaker: I literally spoke [00:08:00] through and told the stories and explained my viewpoint and talked about what I thought was important, and I did it while I was driving for the most part. But then, I started getting excited and I wanted to get it done, and I was talking as I was walking in the gym and I was, doing it as I was commuting around town.
Speaker: It didn't have to be an hour and a half drive. It could be 10 minutes to go pick up my son. And I started using these little chunks of time that were otherwise, quite honestly, maybe me stroll- scrolling on my phone or reading an article or doing a Sudoku or things that sometimes are good in order to give us a little bit of mental break, but also sometimes were just a waste of time.
Speaker: And so it is true that I've been thinking about doing this for a long time and I couldn't figure out a way to start. It felt overwhelming. It felt like it was more time than I was possibly gonna have. I didn't have the expertise to do it. And so finding this book that helped me come up with a strategy was really one of the most important parts.
Speaker: And so if you're getting stuck with how to start, think about how you can do it. Think about a [00:09:00] strategy. Ask a friend. Google it. AI search it. However you wanna figure it out, but start with something like that. And then start with a strategy that maybe makes it easier, whether it's breaking it down into steps or however you wanna do it.
Speaker: But time blocking, giving yourself those long blocks of time. I talk to people about it all the time. Never occurred to me, an hour and a half in the car working on the book is a time block, and I hadn't really thought about it that way. But the premise of that book is if you can talk about your idea, you can turn it into a book, no blank pages required, no typing, l- no late nights necessarily.
Speaker: And quite honestly, I didn't have any late nights, which was fantastic. So I recorded myself talking through the chapters. I talked about the structure that I wanted. I'd read a few books that I think are fantastic. I really liked the structure of Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell and Amy Porterfield's Two Weeks Notice.
Speaker: They really give you something to do at the end of each chapter, and that was a structure I liked. And so the thought was, "Okay, let's start with that [00:10:00] structure." And I have a whole bunch of tools that I use in my coaching program and in the frameworks that we use, and so I wanted to integrate some of those so people could do them on their own and work their way through them with sort of a set of tools at the end.
Speaker: And so I used AI To transcribe and shape sort of that raw talking, and it would talk it back to me, and it would decide if it sounded right, or it would add more detail, or it would fix something that didn't sound like I'd said it correctly. And then I could look at it on paper when it was all done, and then start editing it and going through it the way I traditionally do when I write a paper.
Speaker: And AI didn't write the book, but it did give me the prompts that I could go back and forth with and speak my transcribed manuscript into my phone. So that when I was done with it, I actually had something to start from, and it was a fully formed here's the structure, here's the outline that I could go into and rewrite and redo, and now I have, people, actual editors, helping me work my way through the book so that we can launch that this fall But what it brought me [00:11:00] back was feeling like I'd used this really unused time when I was in the car and it really helped buy me hours back because I felt like I had this momentum, and I didn't feel as guilt about not starting.
Speaker: And in the end, I had at least a great first draft instead of a, a dream of something that I wanted that I wasn't quite sure how to carry out. And so The Time-Trapped Physician launches this September. Everybody's fingers crossed as we work through the developmental editing process. But more importantly for you, even if you never wanna write a book is to think about how you can use this in your own life, and it could be a stalled research paper.
Speaker: It could be a grant that's half written. It could be your promotion packet that is not done. So I want you to think about the thing that's sitting there stalled, that you just need to figure out how to get going or how to finish In otolaryngology, we have an honors society called the Triological Society.
Speaker: I've talked to a lot of people who have their thesis that's partially written or conceived of, or the data's gathered, but it's not quite in the form where they can go forward. [00:12:00] And most of what feels stuck isn't a time problem. It feels like it's a method problem. So find the method. Find the how that matches how you actually think and work.
Speaker: So me talking to myself in the car works well 'cause, quite honestly, what's a podcast? Me talking to myself which I'm doing right now. But find something that works, and then you will find ways to fit it in the time. Now, systems beat willpower every time, and I've talked a lot of times about this, but do schedule it.
Speaker: So if it's like, "Hey, I know on that drive I'm gonna do that," or, "In this 15 minutes..." I work with somebody he was really passionate about making sure he didn't miss any of his kids' soccer matches, which he calls football 'cause he lives in Germany. And his point was, "What do I do to get work done but still be present for all those?"
Speaker: And he figured out his kids need to be dropped off before the game. They would practice for an hour before the match, or they would do some things with the coach, and it was actually an hour of time where he was doing a little bit of interacting with the other parents, but it wasn't necessarily the priority.
Speaker: So he [00:13:00] found he could drop his kids off. He'd have the pleasure of the ride there and the conversation. He would then work for an hour on whatever it was on the top of his list, and then he would go back and be there for the entire game, be present, and drive them back home feeling like he had achieved both great job as a parent, and he got that sort of stolen or missing hour back where he actually got work done, and it was intentional.
Speaker: And so those are the kinds of things you can do where you create a system and then find the time and then the other thing is I wanna make sure just forever feeling overwhelmed by it is something I used to get stuck in, and the overwhelm I realized was just realizing that everything felt like it had the same priority.
Speaker: So my thought for you is find one thing you absolutely know is the top of the priority list. It does not have to be the most important thing. It just needs to be one thing that you know this is a high enough priority, it should get done, and just start on one of them. So today, I want you to think about your own career [00:14:00] and what's one thing you've been waiting for time to start so you could have some different method moving forward.
Speaker: And if this is your department, and what you're saying is, many of my faculty are getting stuck not getting the promotion packet in a timely manner, or not getting the abstracts in for the meeting, or the administrative agenda never got written. Whatever it is in your department, if you need to be able to help your faculty move one step further, help them focus on the method, not just finding the time.
Speaker: And then if there are time strategies that you need in order to get some of that time back or to find it, whether it's a time audit or time blocking or some of the other really evidence-based methods for us to be able to get that time back as physicians, I absolutely recommend that you talk to your faculty about ways to do this.
Speaker: Now, if this is useful, please share this with friends and colleagues who might be able to benefit from it. And please come back and listen to us next week so that we can talk to you a little bit more. I think I'm gonna be having a guest next week who [00:15:00] will be talking to us about new ways to build medical education.
Speaker: So thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you next week. Please find us at the blog or the podcast or on social media, or just give us a call if we can help you or a friend or a colleague, 'cause we have four new coaches starting with our team in the next month, so we have lots of capacity to give you a hand.
Speaker: Thank you.
