My personal take on the topic of time management during intern year is based on this amazing blog I read a while back about fixed-schedule productivity. The premise is that you decide how many hours you are going to work (for him - 9 hours a day, 5 days a week; for an intern - 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week), and then fit everything you are going to do into it.
For me, it's unreasonable to get everything I need to get done in life during the hours while also being an intern. My goal, instead, is to fit time in for menial tasks, errands, emails, phone calls during the day so that it frees up my time outside of work for thinking, creating, and developing things that are important to me! Here are my personal tips for fitting tasks into the busy workday.
Pre-round in half the time.
Ever notice that you pre-round faster when you have more patients, because you simply don't have more time? Well just pretend that rounds start 30 minutes earlier. Then you get an extra 30 minutes for yourself every morning. Not quite achievable every day, but I'd say 50% of days work out.
If I can get this time in the morning, it's most productive for me to write/answer emails where I'd like the other person to get back to me that day. I also like to use it to plan out what else I might be able to get done during the day depending on how busy the service looks. If there's an interesting patient, I get bonus time to look into the primary literature.
Create your own time.
Try to set aside a 30 minute block in the afternoon. I like spending an hour after noon conference catching up with patient related tasks, and then take this "own time" afterwards. Because interns are constantly bombarded with requests, it's a very conscientious effort to leave anything that is not time-sensitive or critical to patient care for 30 minutes later. That means all progress notes and non-urgent pages and non-urgent orders. In return, I actually can respond to email, flesh out an outline of a grant, or read a journal article.
Set tasks for yourself.
I have an Asana (online and app based productivity scheme) where I keep a running list of to-do's (and have a set timeline of recurrent to-dos). During a few minutes downtime, I can quickly check my list to see if I can take care of anything on it. Not all tasks are amenable to shift work. I'm this far down in this blog post during the first draft on hour 7 of my 10 hour ED shift. I'm enjoying blogging so far because it doesn't take a lot of mental capacity and I can add to a post during down time after I've created a general outline.
Set expectations for others on the team.
If the service looks light that day, I'll remind the attending first thing in the morning that we may be able to round quickly enough to get to senior conference (for us, a very educational conference at 10am that interns often cannot get to because of timing). On services where interns prepare the signout, I start preparing it about 30 minutes before, and allow at least 10 minutes for printer mishaps. If someone else besides the residents (i.e. attending, NP, etc) need to be at signout, I remind them via page or in person 30 minutes before so that they are there on time. Since the intern typically leads signout, I feel like it is up to us to lead the the process with minimal chatter (chatter after signout, please)!
How did I do this week?
I sent in applications to 2 small resident grants, started an essay for another site, and contacted 2 resource banks to look for samples for my research study. Since I wrote the majority of this post during my ED shift on Thursday, I just spent 20 minutes polishing it up today and now I'm ready to share it with you!
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