Ten top tips to manage your time
Post date: 11/09/2015 | Time to read article: 2 minsThe information within this article was correct at the time of publishing. Last updated 18/05/2020
Effective time management is central to being a good doctor. Professor Allan Gaw, from the National Institute of Health Research, shares his top tips to help you manage your time.
- Define your priorities - Good time management is about making choices that are meaningful for you. To do this you need to work out what is most important for your work and for your life, and you have to spend your limited time realising those goals.
- Don’t have to-do ‘lists’ - Have to-do ‘quadrants’ where you categorise anything you have to do as important or not and urgent or not. Everything that is both important and urgent needs to be done. Everything that is unimportant but urgent needs to be delegated. Everything that is important but not urgent should be deferred and anything that is neither important nor urgent shouldn’t be on the list and should be dumped.
- Realise that everything has an opportunity cost - Simply put you can only spend your resources once - whether that be your money or your time. Choosing to spend your time on one task means you can’t spend the same time on another.
- Have one diary - Your diary should not be plural. If it is, you are likely to run into problems - double booking, forgetting and missing appointments. Have one diary - paper or electronic - and use it for everything.
- Manage your email - Don’t live at the mercy of your inbox - your inbox is not your to-do list - if it is, you’re letting others dictate your daily priorities.
- Watch less TV - Most people watch more TV than they care to admit even to themselves. The most obvious way you can make time is by turning off the TV and doing something else instead.
- Learn to say ‘no’ - Although this can be difficult it is an essential skill to master. Depending on whom you have to say no to, you may have to be forceful, gracious and perhaps persuasive.
- Never attend a meeting that doesn’t have an agenda - We waste a lot of time at unstructured and sometimes unnecessary meetings. Always think about whether a meeting could simply be an email or a phone call instead.
- You don’t find time, you make it - Time management is not a spectator sport. You have to be proactive in making the most of the limited time you have.
- The best way to get anything done is to start - Avoid procrastination and realise there is never a right time to do anything - from studying for an exam, signing up for a course, applying for a new job, getting married or having kids. If you wait for the ‘right’ time to do any of these things, you will reliably never do any of them.
Find out more
- Read our guide Supporting you Through your Foundation Years
- Book on an MPS communication skills workshop and enhance your skills
- Already attended a workshop? Refresh your knowledge on this subject and take our online revision module
- More articles for foundation doctors
Professor Allan Gaw works for the University of Leeds and the National Institute of Health Research. Previously he was a full-time academic working as Professor of Clinical Research at Queen's University Belfast.
Access his work here www.allangaw.com and www.researchet.wordpress.com; follow him on Twitter @ResearchET.
