How To Take Control Of Your Time

I would love to [insert hobby, activity, or habit here], but I just don’t have the time. As someone in a profession that demands a lot of your time, I’m sure you’ve heard this statement from colleagues, and you might have even said it a few times yourself. Physicians are particularly prone to placing too many items on our plate as a result of human giver syndrome, but as many of us come to realize, once that plate reaches a critical mass, everything starts to suffer. It can be daunting to try to take control of your time because, inevitably, any change requires effort and time, which is what you’re feeling deprived of in the first place. In this article, my goal is to help you stage an intervention for where your time is going and create strategies for intentional time management going forward. This is part of my holistic biopsychosocial model for combating burnout, along with physiological self-care and mental health. 

Time Inventory

We’ll start by taking inventory of how you currently spend your time. You don’t need a fancy planner for this - just turn a sheet of paper on its side, write the days of the week across the top, and draw vertical lines to create a column for each day. Then, outline your daily activities in terms of time. You may choose to list a time of day for the start of each new time block, or you can simply list the number of hours for each activity. Don’t get too granular; your time blocks shouldn’t be any smaller than an hour. Possible activities include work, family time, exercise, housework, caregiving, kids’ activities, leisure, hobbies, etc. For work, try to break your time down into a few large buckets such as direct patient care, writing notes, inbasket management, teaching, or management. Use the categories that are most relevant for you based on where you spend the most time. 

Lastly, look back over your calendar, underline the activities you enjoy the most, and circle the ones that cause you the most stress. The underlined activities should be protected and prioritized, while the circled ones will be the subject of the rest of this article. While you may be tempted to skip this inventory, it’s crucial to take stock of where you are right now in order to know what needs to change. This doesn’t need to be a full report worthy of an A+; it just needs to provide a means for you to reflect on what is filling your days. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes on this - learning to do something to 80% rather than 100% of what you wanted it to be can be an important exercise in overcoming perfectionism, and giving up that last 20% of effort will save you lots of time.  

Saying No

Now that you’ve identified the activities you want to protect and the activities that cause more than their fair share of stress, it’s time to hone in on those energy drains. Review your circled activities and examine them with a critical eye. Are there activities on this page that you don’t even need to do? Have you taken on non-essential responsibilities for work, family, or friends that you dread doing or that take hours to recover from? If there were no consequences, which of these activities would you get rid of forever? Expanding the amount of time in the day is impossible, so if we want more time for the things we love, we have to learn to say no to other things. Consider that each time you say yes to something currently, you’re saying no to something else that could fill that time, even if what you’re saying no to isn’t an activity and is just your sense of wellness and sanity. 

I don’t want to gloss over how difficult it can be to say no. Most of us got where we are by saying “yes” to more work. Yes, I’ll do more research in college to be more competitive for medical school. Yes, I’ll stay late and do that admission to make a good impression on my seniors. Yes, I can answer emails and calls on my vacation to help out my colleagues. Unfortunately, at some point we have to acknowledge the limits inherent in our humanity - we can’t do everything, and we can’t fix everything. We also have to find compassion for the place inside us that feels fear when we say no. Perhaps there’s a feeling of not being enough, or not being good enough. We owe it to ourselves to stop sacrificing our wellbeing for the idea that no one else can do what we do. Find at least one thing on your list to say no to, and see what it opens up for you.

Supports 

Let’s say you found at least one thing to say no to, but you’re looking at all of your other circled items and thinking but I can’t say no to these. I still have to go to work. Now it’s time to find the activities that maybe you can’t give up, but you can ask for support with them instead. This support could look very differently depending on the activity - broadly speaking, you can ask someone to take over a task completely, help you with it, or help you cope with it. Perhaps you would rather prioritize having time to help your kids with homework rather than driving them to dance class, so you ask a neighbor if they can carpool with them. Perhaps you find yourself drowning in notes, so you ask your employer to support you in implementing an AI scribe. 

Asking for support may also mean cutting back on how much time you can devote to something, such as eliminating a half-day of clinic each week. It’s remarkably costly and time-consuming to replace a physician when one leaves, so don’t hesitate to ask your employer for what you need in order to make your work more sustainable. Alternatively, you may find that you want support in the form of skills and tools for helping you complete your work more efficiently. Or perhaps you want support from your partner, a friend, or a coach who can listen as you share what’s been burdening you and sort through your sense of direction and next steps. Having help from our support system is an essential part of recovering from burnout and maintaining a path of balance. 

I hope you find that the journey of taking control of your time is about much more than time management - it’s about having time for the people and experiences you value most, and it’s about creating the life you want. To start, take a simple inventory of your time as detailed in this article, to see how your days are spent currently. Then identify the things you want to prioritize and the things that are causing the majority of your stress. For the activities draining your energy, become relentless in choosing when you need to say no altogether and when you need to ask for help. Our social environment can both nourish us and drain us, so it’s crucial to recognize our own limitations and set realistic expectations. 

If you’re looking for a supportive environment as you learn to identify your priorities and implement boundaries, please join our community today. You can also schedule a free consultation for one-on-one coaching if you want personalized, in-depth support as you build the life you want.