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Working in a busy medical practice requires excellent time management skills and an ability to handle those unanticipated emergencies, urgencies, and monkey-wrenches that can and often do throw a well-planned day out of whack. This article offers busy medical practice employees 50 time management tips to help them manage their time well. It focuses specifically on eliminating time wasters, working more efficiently, and developing personal goals and habits that can increase productivity, reduce stress, and make working in the practice more enjoyable. This article also offers several hands-on time management exercises, including a time management self-assessment quiz, a multitasking exercise, and a time drain exercise. These can be completed individually or collaboratively with other members of the medical practice team. Finally, this article explores 12 popular time management myths and how a medical practice employee can increase his or her productivity by identifying and harnessing his or her productivity "happy hour(s)."
KEY WORDS: Time; time management; time pressure; time drain; productivity; organization; organized, procrastination; prioritize; delegation; distractions; work/life balance; multitasking; estimate; planning.
Do you feel the need to be more organized and/ or more productive? Do you spend your day in a frenzy of activity in your medical practice and then wonder why you haven't accomplished as much as you would like by the end of the day?
Time management skills are especially important for busy medical practice employees, who often find themselves performing many different tasks during the course of a single day, often under time pressure. These 50 time management tips will help you increase your productivity and stay cool and collected when the going gets rough.
FIFTY TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS
1. Accept that time management is a process. No matter how organized you are in your medical practice, there are always only 24 hours in a day and there will always be unforeseen drains of your time. The goal of time management is to change behavior and manage ourselves, not to change time. Remain objective and flexible and be ready to go with Plan B when you need to.
2. Focus on an appropriate goal. Make your time management goal to spend your time well in your medical practice, not to cram more and more into an already overcrowded schedule. Sometimes...