Time management crucial for your job
(Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on time management for risk managers. This month, we look at the need to manage time effectively. Next month's Healthcare Risk Management will include more tips on time management for risk managers.)
If you are like most health care risk managers, your job description probably has grown exponentially in recent years, creeping a little at a time until you may feel like you are now doing the work of two or three people. That's why time management always is one of the biggest concerns for risk managers.
The good news is that there are solutions out there. With some tips and tricks and determination, you can go home feeling like you actually got everything done.
Lynn Sessions, JD, risk manager at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, knows exactly how important time management can be to her job. Without it, she'd never get everything done. Sessions worked as a medical malpractice attorney before joining the hospital, and she says her experience in juggling hundreds of cases at a time helped her learn good management skills.
Sessions relies heavily on deadlines in her department. Every task in her department gets a deadline. Often, she says, requests come in from other departments without any deadline attached, so she or her staff must investigate and determine when the task must be completed.
"We set a lot of internal deadlines to make sure it gets done, even if the people in the other department say it's no rush, don't hurry," she says. "With a deadline, we know it will at least get done by that date, if not earlier."
Multitasking also is important, Sessions says. So is having a great team backing her up in her department.
"I don't think of myself as such an organized person, but I'm surrounded by people who are extremely capable, and we follow some practices in our department that make sure everything gets done," she says. "Being able to rely on my staff like that is the only reason I can go to 15 meetings a day and still get everything done that needs to be done."
Daily folders help prepare
Sessions says she has good support from hospital leadership, which helps when she can make a business case for hiring outside help in the form of consultants or outside legal help. Here are some of the other ways that Sessions manages her heavy workload:
- Every evening before Sessions leaves the office, her assistant prepares a folder for Sesions to take home with her. This folder includes her calendar for the next day and lists any supporting documentation that might be needed. The assistant has folders labeled for Monday through Friday, and Sessions remembers to grab that day's folder on the way out.
- Sessions tries to arrive early each day, around 7:30 a.m or 8 a.m., so that she has some relatively quiet time in the office before the phone starts ringing and meetings must be attended. She uses that time to prepare for the day and to catch up on e-mail and other items that might have been unfinished from the day before.
- Her assistant blocks out the morning schedule until 9:30 a.m. so that Sessions can get the day started without being distracted by meetings right away.
Kenneth McGhee, author of Teamwork: Moving Beyond Teambuilding (Outskirts Press; 2007), says a list of ongoing tasks can be helpful if you indicate which ones take priority. Each employee in the department needs to follow this approach to balancing the ongoing responsibilities, he says. This kind of prioritization can be particularly important for risk managers, who have competing demands for improving safety, providing training to staff, attending ongoing training themselves to remain current in the field, and monitoring compliance concerns.
"Management is task-focused, and leadership is vision-centered," McGhee says. "Different employees in the department need to be working on these two coequally important objectives."
The risk manager should develop a priority task list and make it available as a checklist for all department staff, he says. That helps clear up any uncertainty about where the boss' priorities lie and what should take precedence when there is just too much work.
"It also is important to have a specific time line for when things can realistically be completed," McGhee says. "That helps prevent the sense of feeling overwhelmed."
Try time blocking
Another prioritizing idea comes from Keith Rosen, president of Profit Builders LLC, an executive training company in New York City. He says "time blocking" can make a big difference when you feel like there is too much on your plate.
Time blocking involves allocating blocks of designated time for specific activities or tasks throughout the day that are aligned with your goals and the realistic number of hours you have each day, Rosen says.
Sessions and her staff have tried time blocking but have found that it sometimes is not practical for a risk manager to say, for instance, that she isn't going answer the phone for an hour because she is working on a task. If there's a crisis, sometimes you just have to take the call. But she says she does support the basic idea behind time blocking. As much as she can, Sessions tries not to schedule meetings on Friday so that she can catch up with office work.
Prioritizing the many tasks during the day can be crucial, Rosen says. There are some days when you're not going to get to every single thing you wish you could accomplish, and some things are going to be more important than others.
"If you haven't already, I would strongly suggest that you make a list and prioritize your tasks and activities to be included in your daily routine along with established time lines for each," Rosen says. "For example, if you have a nine-hour workday, you realistically have about eight hours, or less, to use for activities that you can create designated blocks of time for and then position within your schedule."
Sources
For more information on time management, contact:
- Kenneth McGhee, Author. E-mail: [email protected].
- Keith Rosen, President, Profit Builders LLC, New York City. Telephone: (888) 262-2450. E-mail: [email protected].
- Lynn Sessions, Risk Manager, Texas Children's Hospital, Houston. Telephone: (832) 824-1000.
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