It's Wednesday evening and I've joined a webinar to listen to Rachel Morris and Caroline Walker to explore work-life balance,.
Caroline Walker is a Psychiatrist and specialising in healthcare wellbeing via the Joyful Doctor website.
Rachel Morris is a GP and hosts the You are not a frog podcast and provides resilience training for health care professionals
The Medical Protection Society is hosting a series of webinars to help address health and wellbeing in health care.
"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life"
Mistakes happen more often when we are rushing and the webinar explores how can we lower the pressure.
Time poverty can affect the quality of life and common experience suggests mistakes happen more often when under time pressure.
How to create space and time in life to do the things that really count:
How to be list!
What do you want your life to be about?
What sort of relationship do you want to build.
What sort of person do you want to be?
How does time poverty affect us?
Wellbeing? Kindness? Generosity? Enjoyment?
If you are in a hurry you are less likely to show kindness and to help. Evidence was presented how a sense of hurry limits our inclination to help someone. We can struggle to be kind to ourselves as well.
Common Time Traps:
"I can do everything"
"Underestimating the time things take"
"Overscheduling"
"Thinking time will expand"
"Money is more important than time"
"Not living in the present moment"
"I don't have time to....."
How can you challenge these issues and how can you create time and space?
Big rocks first for a meaningful life.
If you start with the big rocks first and then little pebbles and then sand you can achieve more.
What are the most important issues - personal care and relationships:
Identify Time Thieves and address them:
Distraction management = pain management --- create friction to avoid / make it harder to be distracted.
Infinity pools - --- delete / create boundaries.
DIY attitude ---- delegate and outsource more
Certain apps are designed to keep us sucked in.
We are trained to handle anything but can lead us into doing everything ourselves.
Eliminate and Prioritise
MIT - Most Important Task
Beware the urgency trap - we are doing the quick and urgent stuff but we need to do the important stuff to prevent stuff from becoming urgent.
Say no
Don't finish things
Quick and dirty
Only take on things you really want to do.
"I need to check my diary and get back to you."
We are often trying to squeeze too much in.
You can use Post-It Notes to identify what we are doing and review to identify if we are trying to do too much.
Some people are trying to manage 14 or 15 sessions of work in one week.
How many sessions do you want to do and include admin times as well?
What else do you want to do?
Introduce Buffer Zones and a mental buffer.
Under schedule each hour of the day to allow time for thinking and reflecting.
I enjoyed the presentation and it introduced some new ideas to consider. I have found that using my diary to schedule tasks and allow time for them is one of the most helpful approaches. This helps me to avoid over scheduling. I agree that hurrying is not effective and risks more mistakes. I will explore some of the tools and have joined the mailing lists for further information.
