Please help me get organized at work

In My Humble Opinion
1

Semi-related to this thread. I am an intern, and I have decided my greatest fault is my disorganization and distractability/forgetfulness.

I need help with the following:
-keeping focus in busy areas when lots is going on and you’re constantly getting messages about other things that need to be done.
-Keeping track of many tasks at a time
-figuring out how to be more efficient.

I would love any advice than anyone has to offer, especially concrete specific things. So instead of, “write down all your tasks” something like, "keep index cards with you labeled in such a way . . . " Thanks!

2

This reminded me of a Ted Talk I saw by accident earlier this week:Ted Talk: Feats of Memory.
For years I’ve been using the “off-color or raunchy” aspect. If you can relate the tasks as part of a weird story, it’ll help me remember ordered lists in my head much easier.

Because my memory has turned to crap over the years, I just keep it to relatively short lists at a time based on social & physical priorities.

“Shit rolls downhill” = social importance related to how screwed I’d be if I ignored these & focused on something else. Same goes for learning things the boss’/superior’s way.

For jobs dealing w/ paper work, we used color coded tabs on clients’ paperwork/folders for priority jobs.

I also stick post it notes all over my desks at work & home & replace them as old jobs are completed/memorized & new ones come up.

3

I have no advice, as I’m probably pretty bad at this too, but:

This is a damn great username/post combo!

For the uninitiated:

Wikipedia, bolding mine: “The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.”

4

Learn to say “one second”. Very often a task will come up when you’re in the middle of another, and people have no compunctions about interrupting - interrupt them back. They can’t tell you the new task until you’re finished with what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll waste the part you already did (because you won’t remember where the hell you were) and things will just pile up.

Even if, as it could happen in your job, somebody IS dying, it’s highly unlikely that having to wait for a few seconds until you’re done reading somebody else’s chart is what that first somebody’s life will hang on, specially since you’re “just an intern”; there is going to be a lot of other people around taking care of them, many of them more qualified and at higher levels of responsibility than you.

5

Give yourself permission to take the time to be organized. Keeping shit straight takes a certain amount of time–not tons, but an extra. I always tend to feel if something is going on and I give a little time to clearing off my workspace, or putting my things back where they are supposed to be that I come across as being not serious about the Main Task, not gung-ho. I feel like people well judge me for being so self-indulgent, so precious, that I have to do that stuff. I feel like no one else does, that their stuff just stays orderly.

This is entirely bullshit, of course, which is why you have to get over that way of thinking. Someone here said once that their mantra was “I don’t have time to hurry” and I use that one a lot now.

6

The four D’s of triage: Do, Delegate, Delay, and Dump.

Today stuff is Do.

Subordinates or coworkers get the Delegate.

Delay can be tricky; you can’t let this pile build up. I find often, things that are required of you simply evaporate because someone or something else upstream fails. My Delay pile was a dedicated drawer in my desk.

Dump is obvious.

7

What are your responsibilities?

I work in the private sector supporting government healthcare programs, so we have some pretty hard and fast deadlines we MUST meet or we’re toast. So here’s what I do:

  1. The night before, I make a list of stuff I know I need to do the next day. It might include tasks I didn’t have time to finish the day before or stuff that came in during the day. The list is generally by priority; progress on the top 3 highest-priority is what I work on the next day. I break those high-priority items out by task so it’s more doable. Usually the actual work required takes a hell of a lot less time than dealing with the interruptions.

  2. When I get in, I check my e-mail really quick to see if anything higher priority has come in. If it does, I adjust my list.

  3. Then I start knocking out tasks. If necessary, I turn off my e-mail and my IM so I don’t get interrupted. (Most of my meetings and work are done virtually, so the interruptions are usually co-workers actually in the office asking for a quick opinion or wanting to chat.)

  4. I generally do a time check every 20-30 minutes and I do check e-mail and IM throughout the day - my schedule is usually double and triple-booked with meetings, so I have to figure out which ones I can politely decline and which ones are “must go to” meetings.

  5. As I go, I cross out the stuff I’ve done. It helps me see progress and figure out if I need to speed up or adjust my priorities.

  6. At the end of the day, back to step 1.

You should ask your boss, too, what your priorities should be. Usually you know, but sometimes it’s just not all that clear. Don’t hesitate to ask - that’s what your boss is there for: to help you figure out what’s important and get obstacles out of your way. I meet at least weekly with my boss; frequently more often. I also have a Franklin Covey planner I use to help me organize my brain.

8

I used a daily planner and was religious about keeping it up. At various times I tried setting up “super” systems with color codes, numbers whatever. I always fell back on the simple planner and writing everything down. I would review my planner countless times throughout the day and became very familiar with it shortly into the day. My last job before going home was a detailed update of my planner to start the next day with. I tired to encourage my boss and others to update the planner themselves when something was completed or something new came in instead of interupting me but that never seemed to catch on.

9

It’s a bit trite, but you can score/triage things based on two factors - importance and urgency:
[ul]
[li]Items that are important AND urgent (i.e. the wheels have fallen off!)get your immediate attention[/li][li]Items that are important, but not urgent (i.e. the boss needs this analysis by month end) get stacked for later (this may naturally migrate them into the above category, but that’s OK)[/li][li]Items that present as urgent, but are not important (i.e. your peer asks you for urgent guidance on something that isn’t your responsibility) - question whether they really need doing, or whether someone else should deal with them[/li][li]Items that are neither urgent, nor important - just ignore them. You’re busy.[/li][/ul]

10

Use your reminders in either your work calendar or phone. So your working on something and then something come up that you also need to do. Set it for an apt later in the day and address it at that time.

As distractions come in say NO. to yourself… I even say out loud to myself. NO FOCUS… it works. im making calls and the get distracted by emails and will float around doing that instead of what I need to be doing.

Make a flow chart of your day… early morning do this … at this time do emails, service calls at 4. Stay on track… you will need to remind your self and that OK.

at the end of the day clean your workspace… pens on pen holder… paper stacked… surfaces clean… its nice to come in and see clean, easier to focus :slight_smile:

good luck

11

My job is a bit different than those described, in the sense that I neither have a workspace nor long-term projects. My job is a bit like that of a nurse in a higher-acuity setting (like ICU or ED) in the sense that I have a lot of things to do for multiple patients, work in a fairly frenetic environment, and my workstream is constantly interrupted by pages. My daily routine is this:
Go get vitals on all my patients (I always mean to go back and look at any abnormal vitals but always forget)
Look at any important labs (again, often get distracted while doing this and don’t complete the task properly, either because I delve too deep into someone’s history and neglect other patients/labs, or because I make note of an abnormal value and never go back to it, or because it fails to flag my attention at all that a number is abnormal)
See pts (this is actually the quickest part of my morning)
Go and tell the resident about the patients, then they will give me the plan and a list of things to do. I generally write down all of the plan and the to-dos, but do it in a sloppy way and sometimes I honestly just don’t “see” what I’ve written down, if that makes sense.
Then I am supposed to do all these things in order of priority, with which I have trouble
In the meanwhile I get a zillion pages which distract me

I always leave last because I am inefficient and everyone gives me shit for it.

Just typing this is depressing me. I really need help getting my shit together.

12

Can you create protocols and checklists?

For example, when looking at labs, can you sit down and create a list of the important things you need to look at? Then create a checklist based on those things? If you have problems writing things down during work, take sometime during the weekend to create this list.

The protocols will keep you focused, and the checklist should help you from forgetting things.

You can read this article about how checklists helped improve intensive care treatment.

13

Handling a lot of important tasks at once is hard. Don’t give your self a hard time about it. it just takes time to get in the grove that works for you. you are one person and can do one thing at a time… you just have to do them efficiently and effectively and move to the next thing

do you have to answer pages right away?
can you complete what you are doing and then answer the page?
If not perhaps you can make a note of where you left off in what you were doing and the moment you are done with page issue go right back to your getting vitals rounds.

you may also be a deep thinker. I had an ex like this and he would take forever to get something done… he would get like deep in thought and over focused on something and just do things slow because of it… I guess the solution for that is just recognizing it and not letting it get so deep and focus on what you NEED to do and then move forward to the next task.

14

Assuming you don’t simply have an unrealistically huge workload (in which case, no amount of organisation will make the problem go away - you just need to ask for help)…

It sounds like you need to work on compartmentalising your time and maintaining the discipline of working at the right level for the task.

For example (and this is not as important as the work you do, but the principles are the same):
I return to work from a week’s leave and there are 500 emails in my inbox (if I’m lucky, only 500). I can process these in an hour.
That’s only 7.2 seconds per email (working out that it’s only 7 seconds per email is an important preliminary step.

So I churn through the emails:
[ul]
[li]Meeting requests get processed from the oldest to newest - it takes about 5 seconds per request to scan the subject and sender and decline or accept, so I’m ahead of schedule.[/li][li]Emails from my superiors I open and scan - If they asked me a question or need me to do something today, I leave the message window open, but in the background. If it’s just a general bit of information, I move it to a ‘read later’ folder.[/li][li]Emails from my suppliers - if the title makes it look like news about their product, I move it, unread, to a ‘supplier news’ folder that I will read through later in the week - if it looks like it’s a specific question, I move it to the ‘read later’ folder.[/li][li]Emails from my peers - I check to see if there are blocks of them with similar subjects (indicating a conversation that I missed) - I scan read the most recent of each group and decide whether it needs my action/comment, whether I ‘read later’ or just close.[/li][li]Emails from customers asking me to do something that isn’t my job, I forward to the right person with a boilerplate “This came in while I was on leave, but not sure if it got done - please can you check”.[/li][li]And so on. Even if someone really important asked me something quite urgent, it will wait until the end of the email processing session.[/li][/ul]

15

I’ve heard this described as “piano-building” - as in, you’re not building a piano here - just toss it together and move on to the next task.

In task-switching, it might help you to realize that every time you switch your attention, it takes a certain amount of time to regain your focus again - you can actually save time by finishing your current task before moving on to the next one, rather than dropping it and picking it up again.

A common thing that people do in the modern work world is answer their phone constantly, and look at every new text or email that comes in, but a more efficient way to work is to only switch your attention at the end of a task, not in the middle (or do all your checking at once every hour or half hour). The parallel for hospital work would probably be the pages - maybe your next step is getting some guidance on how to prioritize pages - not every one is a “drop everything and run,” I’m fairly sure. :slight_smile:

16

If you have a smartphone you might find it useful to download a to-do list app and use it to keep track of your tasks. There are plenty of options both free and paid.On Android you can also create scrollable widgets of your tasks which you can put right on your home screen if you wish.

17

I love and for by my calendar. Rather than keeping a to do list, I schedule everything-- and mean everything from “write report” to “think about of you want to go to lunch with Annie” in my cal, and I set everything to have a variety of notifications- pop ups, emails and texts.

18

Gestalt, I’m an ICU nurse. I’ve worked with a lot of docs.

You don’t “get” vital signs. I cannot imagine a doc doing vitals, even in a code situation. If the vitals are whacky, I report them to you. The patient’s vitals are part of that patient’s Big Picture. A bp of 70/20 may be great for pt A but ominous for pt B. It’s my job to recognize this and communicate my findings to you.

Labs. I am responsible for those. I report critical values to you. If I see a trend, I may page you to request help with noncritical values. (Mr. Smith has a K of 3.4, mag is 1.2, he’s on a high dose of lasix, and he’s having frequent PVCs.) An ICU nurse must be aware of these things. My patient’s potassium may be fine now, but I know that if I give him x amount of insulin or if he vomits x liters of fluid, we’re going to expect a change.

More than once, I’ve called a doc to say you need to get here right now, because this patient is going to code. Vitals are fine. Labs are fine. But get your ass here, please. Trust me.

More than once, I’ve gently suggested what needs to be done. You want to order dopamine for the low bp; I suggest levophed or neo because our patient’s heart rate is already 120.

The best thing about being an ICU nurse is putting those jigsaw pieces together, fast. It means seeing that whole picture and intervening to fix it, if fixing is possible. This is learned. It requires experience. It is gestalt.

My advice to you is to ask your nurses for their opinions. Learn which nurses have experience. They will admire you for asking, they will not think badly of you. A good nurse will be more than happy to help you. The best doctors trust experienced nurses.

Gestalt is exactly what happens when this all clicks.

In the meantime, you’ll get 40 pages asking for cough drops, pain meds, blah blah blah. You will figure out the difference between a nurse suggesting you give an order for Zofran and a nurse telling you there is a REAL problem.

A lot of nurses get caught up in the task-oriented part of the job, and I’m sure doctors do, too. The trick is to get your tasks done but still do the important things. The tasks are nothing compared to saving a life, preserving a life, allowing a life to go in peace, or giving comfort to the grieving. Tasks be damned, compared to the important things.

TLDR: get to know your nurses. Ask their advice. They’ve spent 12 hours with the patient, while you may have spent 12 minutes. We are on the same team. We can make your job easier.