DTD 194
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This is the Drive Time Debrief, episode 194.
Hey guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda. I'm Laura. And I'm Kendra. And before we get started, I just wanted to share with everyone that we created something that's hopefully helpful to you. We are nearing 200 episodes of this podcast, which is great, but if you're a brand new [00:01:00] listener, you may be a little overwhelmed with going back to episode number one and working your way all the way through.
So we have created a podcast fast track that we think highlights a few of the more important episodes that might get you the most bang for the buck. So feel free to download that. It's at thewholephysician.com/fasttrack, and hopefully that helps you just weave your way through some of the more important ones to get some results quickly for yourself.
But today we are gonna talk about some of the biggest physician time wasters and how to get our life back. We recently had a podcast on scarcity mindset and time scarcity is a huge one for a lot of us. So let's talk about it. Have you ever wondered where all your time went? We're gonna see if there's any of these top 10 time wasters that might apply to you.
If there's a way to get some of that time back and as with everything, we never want you to work harder. We want you to [00:02:00] work smarter and let go of things that don't serve you. Yeah. I think these are great because a lot of times we talk to our clients and we find that there's a common limiting belief, like I don't have time.
If we were to dig in a little bit, it may be that making time for some things that light you up or bring you joy or make you feel good would be a more intelligent way to spend your time.
So let's dive in. The first one is documentation perfectionism. Anybody holler back at me like minutia in our documentation? And we well know that who are we documenting for? Well, we have spent lots of time and money getting this education. We feel like we need to regurgitate it in one chart.
So that's not true. And so what happens is we waste time spending so much time on these notes and trying to make them flawless, and our perfectionism comes out when actually what we could do [00:03:00] is use the hacks that are built into these EMRs like templates, like macros, like using the Dragon mic just to dictate or come up with some smart phrases and asking ourselves over and over again, is perfectionism serving me here where I need to get in the minutia and be into every single detail?
Or does this note meet the legal and medical requirements? If yes, right, move on. You're done, right? So you're getting your required checkboxes and once they're all checked, move on. For our members who have our Pyxis of mini courses, one of the mini courses in there is on charting. And one of the amazing facts that we came across is that United States charts are 10 times longer than European charts. We are charting now for the government and for coding.
It has never been proven to help with patient care. So that's something I try to remind myself of. I need to make this chart enough where it can be coded properly and people [00:04:00] know an essence of what's going on, but the amount of charts I see where people have copy and pasted the previous four notes, who is reading that?
Yeah, actually nobody. It makes you tired thinking about it. Yeah, it makes me tired too. And we're not trying to step on toes or hurt anybody's feelings. We are helping you remember these are things that we just want you to marinate on a little bit, maybe do a little bit at a time.
Okay, so this leads us into number two, inefficient EMR use. Right? So just like Amanda said, if you're clicking through the last 18 consults and eight years of labs, I know I'm exaggerating. It is important to get some of that information, but is it important for this patient visit today? Will it add something?
Will it help you dispo the patient? Will it help you move this patient onto the next step? If not, what are you doing? Ask yourself, why do I feel like [00:05:00] something's coming up, like I have to quote unquote prove myself, which I've heard time and time again when I've met with clients who have the issue of the long chart or documenting everything.
If we peeled it back, they're proving something. So it's about you. You're making it mean something about you as a physician and the kind of care you give and not more about like, okay, this is a document that needs to include medical and legal stuff. Boom, end, right? So we make it mean something else and therefore we get kind of stuck in the minutia.
So what's a quick win here? Batch similar tasks. So learn two to three new EMR shortcuts a week. Take the time upfront to develop macros to get some smart phrases for all of you out there that use a certain EMR that's large and in charge, macros and some smart phrases. Program your Dragon mic for when you say adopt phrase that it'll just populate.
Take the time if this sounds overwhelming, to meet with your IA or your IT person at your institution. 30 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an [00:06:00] hour one time to get all this set up. It will pay dividends down the road for you, getting your charts done and getting the heck out of there, right? So these are just these quick tweaks guys.
Just make it a priority. And then three, multitasking madness. While we think multitasking is excellent, it actually gets you off the main thing. So when you are constantly being interrupted while you're trying to chart, or if you're answering pages because you're on call, or you have your MA or nurse in the clinic coming to your door every few seconds to ask some situations that you may be able to empower them to take care of themselves. All of this interruption really actually adds time to completion of the task. You feel like you're taking care of a bunch of stuff, but you're actually not. And so what happens is you have to regroup. So you get interrupted, and then you get back to the task and you're spending a few seconds to a minute, where was I again?
What was I looking [00:07:00] up? Where was I? And so it's just adding time to getting that chart done. And so the quick win is to do single tasking sprints is what they offered. So 10 to 20 minute chunks of focus charting before checking messages, or protect that time if it needs to be a conversation while you're in the clinic with your MA or nurse to say, Hey, I'm going in the office closing the door for 20 minutes.
I gotta get caught up on my morning charts. So you do that, you know, before you start your afternoon. Or you say, I'm protecting this time between cases. I'm gonna do two cases, and then I need no one to bother me for 20 minutes. Here's my pager to your PA or your NP that's with you or your circulating nurse.
Here's my pager, 20 minutes, I gotta get my OR notes done. Whatever it is, it's a lot more useful if your time to do 10 or 20 minutes where you're focused to get that task done and then move on. One task done beats three or four or five or six half done or not very well done. Yeah, I think that's easier said than [00:08:00] done in some of the working cultures that some of us work in.
And so rather than, you know, raging against it, like, I need no interruptions when that's just not gonna happen. You know, if you work in a place where there are a lot of interruptions, that's gonna happen, but then maybe you are extra purposeful before or after your shift to finish rather than taking it home and then getting up and getting some snacks and then sitting down and watching some commercials and then going back to charting some more and then going, you know, some of the things you can control, some of them you can't.
Meetings are the bane of my existence sometimes. But here's the thing, if you don't have to go to a meeting, great, don't do it. But there are gonna be some meetings that you really can't skip. And so when you are attending those, at least be intentional. What's one thing that I can get from this meeting?
Maybe it's even just getting to know your colleagues better, and you are satisfied with that. I would love for all meetings to be canceled, but they are useful sometimes. If you are the one calling all the meetings, then that's something to consider. [00:09:00] If it would've been more useful to send an email or some sort of other message.
One thing that might be a tendency is over-explaining and over-checking. I think sometimes when you're calling a consultant and you give a 30 minute spiel on it, maybe that's not always useful. Maybe it would be good to just give a five minute summary and then ask what else would you like to know?
And then maybe there's nothing. Maybe triple checking your orders isn't a good use of your time. A quick win would be to use the 80-20 rule. 20% of your explanation is probably gonna cover about 80% of what anyone needs to know. And then you can just stop. They can always ask questions if they want to, but let's move on to the next thing.
Here's a big one for me, is ruminating or replaying mistakes. That is mentally reliving a case all night long. Sometimes weeks at a time, sometimes months at a time. So a quick win could be using Byron Katie's famous question of whose business is this? Is it mine, theirs, or God's? If this is nothing that you [00:10:00] could have controlled in the first place, maybe you also don't need to be ruminating about it and you can just drop it and move on. Or maybe it was your business. If you took a couple things that you learned and are gonna apply the next time, maybe it's time to move on. A lot of this rumination is trying to get resolution when that's not going to be coming.
And so you can waste a lot of energy that way. Something that would've been better used doing something else, and then number seven is catastrophizing about the future. A lot of us, since we are so good at picking out when things start to go wrong at the very first moment with our patients, or we are problem solvers, so we're looking for the problems to solve in the first place.
Our brains get really good at that, and that is a fabulous survival skill. But when we are doing that a hundred percent of the time, we are never looking for how things might go right, and it wears on us. So if you can't stop yourself from thinking about the worst case scenario, at least maybe use a worry [00:11:00] container where you worry about it for 10 minutes a day, write down those worries.
Something about writing things down gets it out of your head, and then the rest of the day you can redirect to the things that need your attention and are a more useful use of your time. Yes, that sounds very familiar. The meme where like you lose the pen and you wind up dead.
That one comes to mind with that catastrophizing lesson and learn. Don't lose the pen. Don't lose your pen. You might end up dead. Okay. Number eight is your phone and digital distraction, and the waste comes in when you're doom scrolling or quickly checking email that turns into 30 minutes. I would argue probably 30 minutes could be a reasonable amount of time that you carve out for those tasks.
It's when you think it's gonna be one minute and it's two hours that you get into trouble. So a quick win would be move distracting apps off your home screen and set a two minute timer before opening social media. Another thing I talk to [00:12:00] my clients about a lot is constraining when you're gonna check email.
A lot of us have gotten in the habit of checking email pretty much constantly throughout the day, and it really does drain your attention, your focus, your ability to do what you're supposed to be doing because every time you task switch, it takes a lot of time to get back into what you were doing.
So maybe check email morning, noon, evening and leave it at that or check it once a day. I know that sounds extreme for some of us who are checking it constantly. This will be very freeing for you and your brain will thank you for it. So just setting time. And same with social media. Just decide ahead of time, how much time do you wanna spend on social media?
Set a timer for yourself and then just do that. Number nine is over-committing. We're good at stuff, we're good at fixing stuff for other people. We're good at taking on new tasks. The [00:13:00] problem is that when we say yes to every committee, talk or project, because we should, then we wind up with not enough energy for the things that really do align with our values and that we really want to be doing.
So a quick win is to pause before saying yes. Ask if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? Because you do have a finite number of minutes in the day and hours in the week. So you may be saying no to sleep, sanity, time with the people you really love. Just ask yourself, what am I saying no to?
And is that what I wanna do? Yeah. I appreciate the Essentialism book. Yeah. And it was like, if it's not a hell yes, then it's a no. So I have now made that my motto. Mm-hmm. Yes. Number 10 is low value perfectionism.
So here's the waste where you spend hours tweaking slides, emails. We use memes in a lot of our presentations, and that's one of mine is I just need the perfect meme [00:14:00] and I could spend a lot of time doing that. Tweaking emails, fonts that don't matter. I'm thinking about going back to those charts.
Don't keep tweaking your chart. And a quick win is just use the good enough test. If it's 80% and functional, unless you're doing surgery, okay, yeah, go A+ for that. If it's surgery, we want a hundred percent, but if it's 80% and functional in some documentation, stop. Save A+ energy for what truly matters, like surgery, like your relationships, things like that.
So hopefully we were able to give you a very valuable top 10. Don't try to tackle all these at once. We don't want you to do that. We want you to resonate maybe with one or two, maybe just one this week and think, oh yeah, maybe that's easy. I could probably implement that.
And then just keep a mental note of how much time is redeemed or how much time at the end of the week, or maybe when you go home and you feel great, you can take a big deep breath and be like, yeah, that really worked, or [00:15:00] that was amazing. Because as you know, time doesn't get wasted in big blocks. It leaks out in small moments of perfectionism, distraction, rumination, all the things we talked about today.
So if you patch the leaks, you'll get hours back and we always love to hear about this. So let us know your favorite time saving hack. Let us share it with all of our listeners and anything else that you thought maybe should have made the list, email us at [email protected] so we can include it in our next episode.
So thanks for joining us. We are so excited that you've decided to listen and we have a weekly newsletter. It's bits of encouragement and you'll find out new stuff that we have coming out. Our next masterclass, we are excited to announce a retreat we'll be having in 2026.
So, sign up for our newsletter and you'll be kept up to date as to all the goodness that the whole physician has going on. So thank you for spending time with us today. You are [00:16:00] amazing and until next time, you are whole. You are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
