Leadership in healthcare is both a blessing and a curse a privilege and a challenge! The fast-paced nature of the industry, combined with the responsibility of ensuring the well-being of patients and staff, can be overwhelming and outright exhausting. Being HBIC (read: Head Bitch in Charge, aka the DON aka Queen of the Nursing Mafia) means it is imperative to figure out a way to prioritize one’s own mental health and establish effective strategies to manage stress. This post is going to focus on how to manage juggling ALL THE THINGS that you plan to do and ALL THE THINGS everyone else needs you to do, without losing your shit or missing something major.
Time Management: Your flighty BFF
Not a day? hour? minute! goes by that I don’t have people constantly cycling in and out of my office, or texting, or paging me, interrupting my train of thought and begging me to pivot to whatever their most important task at hand is. Effective leadership means juggling everyone else’s needs and priorities while also handling your own responsibilities (and doing it all without freaking out on anyone in the process- see losing your shit, above). A less traumatized office-based worker might suggest one starts each day with a clear plan. My nursing leadership PTSD has taught me to start each day with a FLEXIBLE plan. This involves triage, delegation, and knowing when to call it quits, and either moving something to a later date or letting it go entirely.
Triage: That one chick who is kind of intense but totally has her shit together
How do you decide what is important and what can wait? Years of experience have helped my brain to filter things by importance and urgency (almost) automatically. Yes. there is a difference between something being important and something being urgent. For anyone struggling with the mental gymnastics triage and the never-ending to-do list (I’m looking at you, future nurse leaders of America!), here is a visual depiction of how my brain works:
When you work in healthcare, and especially in healthcare leadership, EVERYTHING is important on some level. The trick is to determine what is MOST important (just like those NCLEX-style, select all that apply questions from hell). This is where identifying which tasks are most urgent and which are not urgent at all comes in.
Abuse allegation? Totally important and super urgent!
But what about the patient who is going to miss their scheduled antibiotic dose because the pharmacy can’t deliver it in time?
Well, that’s also important and urgent- what do we do?
We delegate. Knowing your scope and the scope and capabilities of your team is essential to performing effective task triage in nursing leadership. My nurses can’t initiate an abuse investigation and suspend the accused individual from the facility, but they CAN call the doctor and get an order for an alternative medication or to retime that antibiotic.
The abuse allegation would land in the top left box for DO IT NOW! and the antibiotic issue would go right under it to be delegated- it can still get done NOW, but it doesn’t need to be done by ME, and it doesn’t have to interfere with the higher priority task. Rinse and repeat this process for every task/crisis/interruption that enters your sphere of awareness throughout the day.
Pro tip on triage: Anything that is related to safety is usually a RIGHT NOW task. Get your time back by knowing what you can delegate and to whom you can delegate it to
Pro tip on not losing your shit: Make sure you include ‘eating lunch’ in your matrix to ward off the hangries
Self-Care: The friend of a friend you see twice a year at parties and always has GREAT hair
Yup. I said it. Self-care. I know, it’s a cringey over-used buzzword BUT IT MATTERS AND YOU NEED TO DO IT. Take your breaks. Eat your lunch. Go outside for five minutes and get some sun on your face. Drink something other than Redbull once in a while…. taking little moments to take care of yourself throughout the day makes a HUGE impact on your ability to handle your shit, and everyone else’s shit too!
Like I said, my brain, for the most part, functions like this automatically at this point. But if your beautiful brain isn’t there yet- that’s ok! Practice makes perfect, so use my free task triaging template HERE to start building those neural pathways and strengthen your triage muscles.
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