Improving your Organizational Skills

By Rose O. Sherman

I received an email from a blog reader who wanted suggestions and tips for becoming more organized in a Nurse Manager role. This is a great topic because it is so easy to become overwhelmed with work in front-line leadership positions.

I use the analogy of a sandwich – with managers being the filling in the middle. There is pressure from above to complete reports, monitor performance data, attend meetings, arrange staffing and a myriad of other administrative responsibilities. The bottom piece of sandwich are staff who want coaching, have performance reviews due and often need help managing complex patient issues.

Choices about where to spend time becomes challenging. A manager with a significant span of control and high turnover cannot manage his/her job responsibilities in the same way as a manager who manages a single unit with a stable staff.

How we spend our time at work is essentially a collection of habits – some good and some bad. If we see workload in this way, it is easier to evaluate what habits we may need to change. While every leadership position has different responsibilities, here are some tips to getting started in managing your workload:

Evaluate your own personal rhythm of productivity. Each of us has times of the day where we are most productive and those times of the day when we are least productive. Understanding this about yourself is important in making any changes in scheduling. If you find budgeting to be tedious and difficult, this is an example of a task that needs to be done during your most productive hours.
Take one average week in your role and keep a calendar of how you are currently spending your time. Changing your work habits should begin with a clear understanding of how you currently spend your time preferably in 15 minute increments. If you do this, you can begin to identify for yourself areas where you may be wasting time. We all waste time but it is key to know what your favorite time wasting activities are.
Make a list of all of the meetings that you regularly attend in your organization. Staff often complain that managers are always off the unit attending meetings. While this perception is not entirely valid, there may be some truth to it in certain situations. You may be attending meetings that you personally don’t need to attend. Are you some who suffers from FOMO if you are not there? After you list the meetings, choose 25% that you might not need to attend and discuss the list with your immediate supervisor.
Identify three job responsibilities that you are not spending enough time on. All of us have activities that we prefer and those that we don’t. The challenge is that sometimes responsibilities that we procrastinate are key job responsibilities whether we like that reality or not. If you are uncertain what these might be, ask a mentor or trusted colleague.
Decide what matters most. Too often in our nursing leadership work, we have long task lists of goals that we want to accomplish. When we create these task lists, we can make the mistake of thinking that everything matters equally but the truth is that it doesn’t. Completion of 2-3 key tasks every day is better than a long to-do list that never gets done.
Learn to so no. Your time is a limited commodity. This means that every time you make a commitment, it will leave less time for other activities.. A reality of leadership is that the more successful we are, the less accessible we become. A leader usually can’t be equally accessible to all people. So you are faced with the dilemma of who gets your time and who doesn’t.
When given a new area of responsibility – ask what other activities should be re-prioritized. Nurse leaders often feel they should be able to cope with a situation and say yes, because that is what they are expected to do. This can be a trap that leads to career derailment. You may question whether you even have the right or deserve to set boundaries in the first place. When these doubts occur, reaffirm to yourself that you do indeed have this right, so give yourself the permission to do so, and work to preserve them.