Tips on...

Preparation and arrival
Before you start a new post, telephone the current postholder to ask for details on what to expect. Contact the personnel department to check the details of your starting time and venue. Ensure that you arrive on time.

Prioritising
If there are many demands on your limited time and a sense of achievement is a distant memory, you should reconsider your approach to prioritising.

General Principles
Start with a list of tasks to do and then prioritise in a meaningful order by evaluating each task in terms of its importance and then its urgency. An important and very urgent task has high priority and should be achieved either first or during your most productive time of day. Avoid tackling less important but easier tasks instead.

Associated Skills
Time management and the ability to delegate are necessary skills for successful prioritising. If others attempt to alter your priorities, negotiate to protect what is important to you.

Clinical Work
The triage method demonstrates that prioritising works even if all tasks seem equally important and urgent. On the wards, urgency allows critical illness to supersede elective work but meeting the routine deadlines of ward rounds is as important.

Academic Work
Here the concept of importance is likely to play a larger role. If a large task is important but not urgent, plan it in a series of steps with interim deadlines. Beware also of checking your email every few minutes, as this is rarely a high priority.

Outside of Work
Plan important activities and address urgent tasks promptly so that spending time with family and friends and paying the overdue bills can both be achieved.

Maxine Patel, honorary specialist registrar in psychiatry, Maudsley Hospital, London


studentBMJ 2001;09:357-398 October ISSN 0966-6494