TOP Time Management Practices in Nursing Profession (2022)

The 1st century Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger observed, "It is not that we don't have enough time, but that we waste a lot of it."

Constantly striving to make productive use of every minute of time with a large number of cases and a high workload is no easy task. It is especially common in healthcare settings, where even a slight delay can cost a person's life.

Nurses' daily routine includes dispensing medications to patients, responding to emergency calls, performing medical manipulations, scheduling, and many other tasks. All of this translates into a constant battle with time.

Of course, time cannot be accelerated or slowed down, but with the right approach, it can be used as an ally. We will talk in this article about how to do it without losses.

The need for effective time management in the nursing profession

Time management is an effective skill that is probably one of the main soft skills of a successful person today.

These days, nurses serve an ever-increasing number of patients, perform a large amount of organizational work, fill out a huge amount of administrative paperwork, and follow orders from senior medical management, all while becoming more accessible via email and cell phones.

As a result, nurses are increasingly reporting serious problems in managing time demands. To maintain a work-life balance, each needs to learn how to improve efficiency within the limited resource of available time.

The lack of a sound approach to time management negatively affects all aspects of a nurse's work, impedes her professional development, hinders experience, slows promotion, and undermines credibility, ultimately reducing her job satisfaction.

It is well known that health care workers often suffer from depression and professional burnout. The resulting stress affects the professional's personal life, further increasing the risk of nervous disorders [BMJ, 2014].

The study of nursing staff representatives of different profiles and specializations showed that they have the following symptoms of emotional burnout syndrome :

• Reduction of professional duties;
• Inadequate selective emotional reactions;
• Experience of psycho-traumatic circumstances;
• Emotional deficit;
• Feeling of being "caged".

Studies have also shown that female professionals have a higher degree of resistance to emotional burnout syndrome than men. 

Time management in nursing helps nurses organize and prioritize patient care, internal administrative tasks, educational goals, and personal responsibilities.

Additional benefits of applying time management principles to nursing practice are: 

Increasing efficiency and productivity; 
Reducing stress levels; 
Increasing opportunities for professional growth, as well as for achieving career and personal goals; 
Maintaining a work / personal life balance [ BMJ, 2014 ]. 

In their book Extreme Time Management, Alexey Tolkachev and Nikolai Mrochkovsky talk in detail about how proper planning skills improve the quality of all areas of life. For example, high productivity at work to the detriment of health will not lead to good consequences. Only being in balance and harmony, a person can feel happy and satisfied. And it is possible to achieve such a balance by observing the principles of time management.

Tips for the nurse to improve time management skills

The principles of time management at work involve proper goal-setting, prioritizing, limiting distractions, and maintaining a work-rest balance.

Setting goals correctly

One of the common principles of time management in the work of highly effective professionals is proper goal setting.

Honest reality testing is necessary to determine whether the goals the nurse sets for herself are attainable. Pursuing unrealistic or conflicting goals ultimately leads to frustration and professional dissatisfaction. On the other hand, excessive conservatism can lead to stagnation and inefficient use of professional talents, as well as limit professional satisfaction.

All goals can be divided into short-term goals, achievable within 1-3 years, and long-term goals, which usually take 5-10 years to achieve.

The discipline for setting long-term goals is well demonstrated by a novice runner preparing for a marathon. Each run, even a short distance, is an important and measurable step toward the long-term goal of running a full marathon. Similarly, the nurse tracks short-term accomplishments toward long-term goals.

Regular reconciliation of planned and actual results allows her to see if she is headed in the right direction toward long-term goals. In particular, whether her timetable matches the pace of achievement of the milestones and whether her final goal is realistic or whether external circumstances warrant revision.

Such analysis of long-term goals facilitates thoughtful decision-making as new short-term opportunities arise. Identifying and protecting the time needed to set and achieve long-term goals contributes to sustained professional success.

According to health care researchers, a common mistake nursing staff make is to "allow long-term goals to take precedence over the more pressing and urgent short-term demands of time" [Marymount University, 2020].

Nurses are encouraged to set career goals that are achievable within 1-3 years (e.g., getting a college degree). Daily goals, on the other hand, are more likely to change throughout the day, but some routines remain the same for nurses and can be anchored by routine procedure.

Proper planning

Once goals have been selected and the necessary actions to achieve them have been outlined, the next step is to determine how to most effectively accomplish key tasks. This requires extensive planning beyond the daily schedule.

Planning "just for one day" quickly becomes reactive, inadvertently shifting one's attention to "urgent" activities. Developing a weekly or monthly schedule is a more effective strategy for achieving long-term goals. The advantage of this proactive approach is that it defines in advance the available time that can be devoted to "important" but "less urgent" activities.

Self-reflection allows nurses to determine the optimal time for maximum productivity. For example, knowing one's own biorhythms contributes to greater efficiency by being more conscious of the highly productive periods of the day. One of the keys to successful scheduling is identifying and protecting the most productive times to focus on the important and often most challenging tasks.

When planning, keep in mind the importance and usefulness of lists of tasks for the day, written down on paper or in a special app. Make a list detailing expected tasks for the shift. In some organizations, this document may be a computer-generated snapshot of each patient, which the nurse simply personalizes by adding handwritten notes of unfinished tasks [NursingCenter, 2017].

When creating a to-do list for the day, it is also important to allow time for contingencies.

Routinization

Routinization is a tool that helps nurses make the most of their time. Routinization involves repeating what is present in a systematic process so that this consistency helps with time management. Creating a consistent routine improves time management in nursing by eliminating unnecessary scheduling and turning important tasks into habits [Marymount University, 2020].

Routines are designed to perform necessary daily duties, from gathering patient health information to performing medical manipulations. The key to this process is knowing the sequence of routines and the amount of time needed to perform each one.

The nurse should make a list of routine tasks and organize them according to the duration and priority of each item. Each shift is a mini-cycle of "plan-perform-execute-action" in which the nurse can modify her routine to make the most efficient use of her time [American Nurse, 2018].

Implementing Cognitive Accumulation.

Creating routines to manage predictable responsibilities is an obvious solution, but how can nurses manage unpredictable tasks and unforeseen changes? According to the Lippincott Center for Nursing, cognitive accumulation is "a workflow management process that helps nurses prioritize and manage their time" [Marymount University, 2020].

Cognitive accumulation is an internal process by which a nurse begins to plan her day before her shift even begins. She must create a mental queue of priority tasks that need to be completed.

The difficulty with this process is that the things the nurse does are often not structured. She is interrupted for an average by five other externally assigned tasks [American Nurse, 2018].

Time management in nursing requires dynamic change management. It is important to continually reorganize tasks as higher priority cases arise.

Finding time to rest.

Work-related burnout is a common risk among nursing staff. A recent study found that more than 15% of nurses surveyed reported feeling burnout, and 56% of them said their healthcare facility did not take any steps to combat it [Marymount University, 2020].

Burnout can also lead to adverse consequences such as:

• Decreased quality of patient care;
• Decreased quality of mental health care providers;
• Depression;
• Substance abuse by health care providers;
• Increased error rates due to inattention.

Time management in nursing is not just about increasing productivity. Sufficient time should be allotted to rest and recharge. Nurses should take regular breaks and prioritize their emotional and physical well-being to prevent work-related burnout.

Delegating

The American Nurses Association has released a guide to the principles of delegation to help them with time management in nursing. According to them, delegation is "the assignment of activities or tasks related to patient care to junior support staff while holding responsibility for the outcome" [Marymount University, 2020].

Nursing facility management should instruct and train nurses on how to make responsible decisions about delegating nursing responsibilities. The association states that this decision should be based on the following criteria:

• The complexity of the patient's care;
• The availability of a worker to whom the task can be delegated;
• The type of supervision needed.

Delegation works best when health care workers have a good working relationship and are willing to cooperate and communicate openly.

Creating a support system

Time management in nursing is a problem that working nurses have faced for decades. It is helpful for them to communicate with their peers, mentors, and senior nursing staff so that they can share different time management practices in nursing strategies and build a strong support system.

The importance of mentoring in the nursing profession cannot be overstated. In one case study, researchers found that a healthy partnership between nurses and mentors has the following benefits:

• Reduced turnover among nursing staff;
• Increased chances for career advancement;
• decreased transition time for training;
• Increased effectiveness of training.

Joining a community of expert nurses and mentors ensures this success and reduces wasted time [Marymount University, 2020].

Avoiding multitasking.

Research shows that multitasking is not only inefficient, but can also be detrimental to the brain. Regular multitasking makes people less productive at completing tasks. It reduces their ability to understand and quickly analyze outside information due to overloading the brain with large amounts of data [Inc., 2018].

Nurses should reduce the number of tasks to be performed simultaneously, prioritizing one in the time allotted. Delegating, prioritizing, and eliminating distractions can all help with multitasking.

Getting rid of distractions

Today's world is full of tempting distractions, from smartphone social media to chatty co-workers. Distractions are especially dangerous when dispensing drugs and can lead to more frequent mistakes. If you want to succeed in time management in nursing, you should minimize these factors.

A major source of lost time is interruptions by colleagues. These unexpected and often untimely visits are particularly problematic, not only because they distract the nurse from the process, but also because the "visitor" may also request assistance with urgent and equally important tasks [Marymount University, 2020].

Emails, phone calls, and pagers interrupt the nurse's work just as much as unexpected visitors do. Misuse of email, ironically designed to save time, is one of the most common causes of lost time.

When used improperly, email can significantly reduce productivity and productivity. For example, checking and responding to new messages every few minutes contributes to decreased productivity. Ideally, e-mails should be accessed 3-4 times a day on a planned schedule.

Turn off any audible alerts so you're not distracted every time a new notification comes in.

Prioritize.

The principles of time management involve properly prioritizing a nurse's work to increase efficiency and productivity.

One popular method of prioritization is the CURE hierarchy, which includes:

• Critical - Critical patient needs. Situations where immediate intervention is needed to prevent deterioration of an individual's condition.
• Urgent - Urgent situations with a high potential for harm or discomfort to the patient if not addressed.
• Routine - Routine needs of patients. These include, but are not limited to, physical assessment and medication administration.
• Extras - Additional activities. These are activities performed by the nurse that, although not necessary, contribute to the patient's comfort. Examples include providing the patient with a warm blanket, grooming their hair, or shaving [American Nurse, 2018].

The systematic use of this method allows the nurse to improve time-management skills, allocate available resources wisely and efficiently, and save energy.

Balancing a huge number of cases is a common task for a nurse. Another great tool for prioritizing is the Eisenhower matrix, which divides all tasks into "important/not important" and "urgent/not urgent."

    Eisenhower-Matrix

There's no denying that no matter what tools nurses may have at their disposal, some days they just don't feel like there's enough time in the shift to get all the scheduled tasks done.

Ideally, such situations should be the exception, not the norm. Using the tips described in this article and making a conscious effort to plan the day will help nurses start and end each shift on a positive note and make time more of a friend than an enemy [American Nurse, 2018].

Conclusion

Nurses seeking to improve their own productivity should apply time management principles that, not only increase efficiency and job satisfaction, but also reduce professional and personal stress.

Although implementing and maintaining effective time management skills requires lifelong behavioral changes and discipline, nurses can start with one or two areas that can be improved today.

Time management is a dynamic process that requires flexibility and patience. By increasing professional satisfaction and reducing stress levels, career satisfaction can be improved, a greater work-life balance can be achieved, and re-energize long-term growth and success.

As always ...

... many thanks for reading!