Keywords: time management, continuous medical education
Background:
Educators in family medicine often work on different fields: clinical work, education, research – and they are engaged in their own personal lives as well. Balancing all these different fields of activities can be challenging. It is then no surprise, that mismanagement of their tasks may lead to stress due to the feelings of not achieving the necessary goals in so many fields in a relatively short amount of time – every day just has 24 hours and not a single minute more. This presentation aims to highlight the importance of effective time management and provides practical techniques to improve it.
Methods:
The presentation will emphasize the impact of poor time management (or lack of it) on educational outcomes and will show that implementation of time management skills can prevent it. The presentation will highlight a couple of techniques for effective time management that can be used instantly and can be learned in short time. A very valuable tool for prioritizing (Eisenhower's Matrix), will be displayed as a useful tool for a wide array of people and situations. Recognizing the significance of time management for family doctors, the presentation will stress the need to incorporate this topic into the education of trainees.
Results:
Expected result of this presentation is to equip family medicine teachers with effective time management skills that they can share as a continuous professional development activity with family medicine residents.
Conclusion(s):
The presentation will address the importance of time management in the context of family medicine education. It will present some powerful techniques that can be readily adopted enabling teachers and trainees to effectively navigate the multitude of tasks they encounter daily, both in their professional and personal lives.
Points for discussion:
How to incorporate the suggested techniques in an everyday practicioner's agenda?
What are the fields or contexts where these techniques are not applicable?
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