Our next question comes from JK. JK asks, "How do you plan your day or week or time block when you have a job that has reactive parts and parts requiring deep work?" JK elaborates, "I'm a pharmacist manager working in a busy hospital environment managing a team of 15 to 20 people at any one time.

This means I can be interrupted with questions at any time of the day by my staff as well as by other hospital staff outside of my team. These interruptions sometimes can be delayed, but mostly they are in the moment questions requiring an answer for them to proceed with their hands-on work.

At the same time, I have non-reactive and deep-thinking work that needs to get done, but that gets pushed aside due to mental overload or lack of time." She gives examples like doing quality improvement work, analyzing data, et cetera. Well, JK, this is a problem in general with the medical field and in particular hospital work.

I have given talks to hospitals in person virtually. I have worked with various hospital administrators on this problem. So just to lay out that foundation, you are not alone in this issue. There is a fundamental reactive nature about the way that hospitals run right now, which is quite degrading to the cognitive capacity of the individual practitioners, and it is a real problem.

We do need more structure, and a lot of hospitals are thinking about this. So let me just lay that out there now. It's a big problem that hospitals are starting to think about. In terms of what you can do before those solutions actually happen is, number one, I would go easy on yourself.

You aren't going to be able to do a lot of deep work in this environment. The cognitive context switching created by all these interruptions is draining. It's going to make it hard, even if later you do have time for you to get things done. So you might have to actually lower to some degrees your aspirations about how much deep work you're going to get done.

Two, put aside that time early in the day, first time in the day. I've negotiated with whatever, my supervisor, my attending, the fellowship director, that I'm working on my data analysis Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I do it from 8 to 10, and then I'm on call. You figure this, you probably are going to have to figure out times that are protected much more officially.

And there might be less of those times than you would like, but at least those times are protected. They're first thing if possible, so you have all your energy and you try to get as much done as possible in those windows when you get there. A surprising amount of deep work can get done if you consistently do that.

That's probably what you're left at right now, because the rest of your day is going to be pretty frenzy. As for time blocking, I think it just depends on the nature of your work. Some inherently reactive jobs aren't well-suited for detailed time blocking. You might time block out the big things that you know have to happen, so you can see the character of your day, but you will be frustrated if it's impossible to know if you're going to get the next hour free, or if the next hour is going to be dealing with something that you had no idea was going to happen.

And in that case, you might not be doing fine grain time blocking. So just to quickly summarize, hospitals are terrible for this, but they are getting better, hopefully. Knock on wood. I think we have to start with probably banning the inter-messaging feature that was added to Epic EMR record software.

I've heard a lot about this, that you can now instant message people in the EMR software, but that's a whole nother argument. Number two, negotiate for the deep work time so it's protected. Use the right vocabulary, explain why this is important, that you want to fit this in, point them towards my work, blame it on me, get that time negotiated.

It'll be less time than you hope, but you'll get more done in that time than you think. All right, that's my advice, JK, so good luck. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)