Many mornings we drive to work with the motivation and ambition to meet deadlines, but inevitably something crops up. There may be a staff absence and extra cases to cover, or too many urgent duty visits required (thereby saturating an already over- stretched team), or something unforeseen has happened on one of your own cases.
To help overcome these difficulties you can use a number of strategies, which can help maintain some control in a job dominated by dealing with the unexpected.
Here's How You Can Seize the Day...
- Color code your to do list. Highlight the list into red, amber and green priorities. It’s surprising how easy it is to get side tracked by green activities that aren’t urgent. It’s important to remember that some tasks can wait.
- Maintain at least one completely protected day in the week. Protected means no phone calls, no replying to unnecessary emails, no disruptions. Writing up a set of minutes can be done relatively quickly; interruptions can cause the task to last considerably longer. Don’t book in any meetings or any visits.
- Have an agenda for every meeting/phone call/visit. I’m doing an activity for a purpose and once that purpose has been achieved it’s time to go. When meeting professionals and families it’s easy to be de-railed from your purpose. Your time is precious, stay focused.
- As soon as a need is identified, make that referral. Your role is to assess risks and identify appropriate support services. Make the referrals as soon as possible. It can be tedious filling in the family’s details in almost identical forms for different agencies, but these agencies can give the families the support they desperately need and in the long run, these families may overcome their difficulties and no longer require our services, creating further time. Better still undertake your visits armed with the knowledge and contact details for the support services in your area and ask the families to make their own referrals. This is where FAMCare helps - No Double Data Entry!
- Having something to look forward to after work. This increases my productivity hugely, whether this be an orange Wednesday or even a nice dinner.
- Be aware of your personality and how it impacts on your attitude to time management. We all have drivers: these include be perfect, be fast, please people and be strong. It’s important that we’re aware of our personal style because each style has advantages and disadvantages. The key thing is that we are flexible; that you are able to utilize the style that is appropriate to the circumstances in which we find yourself.
