The FAQs

Here I’ve answered some common questions I get asked regarding time management, including “how I stay motivated”, “how to minimise procrastination” and “how to maintain spontaneity”.

1.How do I stay motivated?

This is often an issue for many of us, myself included! After a long day of lectures or at the hospital, you come back home shattered and think “can I really be bothered with the gym?”. My way of staying motivated is to think of why it’s important to me and focus on that as best I can. So wrt to gym, it’s important to me because it helps me destress, helps me concentrate later, I enjoy it and it adds to my progression. With things like preparing for supervisions, I focus on my passion for education and the importance of preparing well to help educate as best as I can. Some tips to stay motivated is to break-down your long-term goals into short-term tasks that are objective and measurable. That way you can track your progress towards the final goal, which will help with continued motivation. So things like creating a check-list and ticking things off as you go along, is perfect for boosting motivation. However, the most important thing here is your happiness and health, so if relaxing after a long day is going to preserve your health, definitely do that!

2.What if I want to be spontaneous and not plan all the time?

Spontaneity is great and often the most fun memories tend to be unplanned. The good news is that you can still be spontaneous whilst managing your time effectively! The way I do it is by planning in redundancies throughout the week. For example, I might plan to do absolutely nothing on Sunday evening for e.g. But, say on Monday evening I’ve planned to read about chest pain and a mate walks in and asks to go for dinner. I think to myself, ok cool, I can still go to dinner and I’ll just shift my timetable along such that I’ll do some work on that Sunday evening free slot. Essentially, I anticipate some spontaneity and account for it when making the original plan. However, there is a limit to this. If I was spontaneous all the time, then I’d get very little done and making a plan/timetable would be pointless. This is where some degree of discipline is important!

3.How do I decide a task’s priority?

This is a very individualised concept. What’s important to me might mean very little to you. However, as medical students, certain things are universally high priority. For example, passing exams and tasks you need to do to achieve that is high priority. So prioritise the academic goals and tasks such as pre-reading, attending lectures, post-reading (for pre-clinicals) and reading, doing questions, seeing patients, presenting and getting feedback (for clinicals) etc. The priority of these will be high throughout the year, but edging closer to the exams, revising and associated academic tasks become more important, at the cost of some other extra-curricular tasks. For example, closer to the exams, I spend less time at the gym each day, so that I have more time available to revise. But that’s ok, as it’s just a short-term period of altered balance and once the exam are done, it can be rebalanced to my liking. However, this doesn’t mean you have to throw away your passions and interests. By using Bi-factor coding and maximising efficiency, you should be able to fit in pretty much most things you want to be doing even during the exam period!

4.What happens when I’ve maxed out my time?

Unfortunately, there does come a point where you are doing so much, there simply isn’t enough time to do it all and still stay healthy. It’s important to recognise this and scale back down to a healthy level. Relax, recuperate and learn to become content with the things that you are able to do and don’t be too hard on yourself for having to forgo some of the other stuff. It’s not worth being miserable just to do the most. For example, I cut down the number of colleges I was supervising from 5 to 2 from my 4th to 5th year to allow myself a healthy balance!

5.How do I minimise procrastination/ distraction?

A common problem! Take regular timed breaks as you study, lock access to shopping and social media apps/websites during the study period or even create a mental ban. Turn off notifications! Plan something fun for the end of the day/ week to help motivate and work efficiently!