Pharmacists use their time management skills regularly in their jobs to deal with the many tasks that are presented to them daily.
Time management is an essential skill and it is important that this should be learnt very early on in your foundation trainee pharmacist training. Managing your time well will reduce your stress levels greatly, it will also help you to prepare for the GPhC exam/registration assessment and will help you to be successful in your future career as a pharmacist.
Here are some top tips to help you improve your time management skills:
Prioritise your tasks in order of importance
Do the most important thing first.
Dealing with interruptions and distractions
Interruptions are a normal part of work-life. The key to dealing with them is to analyse and assess the urgency of the interruption. With this approach, you will be able to decide whether to deal with it now or when you have completed your task.
Stop procrastinating
Recognise what is causing you to avoid completing or even starting the task. Motivate yourself to overcome procrastination by visualizing the end result of the task rather than the task itself. If the task at hand is big, divide it up into smaller bite-size tasks.
Organise yourself
To help you plan your time efficiently, use a diary to schedule when to do things e.g. study time, portfolio of evidence, project. Keep some time slots free for unexpected tasks. Also, prepare a to-do list for each day.
Identify and make good use of the resources and staff around you
Know the roles of each member of your team so that you know who to ask for help and refer a problem or task to should it be out of your remit. Get to know the range of information resources available in the pharmacy and make a note of what information each source provides e.g. Stockley’s Drug Interactions for answering queries relating to drug interactions.