Sunsama weekly newsletter

The Meditations Newsletter A weekly Sunsama newsletter to help you work a little bit better. 🙋 Ask Ashutosh Drop your question here to get an answer in a future newsletter. 💬 Jessica asks: I'm a doctor working in a public hospital. I began using Sunsama to help keep my workload manageable and find balance in my daily life. My to do list and administration tasks can seem low priority compared to the clinical work - and I find they easily pile up and can become overwhelming. The main issue I'm encountering at the moment is my day is fully occupied with "meetings". My roster consists of morning handover meetings, teaching and being allocated to an operating theatre or a clinic. We do not have rostered time for nonclinical work or admin. This means any admin tasks (responding to emails, completing paperwork, ordering gear for operating lists, study to prepare for surgery, creating teaching presentations) falls within my break or outside of rostered work hours. It is rare to find myself with an actual 30 minute uninterrupted work free lunch break, and I often take work home. I do not find this sustainable, or enjoy having work intrude on my life like this (I am often exhausted at the end of the day or week) - but unfortunately it is fairly acceptable in our profession. I try to have a rolling Work Admin task (with many smaller subtasks) to time bracket this. I constantly add to this, meaning the Work Admin task is never actually closed/complete which can feel futile and unsatisfying. I regularly braindump tasks into my list in between seeing patients - but find there is nowhere to schedule the tasks on my calendar in my daily/weekly planning sessions. I'm wondering if you or other users have suggestions for how to manage work when we have little control about how/where out time is allocated at work? 🎙️ Ashutosh's response: This is a tough situation because you are running into the physical limitations of time and it looks like you’ve fully allocated it. Usually, I’d recommend all sort of alterations to when you do work, or moving meetings, or asking for a no meeting day. My sense, from my outsider’s understanding of the medical system, is that you really can not control your schedule in a way that would make any of that feasible. It won’t solve the problem but it may relieve some of the anxiety and stress to simply acknowledge you are trying to do something impossible and free yourself of feeling like you’ve got to do it all. If I were in your situation, my next steps would be the following. First, I’d acknowledge how insane and impossible what you are being asked to do and asking of yourself is. Next, I’d try and decide which of those categories of non-clinic work matter to you or have to be done. For example, if bad things happen if you don’t do that paperwork, I’d do that and just give up on professional development work (sad but something has to give). I can’t know what must be done. Next, I’d look into what could be offloaded to someone else. Can you hire an EA to help with the emails and ordering supplies? And finally, a drastic measure, can you use your PTO to take days off to catch up on non-essential work. That’s obviously a super sad and dark way to use PTO but if you really want to get it all done, you’ll need to find time from somewhere. 💡 Pro-tip refresher: managing your tasks ahead of vacation, plus Sunny technique Recycling this previous pro-tip video as a refresher! Heading out of office? This refresher covers a few ways to make sure your tasks don't pile up while you're away, from doing nothing at all (really!) to moving things around ahead of time. Plus, our AI assistant Sunny can now clear out your vacation days for you in a single request, and every change it makes can be undone right from the chat. ☕️ Snackables Digestible, quick-hitting blogs packed with tips to improve your workdays. How to Reclaim a Day That's Nothing But Meetings On a packed day, you usually can't get rid of the mee