Stephen Covey wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven’t read it, you might want to pick it up. It’s well known and frequently quoted for a reason. But today isn’t the day to lecture you on your reading habits. It’s to share with you something you can do make sure you get it all done.
One idea Covey talked about was making sure the important things get done. There is too much for anyone to do. There are thousands and thousands of tasks. The key is to prioritize.You can see this at work any day of the week.
The people who are good know how to prioritize. They see what order to do things in. They know what matters and what might be able to slide.
The people who struggle see everything as equally important, and if that’s the case you can’t possibly get it all done. Do you suction the blood or grab the next suture? Do you get the blankets for the patient or hook up the SCDs? In and out of the OR every decision to do something is a decision not to do a million things. That list has to get reprioritized over and over as new information comes to light and as new tasks get added.
In the outside world, certain things are important to you and need to get done. Other things are nice to get done, and then there are all of the things other people hand you to get done that you don’t even care about.
Covey puts it like this,
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
If you have something that MUST get done, then you NEED to schedule a time to do it and stick with it. Don’t allow input from others to knock you off your rails and send you on to tasks that don’t matter. It’s so easy to find yourself getting a bunch of stuff done that doesn’t even matter.
A major skill is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Cutting through the noise and prioritizing the things that are impotent to you.
You definitely do not have the time to get it all done, but you do have the time to get the most important things done. You have to decide what those are and make the time.
Let me help you. One of those things you should be doing is studying every day. That’s if you want to pass your exams. Schedule this as a priority. Either early in the morning or late at night, so it doesn’t get pushed aside. And an easy way to squeeze it in is to use The Final Step for 10-15 minutes per day. What else is on the most important list for you? What else should you be scheduling before everything else?
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