How I negotiate my academic calendar

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is such a pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I'm always excited to share my thoughts with you, but I wouldn't be able to share my thoughts if you weren't listening. So I just want to say thank you so much for being here.

1:21 So I talked on the last episode about how I create a strategic plan, and a strategic plan is a big and a beautiful, bold thing, and I have mine on the side of my wall right by where I write to remind me of what I'm supposed to be working on. Here's the thing about the strategic plan. The strategic plan represents an aspiration. It's like, wow, these are all the things I want to accomplish. And what happens when your strategic plan meets your clinical, clinically busy calendar? There is a clash of arms. There is because it's like, oh, great. I love that you've outlined all these things that you want to do, but where are you going to put them?

2:08 Because your schedule gets full really, really fast. And that's why today I am talking about how I negotiate my academic calendar. My calendar is my weekly map for moving work forward. If it's on the calendar, it's happening. If it's not on the calendar, it is not happening. And so that is why I want to talk to you about how I negotiate my academic calendar, maybe give you some ideas for how you might negotiate your calendar too. And here's the thing. It may be that you already have a superstar master of your calendar.

2:48 And I would love to hear your thoughts because my way is only my way. It is not the way. And it is not the only way. It is the way that's working for me today. The moment I find someone else who is doing something that is better than me for me, so not better as in more superior, but just wow. I'm like, I like that strategy. I'm going to incorporate it. I will transform my whole experience. I totally will. And so what I'm sharing with you is what I do this moment. Tomorrow, I'm going to get an idea that transforms the way I do it. And I'll be doing something different. So if you're listening to this, whenever you're listening to it, I've already moved on from the ideas I've shared with you. And I'm inviting you to be part of that. Share your ideas with me so that I can transform the way I work on my calendar as well.

3:33 Okay, very good. So the very first step, I'm going to talk about seven ways in which I negotiate my academic calendar. And my very first step is to have my overarching goal. I know I said this in the strategic plan episode, but it's important to say again, it doesn't matter what my calendar, it doesn't matter what I put on my calendar unless I have a plan. Like my calendar is the platform for my plan. It serves my overarching goal. My calendar leads me to scholarly productivity. It leads me to impact.

4:14 That's what I want to do with my academic career. I want to impact the lives of patients. And the process I want to impact the providers that care for these patients. I want my work to be impactful. And I've determined that the way I want to do that is not just in seeing patients alone, but also in moving forward the research that helps the patient I cannot see, that helps the patient that still needs help when I'm no longer here. And so my overarching goal is impact. And that is important because that guides how my calendar serves me.

4:54 Everything that does not lead me to impact cannot find its way to my calendar. Actually, it kind of sort of still does. But that overarching goal allows me to say, this doesn't fit on my calendar. How can I get rid of it? And this is important because once I took on an administrative role where people would just put stuff on my calendar, oh my goodness, it made me so mad. But the people who would put stuff on my calendar were usually people who were a little bit above me in the rank of the role. And it would be like, hey, I put an 8 o'clock meeting on your calendar. I'm like, what? I write at 8 a.m. How dare you?

5:38 And then I would just suck it up and show up for a meeting that would now invariably spawn my mood. And then I wouldn't be able to write. So it was like, not only did you put a meeting on my calendar at a time in which I should have been writing, your meeting residue ruined my writing time. So I stepped out of that role because I don't want people putting stuff on my calendar that affects my ability to write. And it's because I have an overarching goal. It's because I understand that I came for impact. That's why my calendar cannot be anybody's platform for just putting meetings on there. But I learned my lesson from that point. I absolutely did. And I learned my lesson and oh, wow, I'm getting ahead of myself now.

6:20 OK. But I think I'll say it because it fits here right now. What I learned my lesson about is that there are no open spaces on my calendar for meetings unless I create an open space. So I literally will go forward a year in advance and close off stuff. Like my writing happens from 8 to noon. Therefore there can be no meeting from 8 to noon. I'm going to open up the slot after lunch from 1 to 3 for your meetings. So OK, if you can find a slot between 1 and 3 p.m. on any one of these days, then sure, you can slot in the meeting if you want. Actually, I don't even let people put meetings on my calendar. But if by any chance somebody is so brazen as to look at my calendar and say I'm going to put a meeting on there, they can only find an available slot where I would be OK and not so mad if I found a meeting there.

7:05 So that's how I responded to that. My overarching goal for my career allowed me to create that structure. OK, that's number one. I have an overarching goal for my career and it tells me how my calendar should serve my career. OK, number two is I create a strategic plan. So I spend all this time talking about the strategic plan yesterday so that I could, you know, put my strategic plan onto my calendar. I could map it onto my calendar. And so the second step is creating a strategic plan. And I spent a lot of time talking about that yesterday. So if you missed the podcast episode, please go back and listen to it again because I really, wow, spent twenty five to twenty six minutes talking about a strategic plan. Go listen to it.

7:46 Number three, I own my calendar as a map for my week. It's on the calendar. It's happening. It's not on the calendar. I'm not doing it. Very, very simple and invariably. So I make the plan for my calendar a week in advance. So today is Friday while I'm recording this episode. It's Friday and I will sit down later today and I'll look at my calendar for next week and I will map out the week on Monday morning. When somebody comes in with an emergency meeting that needs to happen on Tuesday, I have to now look at my calendar and display something to make up for that emergency meeting. So then I have to decide, is that an emergency for me? I get that it's an emergency for you, but isn't an emergency for me that it should allow me to display something that I already sent as something I needed to do the week before?

8:30 Most of the time the answer is no. So sorry that, you know, that came up for you so suddenly, but I don't have space in my calendar this week. I can do it next week. So the calendar is a map for my week. It is a map for my week. It's not on the calendar. It's not happening. And the good news is that when I go and sit down and map out my calendar, and that's actually number four, I'll talk about it in a minute, is I sync my work calendar with my home calendar so that, you know, there's perfect alignment. If it's not on the work calendar, it's not on the home calendar. It's just not happening. It's not happening. And in reality, life happens, right? Life happens. And some of the things you plan, you don't get to do. And you know, that's why I think people say that the goal, the value of the plan is not in the plan.

9:14 It's in the planning. And in the process of planning my week, then I'm clear about what the week is going to look like for me. I allow the week to serve me. I don't allow the week to just happen to me. Okay. So number four is I fill my calendar a week in advance. So that's what I was talking about earlier, where on Friday I sit down and I look at the calendar and I looked at the week ahead of me. I look at all the meetings I've already committed to. And sometimes I fall, again, into trouble because, you know, former Teosi is so ambitious. She wants to have all these meetings with people. And I'm looking at the calendar. I'm like, why? Why is there no white space on your calendar, young woman? Anyway, you know, I can't get too mad at her.

9:56 She's really working hard for me. But anyway, so I look at the calendar and I'm like, oh, these are all the meetings I've previously committed to. And I don't make myself a slave to the meetings I committed to. Sometimes I uncommit. Sometimes I look and I say, the grant is due next week. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I put this meeting on my calendar, but I am not going to be able to fulfill that commitment. And so I uncommit. I send an email and I say, I'm so sorry. Something has come up. I'm not going to be able to make this meeting next week. Can we move that meeting? But it allows me because I'm looking at it a week in advance, I'm able to make those decisions. And so when I sit down with my calendar, look at the meetings that are coming up, look at my writing time, which has already been scheduled a long time ago, then I can now pull things from the strategic plan.

10:38 The things that I said would come from week one, week two, if it makes sense, I put them onto the weekly calendar. And usually I have two writing goals per day. One is a grant writing goal and one is a manuscript writing goal. And usually it depends on the grant writing schedule. If I'm done with my grant writing submissions for the quarter, then there's no grant writing that's going to go on my schedule. If I have a grant due in a couple of months, then a little bit of the writing will go on the schedule and then there'll be more manuscript writing stuff that'll be on the schedule for that day. So one grant writing thing will get done and then a manuscript writing thing will get done. So I have two blocks of writing, two major blocks of writing in my calendar every day.

11:19 And by every day I mean Monday to Friday. Now if the grant is due next week, everything moves from my calendar to accommodate the grant writing and then when the grant writing is done and if there's no other grant coming up, I will then kind of like focus more on the manuscript. So there's a little bit of give and take as to when manuscripts versus grants fill my schedule. Okay. So I fill my calendar a week in advance based on the things I put on the strategic plan, which if you go back and listen to the strategic plan episode is really those are the things that I want to move forward that are scholarly but that there's no accountability. Okay. Number five is I close my calendar to any additional meetings.

11:59 So yes, here it is Friday. I'm looking at next week and I see that, oh, no one filled the 2 p.m. meeting slot or I, you know, my past self did not fill the 2 p.m. meeting slot on Thursday. I will close the meeting slot. There was not a meeting space available. It's closed. I don't even have to have anything that, you know, is planned for that hour. It's just closed because in looking at my schedule a week in advance, I'm preparing for the week in advance. And so I'm thinking through, okay, this meeting, this is what I want to accomplish from this meeting, you know, that writing project that I said I'm going to do this week, this is what I want to accomplish from it. And so anything else that comes kind of is a little bit disabilizing because I haven't prepared for that.

12:40 I haven't. So I don't want anything to surprise me come on my schedule that I'm not actually prepared for because one of the things about outsourcing my thoughts to my schedule, outsourcing my time spent during the week to my schedule is that I don't have to worry about it until the day shows up. And then I pull it up and I'm like, oh, these are the things I'm supposed to do. I don't have to think too far in advance. I'm just like when it's time I look at the schedule and the schedule helps me. I've already prepared to do that. So when things pop up on the schedule that I hadn't previously planned, they surprise me and they can, you know, they just kind of it bothers me to have those kind of surprises. So I don't like them. So I close the schedule to any new meetings. Now the other thing that that allows me to do is it allows me a little bit of flexibility.

13:23 If there is a meeting slot at 2 p.m. and there's like a research thing that comes up where I'm like, I want to talk about this paper before we send it out because I really feel like we need to sit together and really map out what the discussion would look like. Then there is a slot that's available that I can open up for that to happen. So it gives me a little bit of flexibility to move things in if I need to. But if I don't need to, then it gives me a little bit of white space and I need white space. I'm prone to just like putting a lot of stuff on my calendar and having white space is helpful. So when the opportunity comes for a slot that's not filled, I take it. And if there's nothing else to put in it, I take it and I celebrate it and I rest and I do something different that helps my mind.

14:08 So anyway, that's that's how I close my schedule to any additional meetings. That's number five. Number six, I decide in advance what's allowed to take over my priorities. You know, invariably, there's something that comes up where someone says, oh, my goodness, we've got to meet on Thursday at 2 p.m. This is absolutely critical. And then I stop and I think, hmm, 2 p.m. is the time I designated to work on that other manuscript. Hmm. Is this new request of sufficient priority to displace that time that I had dedicated to this manuscript? And if the answer is no, the answer is no.

14:48 What I love about it is that there's no confusion about what fits and what doesn't fit. It's already been pre decided. It's been pre decided. Like I've decided these are the things that are allowed to take priority over a meeting I've scheduled. Let me give you an example. My chair calls me for a meeting, so she never calls me for a meeting. For the most part, I don't meet with her. My chair, and my chair, I'm not talking about, you know, my chair is above my division chief, right? So it's two steps above. My chair says, hey, I would like to meet with you at 11 a.m. Then I clear the space for my chair. But that doesn't happen very often. So it's not something I'm doing all the time, you know? So for the most part, anyway, there are very few things that will come and overtake my schedule.

15:31 Very, very, very few things. If life happens, then life happens, right? So everything is negotiable. Everything is negotiable. But for the most part, those emergencies that are other people's emergencies that are not mine, I do not let them overtake my schedule. I just like, oh, the schedule is full. But we can maybe meet next week or two weeks from now because I have an opening in two weeks. OK. Number seven, I get accountability every week. And so I have a peer group of men, a peer mentoring group. These are all faculty at about the same career stage. They're mostly at other institutions, which is so awesome for just the feeling of safety of like, OK, if I gripe about something, it's not getting outside of these four walls because they're not at my institution.

16:13 Who are they going to go tell? Anyway, so I get accountability every week. And every week we meet. To the best of our ability, we meet every week. And we say, here are the things I accomplished last week. Here are my writing and research goals. This is what I accomplished. These are the things I couldn't, I didn't accomplish. These are the reasons I didn't accomplish them. And then these are my plans for next week. So we announce, we announce in advance what our writing goals are going to be for the following week so that we can come back the next week and say, what happened to those goals? Did we meet them or not? And so these are friendly people. They're not going to hurt me if I don't do my work. But I don't want to be the one showing up and saying, yet again, oh, I didn't do that writing. Oh, it was so hard.

16:53 I mean, no excuse is a great excuse. I mean, there are just not too many excuses that should displace the thing that you said was most important to you in your pursuit of impact in your career. Like why? What does that? Yeah, I was just, I was really upset. And so I didn't do the work. Like it just doesn't really fly in our community. And so that accountability is beautiful because it allows me to, you know, commit. I said I was going to do this writing and I did it. I commit to it. And so I get accountability every week from a phenomenal group of peer mentors who hold me accountable and encourage me to. It's a really beautiful space. We share wins, we share challenges. It's a really beautiful space. And if you do not have your own accountability group, I totally recommend it.

17:36 Okay. I get accountability every week. So that is what I do to negotiate my academic calendar. Now I want to challenge you this week to go block out space for your research and writing productivity on your calendar. No, do not roll your eyes and say, but they won't let me. Who is they? You are a grown adult making your own decisions. You own your calendar. Can I say that again? You own your calendar. Nobody owns it for you. You own it. And so I don't know who they is, but they don't own your calendar. You do. Now I invite you this week to go and create space for your writing and research productivity on your calendar. I'm going to ask you to take it a step further and block out that specific space every day for the next six months.

18:24 Yep. If you're bold, if you're not feeling so bold, just do it for a week and see how it works out, but block it. It's a meeting. It is an official meeting between you and your intellectual self. Put it on your calendar and then come tell me about it. I would love to hear how putting your work on your calendar has transformed the way that you write. All right. It has been a pleasure talking with you today. Do not forget that we have a webinar coming up November 20th at 6pm. I hope this podcast episode comes out before the webinar, but if it doesn't, there'll always be a next webinar coming up. So look on our website, clinicianresearcherpodcast.com for more information about the next webinar and the next webinar after that.

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