The power of a weekly planning meeting

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 an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for listening. So today I'm talking about the power of the weekly planning meeting, and I will share a session that I had with some of my coaching clients recently, and we talked about the weekly planning meeting, and I am excited to bring you this episode, so enjoy listening.

1:30 So we're talking about the weekly plan and why a weekly plan is so important. And now I'm talking about it very specifically as it relates to your academic work, but it doesn't have to be academic work. This is really just, you're a person who has goals. You have things that you really want to accomplish. And for the most part, the goals don't really happen or they don't move forward in the way you want them to, because there's always a million other things that are vying for your attention. And so that's why it makes sense to plan, because then you can actually move forward the thing you really want to move forward. So last week we talked about the strategic plan. We talked about it as a long range map, looking at three to four months ahead of what you want to accomplish, your three big smart goals, and then a realistic look at the tasks that make up this big goal.

2:19 For example, you're writing a grant and you know that the grant is due at the end of three months, but you first of all have to write the specific aims page, get feedback, rewrite the specific aims page, do the background and significance and the research strategy, then go get all the other documents. So it gives you an opportunity to say, well, the big goal, the big strategic plan is I'm writing this grant, but the individual tasks are specific aims, background and significance, research strategy, all the ancillary documents. And it gives you a realistic plan for what you're going to need to do over the next few months where you're not three days to the deadline and you're like, what, I have 24 more pages of writing? Which maybe has happened to you.

3:01 It certainly has happened to me in the past. So it's a long range plan. It allows you to break down the tasks using smart goals. And that's a realistic look as realistic look as how, as to how these goals actually fit in your schedule. So it's like, oh, I'm gone for three weeks. Clearly I don't have 12 weeks anymore. I really have nine. So that's what we talked about, the strategic plan. Okay. So what happens when there's no weekly plan? You probably have experienced it firsthand. There always seem to be emergencies every day and they're not true emergencies, right? Because we're all physicians and we actually know what real emergencies are. But you know, there's the email from your mentor saying, have you, have you submitted that thing that's due at 5pm today?

3:43 And you're like, oh no, it's due at 5pm. You throw out all the other stuff you're doing to do this thing by 5pm. Or someone says, oh, that note you're writing, you're going to get dinged if you don't close the chart by midnight tonight. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh no, I've got to like put aside everything and write these notes. There's always an emergency, always an emergency. And the thing about the emergencies is that they're urgent, even though they're actually not important, they're urgent because somebody else is yelling about them. It gives you anxiety. It makes you afraid, worried about the outcome. You're fearful. You're ashamed that, you know, it's been three weeks and I still haven't closed this chart. And so it's going to drive your activity, even though it's not the most important thing you do. And so emergencies will always show up even though they're not real emergencies.

4:25 And they happen regularly so that you could literally live a whole week being very productive on just emergencies alone. And that's the challenge. The challenge is that the more emotion that's associated with an activity, the more time seems to fly. If you're like worried, anxious, afraid, and you're working on something, then all of a sudden you're like, I can't believe it's the end of the day. And I've just been working on this one thing. It also gives you a sense of accomplishment because maybe you're working through your email inbox and you have 300 emails and now you're down to zero and you're like, yes, you got all those emails responded to. That email response, as important as they may be, it's not really in the top three things that you're trying to accomplish over the next few months, but you feel accomplished closing the box, right?

5:09 That it's not the most important thing. So in general, when there's no plan, you tend to get carried away by all the stuff that's happening. You could feel accomplished, but you're not actually moving forward the thing you want to accomplish. When you have no plan, what you find out is that you're accomplishing a lot of things that other people want you to accomplish, especially those with the loudest voices, but not really the thing that you want to accomplish. And so what does a plan do for you? Well, the first thing a plan does for you is it actually gives you space to reflect on what's important to you. Because if you're going to come up with a plan, you actually need time to think about it. Like, okay, well, what do I want to do in the next three months? Yes, I have 16 things on my list, but what are the three most important of these 16?

5:53 And it allows you to do it when you're cool, you're calm, unemotional, hopefully not under stress, not anxious, or not trying to make anybody happy. It's like your most lucid, most thoughtful, real self saying, well, this is really what I want to do. Right? And it could be anything. On the one hand, your program director says that if he can get this protocol written by the end of the month, that'd be the most important thing you do. But then you get to sit down and say, well, is it the most important thing? If you don't get this protocol written, is that the end of your career? It allows you to really think objectively without hopefully pressure. So it's first of all, a chance to really reflect and be clear about what's important to you.

6:35 The second thing it allows you to do is it allows you to make decisions free of pressure. So the email you get in the early in the morning where you open your inbox that totally throws off your day, all of a sudden you can't see anything but the red that this email has brought to your mind. And maybe it's full of microaggressions and then you're like so angry, it derails your whole day. Right? That you can't really think well when you're under that kind of emotional stress. And so a weekly plan allows you to plan outside of all those things that kind of derail your calendar or derail your day so that you are your most thoughtful, lucid self and you can make decisions ahead of time. So it's like in the middle of the week, you're going to be overrun by an email that's going to throw you off.

7:20 But the person, you, same you, at the beginning of the week before all of those pressures came in already had the time to make a decision that you know is your true decision because it was your rational, unemotional self making that decision. The third thing that making a plan does for you is that it gives you a very realistic idea of what your week looks like. So before I started making a weekly plan, someone would say, oh, Tia, I just need this. I just need you to review this manuscript for me. It's due on Friday. And I would be like, oh yeah, sure. Of course I can. Because I didn't have a good idea of what was on my schedule. And now that I have a weekly planning meeting and I have a really full calendar of all the things I want to get done, when someone comes in like that and it's like, oh yeah, it's due on Friday.

8:07 I'm like, hmm, I have to throw away one of my preconceived pre-planned plans to take over your review that's due on Friday. Is it worth it to me to take your plan and displace one of the things I said in advance that I was going to do? So it gives you a realistic understanding of what you actually have to do. So you're not like, oh yeah, I have all this time in the world. I can do all of this. And for many of us who find ourselves in unstructured spaces where we're no longer on the consult service or rounding or doing things that take our time for a significant amount of the day, you have all this unstructured free time where it's like, you have all the time in the world?

8:51 Of course you can get your notes done for the next three days. And when you make a plan, you realize that you don't actually have as much time as you thought you did. And it helps you to manage other people's expectations as to what you can do for them. Okay. So those are the three things that a plan will do for you. Okay. So how do you actually do this weekly plan? How do you operationalize that? So people do it in different ways. I'm just going to talk through how I think about the weekly plan. The first is that you choose a day to do the plan. So I think a week is a really good, it's a really good discrete group of days that you can use to make a plan. I used to make a monthly plan and the reality of a monthly plan is that it's so far away.

9:31 It's really hard to be realistic. By the time you get to halfway through the month, the month doesn't look like it did at the beginning. I think a week is useful because in general, we think in terms of the week. Also, the plan can change, but it's not going to change as much as over the course of a month. So I think a weekly plan is useful. So you select a day of the week. Maybe it's a Friday planning for the week starting Monday or it could be a Sunday. I used to do Sunday mornings. Most of the time I try to do on Sundays and then because it helps me look ahead to the week, but sometimes I'll do Monday mornings as well. Usually the earlier the better, but I like as close to the week as possible. So select a day of the week and look at your strategic plan.

10:14 Remember, so we talked last time about the strategic plan where you've already determined these are the top three things I want to accomplish over the next couple of months. So from your strategic plan, select three things, three tasks, right? For the example of the grant that you're writing, well, you're not going to write the whole grant in the next week. And I hope you don't try to do that though. I certainly know that it happens, but you look at the week, you say, well, I have this grant that's due in three months. This week I'm just going to focus on writing the specific aims page. So that's your one big goal for the week. And maybe you have more than that, more than that one goal. Maybe there's a manuscript that you're working on because perhaps you'll finish the specific aims page on Wednesday and you're like, oh, I'm done, but I still have Thursday and maybe Friday.

10:59 And you'll say, well, okay, so then the manuscript, this manuscript that I'm revising and resubmitting will be number two. And one of the reasons you want to do that, especially when you think about longer range things like the grant is that it takes time to write well. And the bigger something is, the more time it takes. And so you want to, you really address it a little bit each time rather than trying to crunch it all at the end. And so anyway, so you might do that. So you have three goals. One is the grant, one is the manuscript. And this week for the grant, all you're doing is specific aims. And so maybe Monday you're going to outline paragraph one and two on Tuesday, you're going to draft paragraph one. And then on Tuesday it'll be paragraph two, Wednesday it'll be the actual aims page.

11:41 And by the end of the week, you have a whole specific aims page. And you can decide that you're only going to focus on one paragraph, which won't take you the whole day of your writing or maybe it will, but at least it allows you to say, okay, I finished this first introductory paragraph, I'm done. I'm now going to move on to the manuscript and revise the introduction. So anyway, so that's an example of how you could take two things from your strategic plan and fit them into your week to have no more than one to three major things that you're trying to accomplish in the week. Okay. So that's what you're going to put on your weekly plan, right? And those are the first three things you do before you really add anything else. Then your priorities are already scheduled.

12:21 You're going to put them on the calendar. So Alison and I were talking about this earlier where you're actually going to look at your calendar and say, if I'm going to write paragraph one of my specific aims page, that's going to take me, I think about 90 minutes. So I'm going to do 60 minutes, right? When I wake up in the morning and then I'm going to do the remaining 30 minutes at 2 PM after clinic. I don't know. I can't do anything after clinic. So usually it will have to happen for me before clinic, but you get to look at your calendar and actually block out the time. And the two, there are many reasons why you block out the time. One is to tell yourself it's a real meeting. It's not just one of those things where somebody calls you and says, oh my gosh, I need you to pick me up right now.

13:02 My car has a flat tire. You're like, you know, it's just, and then you look at your calendar, you're like, oh, of course I'm free. The next meeting is not till three. It's helping you recognize that any meeting with yourself to move your work forward is a real meeting. Like, you know, you're, you're paid actually to be productive academically if you're at an academic medical center. And so it is a meeting. You put it on your calendar and in places where people can schedule meetings onto your calendar without your express invitation, you especially want it to be on your calendar. So they don't find the space and say, oh, I saw that you were free at 6am. So I put the meeting on there. And then when you finally get someone who can help you with your scheduling, then they also know that, okay, this time is blocked off.

13:42 It's not available for a meeting. So you're going to put it on your calendar. So you put all your big activities on the calendar. Your next step is to say, well, what are all your other activities? Right. So the things that are on your calendar, you're meeting with your mentor on Thursday morning, clinic on Tuesday afternoon, those are already at your calendar. That doesn't have to be part of your weekly planning meeting. It's just on your calendar. And if you're like me, if it's on your calendar, it's probably going to get done. Right. Because you get those alerts, you know, it's there, all of that. It's all the other stuff that you're now going to make an exhausted list of what are all the other things I need to do this week. You could say, oh, okay, well, my city training is due on Friday. That's the deadline. Okay. Well, you put that on there.

14:22 It's not the most important thing. It's not on your top list of things that you're trying to accomplish in your strategic plan. But it's kind of important because, you know, you want to be able to continue to work here, but it's not so important that it should take up all your time. And so there you go. You write that on the list and then maybe your mentor said the abstract that's due three weeks from now, you need to have a draft outline. You put that on the list as well. Now it's not your primary priority, even though it's your mentor's priority. So it doesn't supersede the work you've already pre-established that you're going to do, but you would add it to the list. And so by the end, you have an exhaustive list of all the things that you need to do. So now you take this list and you look at your calendar and you say, well, you know, you already have meetings that are blocked out.

15:07 You already have the time in which you're going to accomplish your important thing. And now you got to find space for all of this stuff. And there's always going to be more things on that list and there is space on your calendar. But what you want to do is you want to honor the calendar and put them on the calendar. So realistically, okay, maybe the city training is number three. Where are you going to put it on your calendar? Okay. It's going to take you probably there, maybe 15 modules. You're going to speed through everything. So you're like, okay, I need three hours for the city trading modules. You sit down and you find the three hours on your calendar. You're like, I can do this after clinic. I don't even have to be paying attention. You put it on your calendar, right? And then, you know, clinic notes are part of that list. And then you're going to say, oh, I'm going to be too tired after clinic on Thursday.

15:48 I'm going to put my clinic notes on Friday after my Friday morning writing. And you put them on your calendar and you try, you give yourself a realistic estimate of how long it will take you. You know, the realistic estimate is in quotes, because to be honest, the more time you assign to something, the more time it takes. And when you just say, hey, the deadline is at 5pm. I'm going to start at two. Guess what? You are going to be done by five because you didn't meet the deadline. And it's not even that important anyway. So that's one of the ways that I use my calendar as a forcing function to help me do things that other people want me to do, I don't think is as valuable to supersede my work. And so I kind of leave it to the last minute so that the deadline helps me move it forward.

16:28 But anyway, those are the things you put on your calendar. And what you're going to notice is that at the end of putting things on your calendar, there's stuff that just is still there. It doesn't have space on the calendar, unless you're going to lie to yourself and pretend that the city training is only going to take you 10 minutes, which of course it's not going to. But if you're going to be honest, you're going to see that they're going to be things on the list that are not yet on the calendar. And those are the things you're just going to put in the question mark box. It's like if it gets done, life is good. And if it doesn't get done, it'll be okay. Right? There will never be enough time to do all the things you don't want to do. Never. You never have time in life to finish all the things you hate. And they're always going to be on your list. The first thing is, can you delegate those activities?

17:10 When you find someone else who would love to do them for you, maybe there's a med student who really wants to write that abstract because they want to be first author and you're like, I couldn't care less about being first author. Here you go. Like who could you delegate tasks to? And I will say that there is always someone you can delegate a task to. You may be feeling like I'm just a fellow. No one will do this thing for me. Think again, who can do it for you? Who actually will do it where they will actually find it really valuable to do where you might not find it as valuable. For example, people have probably told you never to write another book chapter. The reality is that book chapters have a role in helping people learn. And maybe it's not as important for you anymore now that you've moved on to the big and bad manuscripts that you're writing as first author, but somebody else wants their name on something and they will gladly take the book chapter and write it with you.

18:04 Right? And so think about who you can delegate things to that don't fit in your top priority. There will always be someone you can delegate to. Okay. So now you are left with a calendar that by the end of your weekly plan is full. By the end of your weekly plan, you have a full calendar. So when somebody shows up and says, Hey, there's this great opportunity. There's this two page grant. It will only be two pages and it's due on Friday at midnight. Then you get to really understand that your calendar is full and now you have to take something off to be able to put this wonderful new opportunity on. And so it's an opportunity for you to ask yourself, well, is it a real opportunity or is it a fake opportunity masquerading as a real opportunity?

18:45 But you get to decide, right? Because when you will come and Lucid, you decided what was most important to you. And then someone has come and they've brought something that they think is more important than what's on your list, but they don't know what's on your list. They have no idea what you've put on your list. And so that's why you really are taking ownership of your time saying, Hey, I realize that this is a great opportunity and I have other priorities on my calendar already. When is the next deadline for this grant? Because grants will always come back. They always come back. No matter what happens, the grants will always come back. They come back every quarter or they come back once a year. They will always come back. Anyway, so there are things like that, that honestly it's like, if you miss the city trading deadline, you probably have another day or two over the weekend to get it done.

19:31 There's always room to move things that are not as important to you. Now is there room to move your stuff out of the way? Absolutely. But the goal is to move your work forward because that's a thing with your name on it. That's a thing that matters to you. It's a thing that you really want to move forward. And so the tendency in life is to push all your stuff aside to accommodate other people. If you're a good doctor and you've had good training, that's what you learn to do. You learn to just put all your needs aside and meet other people's needs. So one of the reasons we do a weekly plan is to help us be very clear that we don't want to do that unless there's a good reason for why somebody else's recommendation should supersede the work that we're doing.

20:14 All right. So number three, step three is just execute on the plan. You have a plan and the benefit of a plan is when you actually work the plan. So every day start with a look at your plan. So you made the plan last week or Friday, or maybe you made it at the beginning of the week, Sunday, Monday comes and you look at your planning, you're like, okay, well, today the most important thing I'm doing is writing the first paragraph of my specific games page. You know what's number one. You might have a number two and number three, maybe number three is getting to the gym or maybe it's number one. And the specific games page is like number three, whatever. Just you know the priority you've assigned to it before you look at it and then you start working with the highest priority thing first.

20:55 It's like, you know, the book, eat that frog. It's like, you know, the thing that you said is important is going to be the hard thing to do. It's going to be hard staring at the blank page, trying to come up with that one paragraph, but it's the thing you said was important. And so it's the thing you should do before you get onto the thing you love about, you know, meeting up with your friend at the gym, which even though the gym is important, it's the thing you actually are enjoying. You would enjoy doing. So sometimes it's like the reward and you keep the thing that you really are looking forward to doing or the thing that's most exciting to you. So you can get the thing that's actually a little bit harder to do first, but you want to do the most important thing first. One of the benefits of doing that is that no matter what happens with the rest of the day, you know, a flying saucer falls out of the sky.

21:38 Your mentor has a conniption fit. No matter what happens, you've already won. You've already won. And that's why it's important to be very clear and start the day with it. And some people would recommend don't check email because email, I am easily distracted. So I can't start the day with email because then the whole day goes down the drain. And I'm like, wait, I feel so productive, but what did I do? Oh yeah, I responded to that email that took me three hours to write. So you want to start the day with the thing that's most important to you. And then when you end the day, you look back. So you've got to reflect and the reflection is important because, you know, if you don't stop and reflect, then you don't really have a chance to evaluate what worked, what didn't work.

22:22 So when you're reflecting, you're saying, well, I set out to do this one paragraph of a specific aims page and I ended up taking like the whole day and I only wrote three sentences and it helps you think about, well, what happened, what went wrong, what could be different next time. But reflection is important and gratitude to say, okay, well, job well done. And even if you didn't accomplish everything you said you wanted to, it helps you reset and say, well, maybe it takes more than three hours to write this first hardest paragraph next time I'll split it over two days. I'll just start with the outline today and I'll do the actual full draft, ugly draft tomorrow. And so it just helps you over time. You start to learn what's realistic, what can be done in 30 minutes, what can be done in two hours worth of writing, like how much can you get done even though clinic starts at 9 a.m.

23:11 It just helps you become more aware, more self-aware so that you can be more productive with your day in a day that's meaningful to you. So that is a summary of the weekly planning meeting and it's not too late. Today is Monday, end of the day. It's not too late to plan the rest of the week. Like if you miss Sunday or you miss Monday, it doesn't mean you're done. But it just allows you to pause and just say, okay, well, let's look at the calendar. Let's make sure that everything is on there that needs to be on there. You want to always leave white space in your calendar for yourself. Like don't be like me stacking meetings back to back to back. Give yourself time as well so that you have white space. Yeah, I think that's all I want to say about the weekly planning meeting.

23:54 Thank you for listening. I look forward to talking with you again next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.