Why do I need protected time?

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 today's episode. We are talking about, why do I need protected time? I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Thank you for tuning in. So, we're addressing the question of, why do I need protected time? Before we get started, I want to let you know that we are enrolling our first cohort of coaching clients on August the 28th.

1:24 If you're interested, sign up on our website, ClinicianResearcherPodcast.com. We hope to see you there. So, we're talking about, why do I need to protect my time? And this is an important question that comes up for me every time I interview a candidate for a faculty position. Invariably, I'll say, so how do you see yourself spending your time as a faculty member? And this is someone who has said that, I want to succeed as a research leader. And they'll start by saying, well, I really love clinical, therefore, I'm thinking that I probably want to do about 50% patient care and 50% research.

2:05 And I start laughing as soon as I hear that, because I'm like, yeah, this person doesn't understand. They don't understand what it takes to succeed as a research leader. That's why they're advocating that 50% of their time be spent doing clinical work and 50% of their time be spent doing research. And so, it's interesting and I laugh a lot because that was me. When I was interviewing for faculty jobs, I just thought that, hey, what is this research thing? It's not that big a deal. Of course I can do it with 50% of my time. I don't need 100% of my time to do research. And I want to just pause and talk a little bit about what it takes to succeed as a researcher when you actually don't have research training.

2:51 Okay. I always like to refer back to my PhD colleagues who spent maybe five to seven years of their lives getting their PhD. Most of that time, 75%, possibly 80%, was spent really honing their research skills. And then they go to summer graduate assistantships or after their PhD, they get a postdoc. And so, I think when you start to put the numbers together, how much time does it take for a PhD to get the research training that helps them succeed in leading a research program? I would say it's probably a minimum of seven years. It's at least five years, right, to get the PhD, but it varies. But I'm thinking it's at least five years, possibly longer.

3:33 And depending on how many postdocs they did and for how many years, it could take as long as it took for us to finish our medical training overall. And so, it takes a long time to learn to lead a research program. And so, when I have someone who's a clinician, who's never really done any significant research, maybe other than what they did in fellowship for about a year or two, they come and they say, I want to learn to lead a research program and I only want 50% time to do it in. It says to me that they don't understand what's needed to succeed as a clinician scientist. And so, I'm not really here to talk about that specifically today. I will talk about it in a future episode.

4:14 But today, I think I want to explain what it really means to have protected time. People talk about protected time all the time. It's like, but what does that really mean? So, we're going to talk a little bit about protected time. So, what does protected time refer to? Well, protected time really refers to the time you have to do the work you're supposed to do. And that really is the short definition, is the quick and dirty way to think about it. If I came in to do research, what is the time I have in my daytime schedule to do the research? And many times in academic medicine, and this is part of our, because of our training, we believe that our 24 hours should be dedicated to our jobs.

4:56 And no wonder we believe that. For me, when I came up in my training, we did 30 hour shifts when we were on call. And so, yeah, it's not a big extrapolation to believe that, well, if I spent all my day in the hospital, then maybe my 24 hours is reserved for my job as a clinician. So training aside, in general, there is more to your life than just the work that you do. You know that, and I know that. And therefore, when you think about your job as an academic physician, and you think, well, why don't I just compute my working hours from Monday to Sunday as the time I'm spending in my academic career, I would say you probably would not be alone in doing that, but it's not helping.

5:41 And it doesn't help you to be the full individual that you want to be. And so protected time really refers to what is an established number of hours at your institution for your daytime job? What does that mean? Is it 40 hours? Some institutions would say it's 50, but every institution has a specific number of hours that they agree is the number of hours in which time should be, the time for work is allocated. Right? When people say 20%, if you make Monday to Friday kind of the normal work week, that's just work with me here, you're like, oh, no, it's not. Just work with me here. If we say Monday to Friday is a normal work week, then 10% is Monday morning, 10% is Monday afternoon, and vice versa until you get to 100% at the end of the week.

6:27 So what is that? If we look at your Monday to Friday job activities, how much of that time is allocated to this particular activity? If you are an education researcher, how much of your Monday to Friday is allocated to that activity? What is the time you actually have to do the work? There's protected time on paper, there's protected time in reality. We'll talk a little bit about that today. But just recognizing that, do you have time allocated in your schedule to do the work that you're supposed to do in your schedule? And on the flip side of that is to what extent does the work you're supposed to be doing in a certain period extend beyond the borders of the time that's allotted to it?

7:11 If you're a clinician, you know that this is true of most clinical activities, they tend to expand beyond the borders that are allotted to them. So protected time for research specifically is the time you have to do your research during your daytime hours. I know there are a lot of people who advocate during research at nights and on the weekends. Now we'll tell you that that means you don't have protected time. If you're having to move your research or your academic or scholarly work to family time or leisure time, the time when you should be recovering or doing something different from your academic job, it's a sign that you don't have protected time within your job description to do what you're supposed to do.

7:54 So when I talk about protected time, I'm really talking about the designated periods or blocks of time within your schedule that are safeguarded for specific academic activities. Specifically, if you're trying to become a clinician scientist or you're in the process of it, you're research. And when I say research, I'm referring to all the things that enhance your research, not just the doing of the research, but the thinking about the research, the writing about the research, the presenting the research, the publishing the research, all the things that have to do with research and protecting your time for research. So I want to talk today about seven steps to protect your time because protected time, as you know, is not guaranteed.

8:41 And sometimes protected time feels like a ghost or like an amorphous blob that's like, oh, I want protected time and I think I have it, but what does it look like? Or maybe you have it on paper and you're like, oh, I definitely don't have it. It's on paper, but it's not real. How do we make protected time real? How do we do that? And so I'm going to talk today about seven steps to protect your time, seven steps to protect your time. I like the number seven. It's kind of just easy. Okay. Step number one, verify your need. What do you need protected time for? And people are always talking about protected time, protected time, protected time.

9:21 And then I see people get protected time and it's like, oh, my life is so easy now. I just coast. I'm sorry, but protected time is not about leisure. Protected time for leisure, you should work towards the weekends as your protected time for leisure or the nighttime as your protected time for leisure. And you know, you can mix it in because at the end of the day, it really is about your time productivity, not necessarily about your time, but protected time is protected time to do something. It's not protected time to relax and take breaks. It's protected time to do a different kind of work. And so you've got to figure out why do I need protected time? What am I going to do with my protected time?

10:03 And it's got to be so clear. And what I see that happens to academic physicians is that they don't have clarity around what the protected time will do for them, or they don't have clarity around the activities that they will perform within the period of time that's protected. In a sense, people have the sense of like, you know, I'll do it when I get to it or, you know, I'll just work it in during the week. But when you really are serious about protecting your time, you want to know what that protected time gives you. In a sense, you're about to make an investment. What are you investing in? You got to know that. And I think it's one of the things that we don't get enough training to do.

10:44 And that's why I coach people in their micro negotiations to how do you figure out what you want? Because until you figure out what you want, you've got to know how to figure out what you want. You've got to understand what you want. And if you don't know what you want, well, how can you fight for it? And if you don't know what you want, when you get it, how do you know you already have it? And so there they are. There are people who have protected time who don't think they have it because they don't even know what they need and they don't recognize the protected time that they have. And so step number one in protecting your time is to figure out exactly what you need the protected time for. What do you want to do with it?

11:25 I hear you saying, well, duh, I need it to do research. What do you, what does that mean? You need it to do research. Are you talking about the time you need to do experiments? That's good. You do need time to do that. Or the time it takes to do an analysis? Sure. Sure. You need that. Well, what about the time it takes to design the project? Hmm. Okay. That's not a doing thing. It's a thinking thing. You need time for that. What about the time it takes to present the project to collaborators so that you can get feedback on your ideas? Okay. That feels like, you know, a little bit, a little bit squishy. You know, oh, I can do that on my own time. It's all part of your research.

12:08 You gotta be very clear about the activities that move you forward so that you can request or work towards or negotiate a protected time to do that. So if you don't know what you need protected time for, if you don't know, if you just have this box of like, oh, just research, be very clear about what activities you're doing in that timeframe. Okay. And if you don't, if you don't know, work with a coach to help you clarify for yourself. Work with your mentor. But sometimes your mentor may not know how to help you figure out what you need because you're a multifaceted person. But your research mentor hopefully understands what it takes to succeed as a researcher.

12:50 And if you are considering, if you're an early career person or just in the process of applying for a job and you're asking for protected time, go talk to someone who understands what you are looking for the protected time for so that you are clear on what the protected time will give you. Okay. We talked a lot about making sure you understand what you need protected time for. That's number one. Number two, determine how much protected time is needed. So when job applicants come and they're like, yeah, I want to lead a research program and I'm thinking, you know, I'll use 50% to do the research. It helps me understand that they don't recognize what's needed.

13:30 I'm like, dude, you have spent the last 10 years of your life not doing any research, not getting research training, not getting training for research leadership. You're telling me now that you think you can succeed doing that for just 50% of your time. Oh, you don't understand how much it takes to really succeed in this research endeavor. Because when you think about it, I always love to go back to our PhD colleagues. Our PhD colleagues finish their degrees and then they get their postdocs. And when they're done with their postdoc, then they say, I need protected time to lead a research program. Go figure. They've been spending all this time learning to lead research.

14:12 Then they get to the faculty positions and they're still asking for protected time. Well, what do they know that we don't know? And that's so important to recognize that no matter how much of a superstar you are, you have a specific skill set to build if you're going to become a clinician scientist. It's a very, very specific set of skills. You need time to develop this set of skills. If you are fortunate, you've had time throughout your medical clinical training to be able to get these skills. But most MDs, most clinicians have not. And so to think that you're going to come into a faculty position, never having had any significant amount of this training, and you're just going to be able to just lead a whole team is not realistic.

14:56 And so the second step is to recognize what kind of protection is actually needed to succeed in the way you want to. So it's that there is sometimes a gap between expectation and reality. So my expectation is that I can succeed with just 25% clinical time. I can succeed with just 10%. Oh yeah, I just need 10%. 10% is not going to cut it. You probably need actually 90% time. You probably need 100% time, depending on how much skill building you have to do. And so if you don't know how much time is actually needed to accomplish the goal that you have set for yourself, well, who can you ask?

15:37 Who are the other people in your network of mentors that you can go to and say, I want to build a research program in health services research? What kind of time will I need? What kind of training will I need? What are the skills I need to acquire? And how much time do I need to protect to be able to do that? You want to have a realistic expectation. And if it's not what you want to do, building a research program is not for you. You're like, well, I just want to dabble. I just want to support people. That's fine. You also want to recognize how much time is realistically needed during your working hours to accomplish this task. And so make sure you understand how much protected time is actually needed for the activity that you want to do.

16:22 Okay. Number three, negotiate your protected time on paper. So negotiating protected time is number three, because if you don't understand what you need, you don't know what you're negotiating time for. If you don't understand what's actually required, then what are you negotiating? How can you negotiate without understanding value? For this reason, we're doing a master class on August 21st at 6 p.m. about negotiating your next, your first next or current academic job. And that's August 21st at 6 p.m. Sign up at coagcoach.com. Events, that's C-O-A-G-C-O-A-C-H.com slash events. And if you get to our website, you should be able to find that mail. It will be in the show notes as well.

17:04 But you've got to understand how to negotiate what you need to succeed as an academic clinician, as a clinician scientist. You've got to understand it. And when you understand it, then you can negotiate for it. But if you don't understand the value of what you're negotiating for, the moment someone says, well, we can't really do that, then you're like, oh, okay, well, you know, I thought I would ask for it. And if I don't get it, I'll be fine. Recognize the value of what you're negotiating so that if you have to give that up, you pursue something of equal or greater value. Those are the things that are important. So the important thing is to understand first what you're trying to get, why you're trying to get it, recognize how much is needed, and then you can go negotiate for it.

17:50 You negotiate it for it on paper. Now, why do I say it's on paper? Because well, what happens on paper may be different from your reality. You may say, well, I negotiated 75% protected time, and then the way your clinic structure is set up actually eliminates that 75% protection. And so on paper, it's really important to negotiate it so that there is an expectation on both sides that this is what you have for you. Now kind of the classic time that people talk about is 75% protection. But what if you need more than 75%? So you got to understand what you need so you can negotiate it for it on paper. And negotiating for it on paper doesn't confirm the reality of it. What it does is it sets up an expectation that this is what we've agreed to.

18:33 And so when you go to your clinic and find out that it's just exploding on all sides, taking up five days of your week, you can come back and say, hey, remember we both have this expectation that 80% of my time is protected for this particular activity? Wow, I'm finding that that's not the case. So you negotiate it on paper so that when you come back and say, hey, it's not working like it's supposed to, there is a reference to what the expectation was, especially if perhaps the person who recruited you to your job is no longer there. And you can say, hey, hey, this is what we negotiated. This is what we agreed upon so that there is at least a frame of reference to start from. Okay?

19:13 All right. So make sure you negotiate on paper what you need once you've figured it out and you know what's required, make sure you negotiate. If you don't know how to do that, join us in our masterclass on August 21st to know how to do that. Okay. Part four is get help to protect your time, especially if you are just starting out. If you have a research mentor, a career mentor, an institutional mentor, you have peers, you have a group of people who are gathered around you to help you succeed, leverage them to help you protect your time. What does that mean? Well, protecting your time, that means making sure that you have the designated blocks of time for what you're actually doing requires a lot of help for one.

19:59 I'll start with the peer help. So you can start out with protected time on paper. And then somebody who thinks, wow, this person has all this time in the world, they must have nothing to do. Let me help them fill their schedule. They're going to reach out to you with a very innocent request. We just need people to serve on the curriculum committee. Oh, it's not much of an investment. It's just one meeting a month. And you're like, oh, one meeting a month? Of course, I'll help out. And what you didn't recognize is that it's one meeting a month and four hours of prep time. You just gave away five hours of your time. So they told you that it is four hours of prep time and one hour of meeting time. That's five hours. And so in a full month, let's give you a month, five weeks, but most months have at least four weeks, a little plus or minus.

20:43 You just gave up five hours of your whole month. And that becomes significant when you start to add up all these things. So that's why you need to get help. You do need to get the help of someone who can advocate for you, but you also need to recognize that you're going to need to advocate for yourself. And your peers can help you say, yep, don't do it. Don't do it. That's a trap. Don't do that committee. That's the one that's going to take you all your week to get done. Those are the kinds of things that you need to be thinking about. Get help to protect your own time. The things we talked about, recognize what's needed. What do you need to do to fill the space that you've been given? If you don't know it, get help, figure out what should I be doing with this?

21:25 All this beautiful time that I have four days of my week, I don't have any patient care responsibilities. What should you be doing with that time? How should you structure that time? It's unstructured. How should you structure it? So you need to get help so that you can accomplish that. You need to get help from somebody who can advocate for you, especially if a senior person is asking you to do something that's going to take up your time. For example, you're supposed to be protected to do research. And then someone says, oh my goodness, we now need a medical director for this particular area. And no, you know what? We're going to find a medical director to replace that role. But for right now, we just need you in this role for just one year, just one year. I'm on paper.

22:07 You've negotiated protected time for three years to transition to your own independent funding, and someone is offering you one year of time as a medical director where the work doesn't stop and you're on call every day. People reach out to you whenever there's trouble, and apparently there seems to be trouble every day. You do need help to be able to go to someone senior and say, hey, this is what I was told that I needed to succeed. And this new role is going to take me away from that. How do we negotiate out of this role? So you do need help to do that, especially if you're new and especially if you're concerned about power differentials that may exist, making sure that you don't have your protected time overrun by someone else who is well-meaning or someone else who's not thinking about your career development as much as you're thinking about your own career development.

23:00 And that brings me to number five, which is build the skills to protect your own time. So nobody is ever going to be as good as protecting your time as you are. If you have the greatest research mentor in the world who's like the enforcer, who's like anybody who even dares ask you for something has to go through them, like I'm going to protect your time. If you're lucky, maybe you have that person. But you know what? Ultimately, you've got to build your own muscles of protecting your own time. Most people don't have that kind of mentor. And even if you do, you've got to do what you can to protect your own time.

23:43 There's a time that's protected on paper, and there's a time that's really protected to do your work. And it defeats the purpose. If you have four days of your work week devoted to research, and wow, most of that time is spent putting out fires on email or addressing the half day of clinic that you have every week. So you do need to build the skills to protect your own time. And it's great if your research mentor can help you with that. But more likely than not, you're going to be able to access and leverage other resources that help you learn to protect your own time. And sometimes what happens to people is that the week runs away with them. It's like, oh, wow, what did I do last week?

24:24 I don't even know. And then you look at your list of activities and you recognize that, wow, I didn't move my research forward. I didn't move any meaningful writing forward. How did this happen to me? It takes skill to learn to create structure out of unstructured time. One resource I'm going to recommend to you is the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, NCFDD. They've got great resources to show you how to structure your own time. Or better still, come to our master class about negotiating your own, your first next to current academic job that's coming up on August 21st.

25:05 And we'll show you what it means to negotiate to protect your own time, which is critical to succeeding in the academic universe. Or you can sign up for one of our coaching programs. Our next cohort enrolls August 28th. And if you missed that window, it's again November 20th. You'll always have the next cohort enrolling on our website, clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. But whatever happens, ultimately, you are responsible for your own career advances. It's nice if you have the one guru mentor who can lead you by the hand and show you the way to go. I hope that's not the person you're relying on to advance your own career, because ultimately, no one cares about your career like you care about your career.

25:52 Having your guru mentor is really focused on advancing their own career. And they're thinking about you, but not all the time. The one person who's thinking about you all the time is you. And so please do what you can to build the skills and focus on protecting your own time. It takes skill, it takes work. And to be honest, you're going to be doing it throughout your career. And you want to make sure you do that. The next thing you want to do is to make sure that you secure funding. So funding is an easy, but actually, I shouldn't say easy. It takes time to procure funding. But you do want to fund your time that you need.

26:33 You need to fund your protected time. What does that mean? So one way we look at it for research time, many faculty fund their research time with grants. And when you're first starting, you might get an institutional startup package to help you do that. You might apply for an institutional career development award to help you do that. But applying for funding allows you to have somebody pay for a portion of time. Somebody says, hey, out of your workday, I am buying 70% of your workweek. Someone will say, out of your workweek, I'm buying 70%. And that means three and a half days worth of time that you should be spending on this particular project, moving this particular project forward.

27:17 So you can secure funding through grants, especially if you're starting out the career development awards. However, you can also secure funding for the activity you have, for example. So the way you secure funding for your clinical activities is by seeing patients. Actually, you're only really securing funding if you complete the processes by which the patient is finally billed. It doesn't matter if you're going and seeing patients and you're not billing anybody. You're not really protecting your time for clinical duties if you're not finding the funding by billing patients to do that. So for every activity you have as an academic clinician, there does need to be funding to do that.

27:57 And the clinical piece seems easy because that's what we've done. We've gotten a lot of training to do the clinical piece. The research piece is harder because we don't have as much training in successfully submitting proposals or bringing ideas to the proposal stage and then going from the proposal stage to aligning our proposals with funders and then submitting and then using the information from one submission to do the next submission. That takes time. It takes skill to build, but is an important component of securing funding to protect your time. Another example is say education is a component of your work as a faculty member. Your time has been allotted to you to do this work of education.

28:41 Are you an associate dean or an associate, you know, something in charge of medical student education or do you have a titled role? Well, who's paying for you to do that work? You just want to make sure that it's clear how much time is allotted so that you can do that work successfully. And so if someone's asking you to do work, it's going to take a significant chunk of time. Your response should always be, well, that's a great opportunity and where's the funding going to come from? Talk about how to do this better, how to do this more effectively in a future podcast episode. But one way to work towards protecting your time is to secure the funding and it allows you to say, well, this is the amount of dollars that are allocated so that I can spend three and a half days of my week doing this work.

29:30 And so you secure funding and it does give you opportunity to protect your time on paper and then the rest is up to you. In working with your mentors, your network of mentors and working with your administrative support, your division chief, department chairs, make sure that there's alignment between what has been promised and what's actually happening for you. The other piece of protecting your time is containing your clinical work in such a way that it doesn't overwhelm its boundaries. And some of you laugh, you're like, ha ha, easier said than done. I just want to tell you that you've got to be really strategic.

30:10 If you're going to succeed as a clinician scientist and you've inherited an overwhelming clinic where there's no support and you're having to go from morning till night doing all these patient callbacks and doing prior authorizations, I would argue that you don't have the protected time you need. And the question is, how do you negotiate the resources that you need so this clinic doesn't expand beyond its borders? It's easier said than done, but if you're going to do it, you're going to want to be intentional about it so that you actually protect the other days of the week that are supposed to help advance your research from your clinic expanding beyond its boundaries. And that's something that if you want to learn about, you should join us at our master class on August 21st.

30:56 Okay. What else do you do in terms of protecting your time? The last thing, number seven, is protect your time for self-care. So as academics, especially during our training, there's a sense that, you know, we can work every day of the week and be just fine. And in reality, you do need times of rest and relaxation, times to recharge and rejuvenate. And the weekend is usually the time that's allocated to do that. Does it have to be the weekend? It kind of just depends on your work schedule. Say you've been on call for a seven-day period. Well, you didn't have that weekend. Are you going to wait till the next weekend before you rest and rejuvenate? No.

31:37 Take a day off on a Monday and recover or maybe take your weekend. And so ultimately, what I'm saying is that you do need to protect your time to be the best that you can be. The most important piece of you in this journey is your brain, your mind, your ability to think clearly in this journey of being a clinician scientist. You want to be able to be a clear-thinking person. You want your mind to work well for you. And if you are doing, doing, doing, and you don't have time for your mind to rest and recharge, then your output is having less quality over time.

32:19 And you know, academic physicians are some amazing people. I've seen people who can really work, work, work, work, work for long periods of time without rest. I've seen it happen. And I've also seen the crash that comes at the end of it, the burnout, the anger, the disengagement, and that loses them periods of time. And so if you want to avoid that, you do need to build rest and relaxation into your schedule because you want to protect your time by protecting the mind that helps you work optimally in every situation. So I'm inviting you this week to think about how is my time protected and who is the chief protector of my time? I want to challenge you to take up the mantle of leadership in your life to think about how do I protect my time for my success?

33:07 You may need to recruit sponsors to help you. You may need to recruit mentors to help you. But take charge of protecting your own time. Ask yourself, how can I contain my clinic so that it doesn't overwhelm the rest of my week? What resources do I need to ask for so that I can accomplish this goal? And if you ask it and you succeed in protecting a little bit more of your time this week compared to last week, come find me and tell me how you did that. Leave me a voicemail on our podcast website. That's clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. And tell me how you did it and I will share it with our audience.

33:50 Excited to have talked to you today. Thank you for listening. I look forward to the 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.