2020 ATS Pediatric Virtual Boot Camp:
Tips for a Successful Fellowship
Life as a Fellow
Life As a Fellow
Aliva De, MD
Time Management
Eric Zee, MD
Life as A Fellow: Time Management
In fellowship you are often pulled in multiple directions and time management often becomes much more important than in residency. Although your clinical time is less demanding your responsibilities have grown and you can easily find yourself trying to balance clinical service, complex outpatient encounters, research projects, grant applications, quality improvement requirements, advocacy initiatives, and committee assignments not to mention preparing for presentations, writing manuscripts, and studying for your boards. As a tool to help with time management, I found that keeping a time management diary for a week helped me as a first-year fellow to reflect on where I could improve my efficiency. Establishing a time management matrix of my short and long-term priorities along with a time management diary allowed me to put a number on the “time wasters” and the interruptions that were limiting my productivity early on. As a result, I began to set time limits on tasks that were less important and that did not contribute to my learning or long-term goals. Also stealing as many “SmartPhrases” as is humanly possible has been an effective time management strategy during my fellowship.
Benjamin L. Wisniewski, M.D.
