Happy New Year! So how can we make the most of 2024?

I hope you all had a lovely break over the festive season. It does already seem a long time ago, but I’m not full of the January blues. I had a busy but very enjoyable break, and a lovely New Year’s Eve. I try not to be sad when good times are over, just grateful that they happened in the first place.  

However, I understand that for many of us, the festive season is hard. There have been challenges for me this Christmas too. My mum was formally diagnosed with dementia this year which rapidly deteriorated, and as a result she moved to a nursing home. It’s been a tough year for us all. This was the first Christmas I wasn’t going home to visit her. As in home to the place my mum and dad bought when they got married and where my sister and I were brought up. I went to the nursing home to see her, and whilst is was still lovely, it did feel strange. I had to remind myself that she is well and definitely safer. And she’s been lonely since my dad passed away and now she has company all the time she’s so much happier.  

So reflecting on all of this, I feel we need to make the most of every day, month and year. I heard something on the radio recently which really resonated with me. Giving things up for January can feel quite negative, although don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly back in the gym after all the Christmas indulgences. But much more positive than giving things up is starting to make plans. Don’t put things off – either in your personal life or at work. I love planning things to do with my loved ones, but I also get a lot of satisfaction out of being productive at work. I know things can go wrong and you can be hit by varying degrees of curveballs. This could happen at any time, but we need to make the plans despite this. Something I certainly do is overestimate what I can get done in a day, and then feel disappointed when I don’t achieve it. But apparently people overestimate what they can achieve in a day but underestimate what they can achieve in a year.  

The important thing is to make some plans and this brings me nicely round to Nuclear Medicine and more specifically to my area, Radiopharmacy. At the beginning of January this year we implemented a significant organisational change. In a nutshell, my Radiopharmacy service moved to another Trust. It is something we have been planning for some years, so to have realised it is both scary and exciting in pretty much equal measure. I’ll miss seeing the people in my old Nuclear Medicine department, whom I’ve worked alongside for so many years and if they are reading this, I want them all to know how grateful I am to them all for everything. They are a fantastic group of people.

It has been a long road to get to where we are now, and like all big plans, there were a lot of individual components which had to be realised to bring it to fruition. But now we have made the move, any idea that we had reached the end of the journey has very quickly gone out of the window. There is still a lot to do. For the first week I felt quite overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. My to-do list looked out of control!

It was then that I heard about a technique called ‘Time boxing’ on the radio. It is a technique which essentially involves ‘calendaring’ your to-do list. Sounds nice and simple and it is. But it’s also been proven to be effective. It’s not just about what you’re going to do, but when. It’s like scheduling a meeting with yourself in your calendar, and as such, you should treat it like a meeting. No rescheduling, unless it’s urgent. No distractions. It requires you to block out a period of time to work on something, something Psychologists call ‘setting an implementation intention’, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘planning out what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. And for bigger tasks, you can reserve several blocks of time in advance. It gives you control over your schedule, even if there are things you can’t control within it. 

I read an article on it in the Harvard Business Review, published about 5 years ago. In this article it described 5 problems with the to-do list: 

1. They overwhelm us with too many choices. This is certainly true. Mine is massive, and doesn’t help nearly as much as just selecting a few things I’m going to do that day and putting them in my calendar.

2. We are naturally drawn to simpler tasks which are more easily accomplished. For sure – who doesn’t love a quick win? But to do this means other, more complex tasks, can end up being left.

3. We are rarely drawn to important but not urgent tasks, like setting aside time for learning.

4. To-do lists on their own lack the essential context of what time you have available. Time boxing allows you to factor in things you already have committed time to. For example, meetings, that manufacturing or reporting session. 

5. They lack a commitment device, to keep us honest. Because we haven’t committed to when we are going to do a task, we don’t hold ourselves to it. 

It’s not about timetabling your whole day – that would be impossible and doomed to failure. It’s about looking at your schedule at the start of each day / week, and looking at your to-do list, and then blocking out time in your diary to work on specific things. Today my calendar looked like this:

7am – approx. 9.30am: Manufacturing session in the Radiopharmacy (already in schedule). 

10 – 11am: QA meeting (already in schedule)

11.30am – 12.30pm: Radiopharmacy move close-out document (time boxed work – first of 2 for this)

1.30 – 2.30pm: Complete ARSAC paperwork (time boxed work)

I’ve not tried this before, so if I’m going to stick to it, I’ll need to embed it into my routine. With 10 minutes planning at the start of the day / week it might even work. The evidence and my experience today certainly indicate it may be helpful.  

If you found this interesting, maybe give it a try? And if you are able to attend the BNMS Spring meeting in Belfast this May, perhaps we can compare notes to see how we’re all doing? 2024 could be a productive year for us all!

Ms Jilly Croasdale

BNMS President