When I was the tender age of 18 I traveled up north to try my hand at tree planting. Let me paint a picture for you- it is grueling, sweaty work. The job basically consists of slogging a large bag of baby trees up and down a mountainside, stumbling around to find suitable “micro-sites” on which to plant each sapling, digging a little hole and and planting them one by one. We would work from 6am until about 5pm, have dinner and then go straight back to our tents to recoup before the next day’s grind. I remember working 13 hours the first day and planting less than 100 trees. At $0.12/tree, minus $25 per day camp fees, that meant that after an impossibly hard day I earned about negative $13 dollars!
While toiling along, I noticed another guy who looked sort of like a Buddhist tree-planting monk. I would watch him float up and down the mountainside planting trees. He never seemed to sweat. He was always in a good mood. His work looked…..well, not like work. Even though he seemed to be expending almost no calories, he commonly planted 2000+ trees per day! I remember staring quizzically at his serene countenance one day, pondering his magical secret.
I eventually asked him to reveal his secret, to which he replied, “I have practiced these skills for so long that I don’t even think about the work anymore. My body moves along, and my mind is mostly somewhere else.” Since then, I have marveled in a similar fashion when watching veteran social workers and counselors serenely go about their days, apparently unbothered by the demands of their work.
Now, after obsessively interviewing these long-surviving front line workers, I have gleaned many insights which I plan to share with you in the coming months. These veteran helping professionals consciously or unconsciously do many specific things that not only keep them in the game, but keep them relatively at peace as well. But for today, I want to share about one little-talked-about attribute shared by most highly successful helping pros: they have developed and use systems for managing their work-lives.
They do not rely on their minds to do the heavy lifting their job requires. Here four basic tools effective professionals use:
- A day planner
- A to-do list
- A daily, weekly, and monthly routine
- A personal filing cabinet
Let’s quickly go through these one by one. If you have no tolerance this morning for technical “shop talk” you can just skim them. But fair warning- I’m going to geek out a bit on these.
1. The day planner
I know that this should seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many social workers don’t use their planners to their full potential. If, like me, you are required to report what you do- the phone calls you make, whether the client showed up or not, etc- then the day planner is not just about remembering future events, but keeping a running log as well. For example, I am required to electronically log every call I make to a client, every text, every meeting. At the end of the month, those stats are passed up the chain to the program funder to ensure my agency is meeting it’s deliverables. When I first started out, I would get to the end of the month and then have to piece together who called me. It meant going into my phone’s call display, looking in client folders for notes, going into my work cell phone for texts. It was a nightmare!
Now my day planner never leaves my side. Every time, I get a text from a client I write a shorthand note about it corresponding to the line for whatever this moment’s date and time is. This practice drove me nuts in the past because I perceived it as tedious, but now I see the light. Now it is pure zen. I am just the tree planter floating along. When month’s end comes, it’s all there. No crazy searching.
I also write case notes in my planner (I have a big 8 X11 one with one day per page). The notes go right beside the scheduled appointment entry. This forces me to be economical with my words and get to the point.
2. The to-do list
I keep two lists, actually: one for the realm of work tasks, and one for home tasks. Do you know where I store those lists? In my day planner! The home list is there because throughout the day, items from my home-life just come up, and the list allows me to put the item out of my head until the end of the day. My practice is also to order work tasks from hardest to easiest, and tackle the hardest one first. These tend to be fairly short lists because of the next system. I learned that my Buddhist tree-planting friend had a similar structure. For example, he always kept every tool he used in the exact same place. He always did every step in the exact same order. This made the process mindless for him. A to-do list similarly frees your mind for other things, while ensuring meet your professional obligations.
3. The daily, weekly, and monthly routine
Routines are prescribed and deliberate actions that effectively remove the need for willpower. Routines are a procrastination killer. Conversely, a lack of routine feeds procrastination. Have you ever kept putting off that report until the deadline and then stayed late to get it done the night before? Not only is that extremely stressful, but it causes ongoing anxiety the entire time you’re avoiding the job. I have learned (though I’m not perfect at it) to schedule my common work tasks and then stick to that schedule. For instance, we have just seen how my custom is to enter every step I make into my day timer as I go along. My habit for writing my notes is that I write them in my car after each client session. I enter my mileage and expense receipts at the end of every day without fail.
I also answer almost every email the moment I read it if I can. You should only have to deal with an item ONCE. Not multiple times. I batch enter my notes onto the electronic case management system once per week. I typically do this on Thursday mornings. By performing these tasks on a schedule, I reduce the randomness of my job thereby reducing my stress levels. That way, when things go sideways (as is normal in the world of child protection) I can respond from a place of strength rather than a scattered place.
4. The personal filing system.
This may be the biggest time saver I have. Unfortunately, my world is still one filled with all manner of paper-based reports, notes, and records. I just don’t have the mental energy to handle large, unmanageable piles. So I have developed a two-drawer filing system comprised of just a few crucial folders. The bottom drawer contains all of my case files. Not the agency case files, mind you- just a single, thin file folder for each client containing their referral document, my latest report, and only the most crucial documents.
In the upper drawer I have only a few folders: one containing many copies of all of my intake docs, one with copies of commonly used referral forms, and one that contains the various flyers and print outs for social service resources that come across my desk from time to time. Aside from that, I have a small “inbox tray” on my desk that I empty every day. From the tray, those documents either go to recycling or into a file folder. Again, my goal is to only touch it once. Finally, I should note that I also have a similar filing system on my computer.
Okay, wake up!
I’ll forgive you if your soul escaped your body for the last eight paragraphs! The nitty gritty can get dry, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I resisted the dry for years and the result was emotional chaos and suffering. I felt alot of unnecessary pain as a tree planter until I learned to be radically efficient with my trade. The same holds true for me as a helping professional. My hope is that you figure out and use some of these systems a good deal sooner than I did.
Here’s my main point:
Your work, especially the tedious parts, need to become automated through systems.
Think about the things you do every day that require no willpower and cause no stress, and yet are objectively boring or tedious. Is brushing your teeth fun? No. Is it hard, though? Not at all. In fact, you don’t have to even think about it. You go upstairs to prepare for bed and pick up your toothbrush- that’s it.
You see, boring is a strong emotion. It is actually a form of anxiety that emerges when we less-than-consciously say to ourselves “My life is passing me by. I’m missing out on something better right now.” Similarly, feelings of tedium arise when we get frustrated with the complex requirements of something that offers very little immediate return in exchange for our efforts. Yet they have to be done (teeth and paperwork). Now when we were little kids, brushing our teeth was hard.
If you don’t remember, look at your kids- they do a pretty bad job when they’re first learning! Sometimes they even lie and tell us they’ve done it when they haven’t. Why? It’s tedious! When you’re little it takes alot of mental energy to carefully brush each tooth in a certain way. Eventually- I mean after years of practice- we come to peace with the fact that we must brush every day. Our muscles learn to be very efficient and we can do the deed without much thought and it stops being stressful. In fact, we start to even feel good when we clean our pearly whites- we like how it feels, tastes, and we are satisfied with the knowledge that our dental hygienist won’t lecture us.
This is all I mean when I speak of systems. They don’t even have to look the way I laid them out above. Once we have accepted their necessity, have practiced them (maybe for a few years or more), and they have become almost unconscious for us, they lose their malicious effect on our souls. If we persist we will find our paperwork zen.
What systems have you developed over the years that serve you? Let us know in the comments section below.