Suppose you’re a nurse working in a doctor’s office. You have multiple patients to intake, charts to update, and procedures that require your assistance. Or imagine you’re working on a hospital floor and have several patients calling for help at once. With so much to do and so little time, time management in nursing is essential for carrying out duties.

Nurses must have excellent organizational and time-management skills to ensure they deliver quality and safe care. At the University of Mount Saint Vincent, the Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program helps students develop these skills and more, preparing them to navigate the modern healthcare landscape. Designed for students with a non-nursing bachelor’s degree, ABSN students can earn a Bachelor of Science (BS) in nursing in as few as 16 months.

Whether you are a professional nurse, a student, or considering a career in nursing, time management skills are crucial for success in your education and career. You will need to learn to prioritize patient care, remain organized, and employ time management strategies.

How to Prioritize Patient Care

Regardless of the healthcare environment, all nurses must learn how to manage their time and prioritize patient care so that all patients’ needs are met. While prioritizing nursing care skills takes time and experience to develop, nurses can use a framework to determine which patient care and nursing tasks take priority.

Some of the patient prioritization frameworks include:

Acuity

Many organizations structure patient assignments based on patient acuity, meaning the severity of a patient’s condition. They evenly distribute patients to staff as best they can to avoid overwhelming nurses. Nurses caring for high-acuity patients know that these patients require more intensive monitoring and interventions than low-acuity patients.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

This theory conceptualizes human needs as a pyramid. It places physiological needs, such as breathing, food, and water, at the base of the pyramid as foundational needs. They are followed by safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Nurses can prioritize care by addressing physiological needs first, then moving through the rest of the hierarchy.

ABCs

This framework prioritizes the most critical needs to preserve life: airway, breathing, and circulation. When faced with multiple patients with physiological needs, the patient with needs concerning their airway, breathing, or circulation takes priority.

CURE

This framework differentiates between the types of needs: critical, urgent, routine, and extra. Critical needs, such as respiratory distress, require immediate attention. Urgent needs, such as discomfort, follow. Routine needs include administering medication, and extra needs are not immediately concerning but will improve patients’ comfort levels.

Tips to Stay Organized During Your Shift

Organizational skills are essential whether you are a licensed registered nurse or a student starting clinical placements. Organizational skills will help you better manage your time, avoid making mistakes, and manage stress.

Below are some organizational nursing tips that will help you manage your time:

• Set pre- and post-shift routines: Create habits, such as reviewing patient charts or gathering supplies, that are helpful at the start of your shift. At the end, take notes, leave reminders for the next nurses to help create a seamless shift change, and partake in self-care exercises that help you relax after work.
• Set timers for time-sensitive tasks: Some tasks, such as medication administration, must be completed at set times throughout the day.Set a timer on your phone or similar device so you don’t forget.
• Keep reference sheets: Keeping reference sheets, such as a list of call-light codes, on hand will help save time and build your confidence. Pay close attention to what kind of reference sheet you find helpful.
• Create to-do lists and take notes: These will help you manage time throughout the day, keep track of tasks, and track patient assignments. Prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, and follow the list accordingly.

Essential Time Management Skills for Nurses

Prioritizing nursing tasks and time management skills are not learned overnight. It takes time to build these skills and learn the tips and tricks that work best for you. Consider these time management skills for nurses to help you build your nursing skill set.

Batch Tasks

Nurses must be wise about when and how they complete certain tasks. Batch tasking is a time management method that organizes similar tasks together, allowing you to complete them at once without needing to mentally switch between different types of tasks. For example, you can group small tasks that don’t take long to complete together, or group administrative tasks that you plan to complete during a slow hour.

Cluster Care

Similar to batch tasking, cluster care is a time management method nurses use to efficiently care for patients. Instead of hopping from room to room, administering medication to one patient and checking the vitals of another, nurses complete all these tasks in one room visit before moving on to do the same for the next patient.

This is an effective time management technique that saves nurses’ time and minimizes the amount of time a patient is disturbed. A recent study found that cluster care can increase patients’ satisfaction with nursing care.

Perform Hourly Rounds

Hourly rounds are one of the techniques nurses use to provide routine care to patients and improve their comfort levels. It helps nurses save time by addressing patients’ needs before they call for assistance, which can easily become overwhelming when multiple patients need you.

It can also improve patient safety because nurses preemptively address patients’ needs, so they don’t feel the need to get up on their own and potentially fall and injure themselves.

Learn to Delegate and Ask for Help

Nursing is a team-based sport. While you will need to take the initiative and complete tasks independently, you must also be able to work collaboratively as a team to deliver patient care. Knowing when to delegate tasks and ask for assistance will help you save time, lighten the burden, and ensure patients receive high-quality care.

Time Management Strategies for Nursing Students

Many of the techniques that help nurses manage their time can be used by nursing students. Prioritizing tasks and knowing when to ask for help are critical to succeeding in nursing school. Similarly, many of these techniques for time management in nursing school can be applied to your future career.

Create a Schedule and Stick to It

First, students should keep a calendar or planner to track assignments, due dates, exam dates, classes, clinical placements, and personal responsibilities. Schedule everything, including study sessions and free time, and adhere to the plan as best you can. Also, schedule breaks. They can easily be pushed aside, but if you don’t take time to relax and decompress, you make yourself prone to burnout.

Time Blocking

Time blocking can be very helpful for nursing students who are busy with coursework, labs, and clinicals. To time block, dedicate specific blocks of time in your schedule to a single task. You can use this time for a study session, cleaning the house, meal prepping, or any other task.

Treat these blocks of time as appointments that can’t be missed. This will help prevent procrastination and enable you to allocate your time more effectively.

Try the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that can be used for study sessions, completing coursework, or household tasks. If you have difficulty focusing or find that long study sessions don’t work for you, this technique might be helpful.

Start by setting a time limit to work on a task, such as 25 minutes. Spend the next 25 minutes focusing on the task. When the time is up, take a five- to 10-minute break. After your break, return to the task for another 25 minutes, repeating this pattern four more times, then take a 20- to 30-minute break.

Plan Your Meals

When you have a busy day of class and clinicals, it can be hard to find time to cook a meal. By planning your meals and prepping beforehand, you can save yourself a considerable amount of time, so you have more opportunities to relax, study, or complete assignments.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

When learning time management in nursing skills, it’s easy to fall into a few traps. For example, it might seem like the goal of time management is to complete tasks quickly, but speeding through tasks means they were likely completed with little care or attention to detail.

Time management requires you to pay close attention to how long it takes you to complete tasks, be realistic about the time you have available, and set achievable goals. As you build these skills, keep the following in mind to avoid common time management pitfalls:

• Manage expectations: It’s easy to underestimate your time and overcommit. Be realistic about what you can do in a day. When you set expectations too high, you may feel defeated, unable to see all you have actually accomplished.
• Avoid multitasking: While tempting, multitasking does not save you time. You are dividing your attention between two tasks, unable to give each the full attention it deserves to be completed correctly. It can lead to mistakes or sloppy work.
• Remain flexible: You never know when you’ll hit a roadblock, a change in plans, or be affected by outside circumstances. Remember to be flexible and pivot when needed.

Take the First Step Toward Becoming a Nurse Today

You will start building time management skills in nursing school. At Mount Saint Vincent, our ABSN students receive a comprehensive nursing education that prepares them to pass the NCLEX-RN, so they can go on to become skilled nurses.

From time management to delivering safe patient care, students learn the skills they need for success in healthcare under the guidance of our dedicated faculty. With small class sizes, each student will be supported throughout their educational journey, from the application process to graduation.

If you have a non-nursing bachelor’s degree, you might meet the requirements for the ABSN program and earn a BS in nursing in as few as 16 months. Contact an admission counselor today to learn more.