Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Patrina Pellett. She is the MSL excellence lead at MSL Mastery, and we talk about time audits and how it can be your secret weapon for time management success. So great episode. Patrina's awesome. As you know, she's brilliant. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn where we have a lot of free content and announcements. Definitely check us out, connect with us, follow, and share this if you get value from this episode.
Thank you as always for all your support. Welcome to MSL Talk with Tom Caravela, a podcast specifically designed for MSLs and all things field medical. Patrina, welcome back to the MSL podcast. Let's go. You excited? I'm I'm ready. I this is a topic that I could talk to or talk about forever. Tom said, though, that I have to be mindful of the time. You guys he was just lecturing me right before this. So Seriously, you have to control yourself. It's it's it's interesting, guys.
We're gonna talk about time management, but Patrina is gonna show you how much time she can actually spend talking about time management. Yeah. So this is gonna be an interesting kind of, you know It's a example of what not to do. But before we get to that, very special announcement. So this episode is sponsored by MSL Mastery. For more information, go to MSL Mastery dot com.
As you guys know, or a lot of you guys might know that we have a course called Aspire MSL, which is to help aspiring MSLs land their first industry position. However, we have some exciting new things that have just come out that are a part of MSL Mastery, and I'm gonna have Patrina tell you what they are. Tom, Patrina and I are so excited to launch our newest course called Presentation Mastery for Pharma and Biotech. This is everything you need to know to crush your presentations.
I'm talking any kind of presentation as well from interviewing for your next job, to presenting your team's value to senior leadership, to meeting with your KOLs in the field. It is three comprehensive modules that are amazing. So we have that available to you as an online course. And, also, Patrina and I are doing live trainings for this too. So contact us to learn more. We can customize to your needs. And Tom said he might even want to come along. Right, Tom? I'll try not to mess anything up.
But if you want me to come out and go on the roadshow, I'll come. Yep. So like Tom said, go to MSLMastery.com. You can also reach out to us on LinkedIn. We are so excited about the impact that this is gonna have on transforming people's presentation skills. Yep. It's amazing. You guys are amazing. So, guys, thank you for all of your support, and we definitely are excited about this stuff.
So we're gonna jump into our topic today, which is about, it's not just about time management, but it's a very specific strategy for time management. And we're gonna talk about doing a time audit. Before we get to that, Patrina, talk to us about some of the challenges that people in medical affairs are facing with their schedules. I mean, it's overload. Right? Everybody has back-to-back meetings. People are exhausted, but they don't have any time.
They're not feeling like they're working on their impactful work or their needle movers. Tom, what would you add? Well, I mean, I think that a lot of what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing out there is the constantly feeling exhausted and feeling like you're not in control. So the idea is, like, how do you get control? How do you take control back? So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you because I know you're a time management fanatic.
Like, guys, you have to see Patrina, like, her the way like, she's, like, a mad scientist the way she organizes her calendar. What Tom means what he means, you guys, is that I completely overwhelmed him one time. Oh my god. When I showed it. No. She showed it to me. I'm like, I I don't know where to look. I just you just gave me a headache, and now I feel like I am terrible. I'm a terrible person. But then I got on the show, you guys, so he must have been impressed. Well, listen.
We invited you here. But talk to us about this time audit thing. Like, what is it? How does it work, and how do we how do people incorporate this in the context of their, like, time management planning? Yeah. It's a really good question, and I'll step back a little bit to discuss what happened to me. I'm sure it's a story that can resonate with or will resonate with a lot of people. I was doing medical affairs consulting work, and it was a lot.
It was really, really overwhelming, which is I had so many projects and so many clients and so much coming at me, I really couldn't I felt like I couldn't handle it. I noticed what was happening. So I was going to bed at 7 p.m., and then I was spending the whole weekend sleeping. And I was like, wow. This is not the life I want to live. This is something that has got to change, and that's when I really started to investigate and learn about time management.
And I have done a lot of experimentation. I think if there's one thing that you take away from today's episode, it should be that you have to figure out what works for you, and that will also change with the seasons as well. You change all the time, so your time management approaches and the techniques you use are going to change as well. And now Tom is probably like, answer my original question, Patrina. He's like, nope.
But a time audit is a really good place to start, especially for people that are like, wow. My schedule is out of control. I'm so overwhelmed right now. In a nutshell, it helps you understand exactly where your time is going. I would say if you are more advanced in your time management journey, you should absolutely do time audits periodically to make sure you're on track and spending your time the way you want to spend it. Was that a good definition, Tom, or do you want to add anything to that?
No. I think that's a very good definition, and I think that the reason this is such a great tactic is because, for me, it's strategy is because you become very surprised when you do this. You learn so much about where you're spending your time and where you're wasting your time. And that's the key. The key is that if you take this as a very systematic process of analysis. And when you do it, you learn so much. And therefore, once you learn, then you can take action.
So it's very hard to just say, oh, you know what? I need to do a better job with time management if you don't do an analysis first. So do you agree that when someone wants to take control of their calendar, the time audit would be the best place to start? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And it's a really easy thing to implement, so it's baby steps. A lot of times people, when they want to implement a new habit, they go in really hard and try to change too many things.
So definitely think about small steps you could take towards developing your time management system. And the time audit is absolutely a really great easy way to start. It doesn't take very much time. And like Tom said, you will probably get your mind blown at least in one way by what you see in your time audit, because I bet you, you're not spending your time exactly how you think you are. And so it's really go ahead. Go ahead. Let's talk about that. Because I, like, I wanna get it.
That's where I wanna go. I wanna talk about that piece. Like, what are the time-wasting activities that are most common that might either surprise people or they might be aware of, and they just can't control it. But what are some of just list some of the things that people find when they do a time audit? For me, and this will probably sound kind of stupid, but I literally didn't have a good sense of how much time basic activities took.
So, for example, I would be scheduling out my day, or I would have calls all day, and then I would feel really stressed because I didn't have enough time to take a shower. And so a big learning for me was that I needed a minimum 30 minutes to take a shower. So you will see as you do this that humans are really bad at estimating how long it takes to do something. So you'll see that that activity you thought was going to take you 30 minutes took you two hours.
And so I think one big insight you'll have is that you basically suck at estimating how long something will take. But back to Tom's original question about the time wasters, I mean, these are the ones we all struggle with. It's gonna be scrolling mindlessly on social media. It's also going to be, which I think people are less aware of, and I would love to know what you think of this, Tom, how much time email takes. Email is the oh, did you see his face, you guys?
If you're not if you're listening, not watching, you should go on YouTube and watch to see his face. Go ahead. Go ahead, Cher. Seriously, it's my Achilles' heel. Like, that's the biggest issue for me. And it's like it's almost an addiction where I kinda feel like I need, well, I think when you're an entrepreneur, when you're in business or in, I don't know, maybe it's any profession. It's almost like the email is like the ring or the ding of the cash register.
It's like, you know, like, when you used to go to a mom and pop, like, years ago when they had, like, you know, a corner store. And you would walk into the corner store, and there would be, like, a bell. Like, the door would make a noise, and you would be like, that's the same thing as email. It's like there's a new customer. There's a new added to me. Yeah. Someone needs me. There's business to be had.
And that running to email without any discipline, without any time constraint saying, I only check email these times during the day. If you just check it randomly throughout the day, you're now a slave to email. There's a really great saying about this as well that you are then running on somebody else's agenda, not yours, because you're going to be distracted by the things that are in your email. Mhmm. And, oh, man.
I'm sure we've all done that where we're like, I'm just gonna check my email really fast, and then, like, two hours later, we're still in there. It's yeah. That's oh, yeah. Tom, we should do an episode soon on email management and tips for that. Email mastery, how to control your inbox. My gosh. Yeah. What else? Terrible. What else? Let's see. I'm like, oh, admin tasks. I think people underestimate how long that will take, so filling out your expense reports.
Another one that I think is totally underestimated is when you are unorganized, how much time you waste looking for things? I have a hack on this around how to stay organized because it is such a time suck. And I think a lot of people's brains work like mine, or maybe they don't. But when I'm looking for something and I can't find it, my brain gets freaking obsessed. Like, it will not let go of that item, and then I waste even more time on it. What else, Tom?
Any any ones you wanna bring up that I'm forgetting? Well, I think that in this day and age, social media and, like, Internet browsing and Amazon Prime and all of those, those are to me, it's like you have the email that's, like, throwing you into something, and then there's this social thing that's drawing you into other things. So I think that there's a lot of discipline and control that needs to happen just by turning your phone off, you're putting your phone away. Because let's face it.
That's that's what's, you know, text, social media, and browsing, and just being a slave to your phone is as bad as email. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. A lot of people. Yeah. Yep. Turn those notifications off, folks. Turn the dings off, man. Yeah. Turn the notifications off. Turn the phone off. Absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, we can there's a lot of distractions, I think, that we can get a we can go over, but I think that those are the ones that I feel most people are struggling with nowadays when it comes to trying to do this stuff. So if you can be mind you're gonna see it, though, when you do the audit. You'll see if you really pay attention. And the one thing about doing a an a time audit is you have to be honest. You can't just say, oh, well, that doesn't count. Yeah. No. Well, you know, I can't.
It was a call from my son. It was a call from my daughter. It was like, it still counts. Like, it's not it's a part of life, right? Yeah. So, yeah. Who do you who would you say can benefit the most from doing this? Is it like is this just for executives? Is this for anyone? Like, who should do this? Everyone. 100%. You want to be the master of your calendar, not have your calendar mastering you. And we're all really busy.
It doesn't matter if we're new, we're trying to transition and find a new job in medical affairs, or we're a senior leader and we have back-to-back meetings all day. You will have to make strategic choices about how you spend your time. The time audit allows you to do what you said, Tom, get data on that. And then with this data, you can make more informed decisions and make sure you are actually spending your time the way you want to.
So before we get into how, let's talk a little bit about what do you see as, like, the biggest challenges people face when they're doing this for the first time? They go too big. It's always, oh, I have to do everything. You might want to go back, look in your calendar in the past, and try to categorize everything and update it that way.
You might make too many categories, so you'll see soon what we're gonna recommend is that you categorize by major focus areas in your life and then assign that category to what you're doing. Sometimes people will come in hot with, like, 20 categories. It's too hard to keep track of. I think that's a really big challenge. Also, especially when it comes to the time audit, a lot of people think you need to track every single minute of the day, and that's just not feasible.
For me, personally, I track in half-hour increments. Sometimes 40- or 15-minute increments if I'm feeling that that's going to help me, but even doing it on an hourly basis. So tracking what you're doing for every hour of the waking day is not that bad, especially if you use the larger time chunks. Tom, what else? Oh, I think the other one. What other we you brought up was it doesn't feel good.
You might get kind of a slap in the face on how much time you're wasting on social media or Netflix or something, so you might want to be prepared that it doesn't feel good. Sorry. I interrupted you. No. So I'm— we're getting in— you're and I'm— we're at that point where you're getting into the nuts and bolts on how to do this. So what you're saying is in order to do a time audit, what you have to prepare for is you have to say, okay.
I'm gonna start on Monday, and I'm gonna take a— do you do this over, like, the course of a week and then document or track and audit all of the activities that you do throughout the week? Do— is it one day? So talk about how to accurately track time during the audit process without overwhelming the person during that day. Yep. So there are a lot of different ways you can do it. I'm gonna discuss in detail how to do that with color coding your calendar.
But keep in mind, if that doesn't work for you, you can also use different apps for it. So there are things like RescueTime that have been built out specifically for this purpose. That's how important it is, guys. People are selling apps on it. So let me start from the beginning. You want me to just dive in on how to do this? Yeah. Okay. Like, we're at that point. Like, how do you do this? What I do is create categories for the main things that I'm focused on in my life.
So these are my goal categories. I'm currently tracking five different goals. You can have more goal categories or fewer goal categories. I'm gonna tell you what I specifically do. So I have my work. I have finding joy, my health, personal development. Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm blanking. No. I said health already. There's five, guys. I forget what it is right now. But what I do is use the color coding functionality on Google Calendar, and this is also available in Outlook.
Everything that's on my calendar, I assign it to one of those categories. I personally do it right when the meeting lands on my calendar or right when I place the time block. So, for example, I'm gonna write an article later this afternoon. My work color is yellow. So as soon as I put that category or that time block on my calendar, I immediately categorize it yellow.
So my first piece of advice would be once you define your categories, and I wanna go into some other ideas for you on those, immediately, when the thing hits your calendar, color code it right away. That makes it less overwhelming when you have to go and then start doing it all at once. Tom, does that make sense? Get it when it's the meeting hits the books, give it a color. You're saying do this as you go? Exactly. You don't have to, but I think that's gonna be less overwhelming.
Yep. Okay. So you so just to kinda unpack what you just said. So you are being mindful. Let's just say you start out on Monday. You're being mindful of the time blocks that are being put into your calendar. You color code it. I don't know if everybody's gonna color code it. That might just drive me crazy, but you're I love it. You're categorizing it. You're color coding it, and you are holding yourself accountable in time blocks for what it is that you're spending time on.
So what about do you incorporate, like, break time and Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Yep. So talk about that. Break is color for me, break is in my health category. So I would color I schedule in my breaks. I schedule in my lunches as well, and I call those or I make those purple. K. Got it. So, yeah, sorry. I feel like there's a follow-up question here. No. No. No. No. Go for it. So it's very simple, you guys. Think about the categories you want to track in your life.
You can make these higher level like I do on general categories. If you read something like "Design Your Life" or from other personal development people, they often recommend six categories. Tom, how many categories do you have that you're tracking against? Five. Five. So you have five as well. What are they? Just so people get an idea. I don't know. I go by yours. I use the same one of yours. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So No. Go ahead. Don't overthink it, guys. Just pick what you want to focus on.
And then another thing you can do—and I have a blog post on this—you can make it very specific to your work life. So I know some people don't like to mix their work calendars with their personal calendars. So what you can do is have color categories related specifically to your work life.
What I've done in the past, which I found really helpful, and it's a very strategic way to use the color coding is when you have, let's say, a KOL meeting or a client-facing or customer-facing meeting, you make that a certain color. So then when you look at your calendar, you're like, oh, that's an important meeting. Then what I would do is—so my important meeting color was yellow, and then I would need to prep for that meeting. I would put the prep time on my calendar and categorize that green.
And so then that's what I mean by being strategic about how you use the color coding. You train your brain to understand what you need to prepare for or not. Do you see where I'm going with this? Yep. Yeah. You also said to me, if I'm not mistaken, that you when you do this, you create your ideal week, which is so the time audit almost sounds like, paying attention to, and I'm analyzing where I'm spending my time.
But then you talk to me about creating your ideal week, which then means assigning or recreating or establishing, whether it's in your imagination or whether you hold yourself accountable to it, to what the ideal week might look like. Is that am I Yep. Saying that right? Yep. That's step 2. Let me tell one more story about the color, color coding. It is an incredibly easy way to see where you spend your time. You can just pull up the week view of your calendar.
And if it's all internal meeting color, you can say, wow. I spent all this time on these internal meetings and didn't work on my strategic projects. Or it could be, wow. I didn't spend any time with my family. I didn't do any exercise either. I have been working the whole time. So the colors help you quickly visualize where you're spending your time. So that's really the time audit piece. And I think I told Tom this story before.
The reason I started doing it initially was not because I wanted to know where I was spending my time. It was because I was pissed off about Mhmm. I my boss's boss had complained that the people on my team were not focusing on the right things, and we, at that particular time, had an incredible amount of unproductive internal meetings. So it was I was mad. I was like, how can he say this? Like, we are forced to go to all these meetings.
So what I did is started color coding it, and then I showed my boss. I was like, well, look at this. And it just clicked for her instantly. She saw this visualization of my workweek, and she was like, wow. Yeah. That is too many internal meetings. So that's what I mean by it being a really easy way to visualize how you spend your time. And in some premium products, I had this when my company was using the premium version of Gmail.
It even creates a little graph for you and shows you where you're spending your time and then gives recommendations as well. So I think that's what I really love about the color coding. It's a strategic thing. It tells me what I need to prepare for so that I come to all my meetings prepared. But also gives me this bird's-eye-level view of where I'm actually spending my time and if those are aligned to what I want to spend my time on. And this is a good segue over to the ideal week.
So your ideal week is exactly what it sounds like, how you would be spending your time in an ideal situation. I have a really great blog post on this for MSLs specifically. You want to break down all of your key tasks. So you'll have your goals, break those down into your key tasks, and then think about how much time you need to be spending on each one so that you can achieve that higher-level goal. The ideal week is laying that out.
So if you have all of your goals and all of the breakdown of your tasks and how much time each one takes on a calendar and you can say, in an ideal world, if everything was perfect, I would be spending four hours, five hours on my KOL follow-up. I would be spending eight hours in meetings. So this is where Tom was going with the ideal week. So you'll have your time audit, and you say, this is what's actually happening in reality. Here's what I want to be.
So your ideal week helps you understand what you're trying to achieve and also how far off you are. So that's a really big benefit in addition to finding the time wasters. Tom, is that what you were hoping for? Yeah. Yeah. And I want to kind of go back to you. I didn't answer your question. You asked a question, and I jokingly just said, yeah. I have five categories.
My categories may be different from your categories, but I'm going to share how I look at the time blocks and how I've done audits in the past. So the five categories are critical, strategic. That's one category. So, like, the critical tasks, strategic tasks are like there was a post I did recently, and how important it is to play chess and not just checkers. I think what happens is we wind up going through our day just playing checkers, and we never play chess. We never strategize.
We don't take enough time to put that goal-related work in place. So the very first category should be that strategic critical task. The high-level thinking. Yeah. High-impact one. Yep. Yep. The second category is meetings. Now we all have meetings, so you have to categorize it. You have to account for meetings, whether it's internal or external. The third category is admin tasks. We all have admin tasks that we have to do, each of us, so we have to be mindful of that.
And then there's personal time, which would be, you know, any type of breaks or self-care or whatever, even exercise. Like, I exercise the same time every day, so it's easy for me, but some people don't, and some people have to, like, make time. And then there's time wasters. There's distractions. So it's important. That fifth category is super important. Be mindful of the unnecessary, the distractions, the time wasters.
So as you go through this, when we talk about the audit, they're like, hold yourself accountable for creating your own categories so that you know what to audit, how to audit, how to categorize it. And then when you set up your schedule, like you said, the ideal week, then you have, like, this format of how to do it. I love that. And I think for the listeners, this is a really great example of how you pick your categories. Right? This is your life.
You're living the life you want to, and you have the chance to design it that way. So I love what Tom said about how he thinks about it in this kind of strategy-critical, strategic, time-wasting method. I was just when he was saying that, I was thinking, maybe I need another category on mine so I can start tracking that. Think about what you want to achieve in your work life or just in your life in general, and then build your categories around that.
I know for a long time when I talked about that story that I started with where I was overwhelmed and really exhausted, I was never taking any breaks. So I made a very specific category for breaks because I was like, my brain is dying here. I felt like I had a heavy blanket on my head all the time. And so the point being, pick what you want to focus on. And the great thing about categorizing is that you can change it later if you don't like it. It's not set in stone. Absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, this is something that you create. So, so what happens after completing a time audit, what would be the best, like, next steps for improving how one manages their time? So you do the audit. You talked about the ideal week, but what happens next? It would be getting honest and real about what you're seeing on there. As we mentioned in the beginning, it might not be fun what you see, and it might not feel very good.
Then start taking the appropriate actions to get closer to your ideal week. And, oftentimes, what this means is setting boundaries and learning how to say no. I know a lot of us really want to be involved in everything and do a lot, but it's just not possible. There's way more than we could way more tasks and projects and activities out there than we could ever actually accomplish.
So we'll need you need to learn how to set boundaries around what's really critical and what you value the most and learn how to say no to them. What would you add to this, Tom? Well, I, again, we have to hold ourselves accountable. Ultimately, we're the ones that get off track. We're the ones that's like, I know for me, personally, whenever I do stuff like this, it's like anything else. It's like you go through the exercise, you go through the work, and you are good at it for a time.
And then all hell breaks loose because there's an emergency. There's a big issue. There's something that comes along. Like, that's part of being a busy professional is that you're gonna get dragged into other things. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't be reactive to situations that then become important. Like, your boss needs your, you know, your help on something or there's a deadline that all of a sudden you have to do something. I mean, these things happen.
But what often what I see is that the discipline fades. This is a disciplinary action. And when the discipline fades and you go back to bad habits, then this thing goes kinda out the window, and then it's like, oh, yeah. I probably have to do this again. That's why I definitely recommend if you don't use color coding, use something and just be mindful of your time all the time. Because as Tom mentioned, you're gonna start out strong, and then it's gonna fade.
I actually had this for myself personally. I noticed a lot of really bad habits on my phone again, like the constant checking or mindless scrolling, not getting as much done. And it made me realize, oh, I need a reset, and that made me pause and reassess how I want to spend my time and my energy, and so the same goes for the time audit. Doing it consistently will help you keep disciplined and stay focused on your goals.
And let's talk about when you complete a time audit and it's transformed the way busy professionals manage their calendar, what can they expect from there? What can they expect? They'll feel awesome? No. It's like, I mean, let's talk about this transformation. Let's give people the excitement of what it is. Yeah. Absolutely. They have to look forward to. Is it work-life balance? Is it that.
It can be let's say, you know, you have those really strategic, they are the important but not urgent categories that you always skip. It's the stuff that you know you need to do but gets pushed on the back burner, and it tends to be on your to-do list forever, and you never do it. When you start implementing the time audit and start being more mindful about your time, you start to get those things done.
And when you start to get your needle movers, your important work done, you show more value, and you feel really good. Tom, what would you add to that? Well, you just hit the nail on the head. There's that sense of accomplishment when people become really good. And I'll tell you, just I'll speak for myself. When I am really good at this, when I'm really locked in at this, at the end of the day, I'm at peace.
I feel like, okay, I left everything on the field, and now I get to enjoy my evening or my weekend or whatever. But if I feel like I missed a bunch of critical tasks, like you said, those needle movers, if I miss some of those or if I didn't get to them or if I was chasing these other things and they're still sitting there, I'm not at peace. They're here. Right? You feel it. Your brain knows. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I think, ultimately, I think one of the greatest benefits.
It's not just about production and productivity and creating. It's also about finding peace. Yeah. I totally agree. I think it's also about learning to trust yourself and knowing that you have a system in place that gets stuff done, that you work on the things that matter, and you know you're going to get them done. And I think that's really powerful.
All of this stuff that we're doing, all of the work and the impact we're trying to have really starts here, right, and in your mind and how you trust yourself and how you approach it. I think the time audit and a time management system in general helps you trust yourself and helps you believe in yourself and shows you that you can do these really hard things and really have a huge impact. I feel like I'm closing. I'm, like, closing this podcast out right now. Well, close it, sister. Listen.
Let's be fair. We're talking, this is a time management episode, and we're overtime. So own up. Over time. Well, we like to do these for 30 minutes, and it's been about 35. So, hey, it's an important topic. We had a lot to cover. I probably talk too much, which sometimes happens. But, anyway, close it out, Patrina. Final words? Final advice? Yes. We would love to know more about your distractors and your experience with the time audit.
If you don't follow MSL Mastery on LinkedIn, follow us there. Comment on the page. Additionally, we created a time management, or sorry, time audit for medical affairs worksheet that you can download on the MSL Mastery blog. It goes through a lot of the steps that we mentioned today from setting your categories, adding colors if you want, that's optional, and then going through this audit process and then making an action plan for what you're going to change next. That's a really cool tool.
You should check that out and download it on the MSL Mastery blog. And, Tom, what are your final words? My final words are, guys, I give Patrina a hard time, and I bust her chops, and I tease her. But I love it. That's why he does it. But here's the thing. She's freaking brilliant, and so is Sarah. So, like, I am just trying to keep up with the two of them, and it's very hard to do. But I highly recommend you follow these guys, and I'm learning so much just from being around them.
So, Patrina, thank you for all you do, and thank you for being here. And thank you guys for all your support. Thank you for coming to this podcast and for sharing the podcast, and I hope that your time, your valuable time is now gonna be categorized in nice, beautiful color coding. Yeah. Send me your colors. I'd love to see them. Like, I love it. And this is super helpful. So thank you guys. As always, appreciate you, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you've enjoyed it, please subscribe so that you don't miss episodes in the future, and feel free to leave a rating or a review or a comment. Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.