Do the Easy not the Hard

Building Non Negotiable Easies into your routines

One of the most effective habits you can have is ‘do the easy not hard’ approach to managing your care service. This is a relatively simple but effective tool once mastered.

Let’s use the example of care plan audits to take you through the principle.

You've had an audit that identified that some of the care files were not up to date, they didn't have appropriate risk assessments and reviews were out of date. So, you set yourself an action plan and decide that as you have 60 residents and therefor 60 care fires you will need to do 20 a month to get through all 60 in the three month time frame you've been given.

This basically means five a week, one per day – easy - you feel ready to start the next week.

You come into work at the start of the week and Monday turns into Manic Monday and before you know where you are its 4:30 and there is absolutely no time to do an audit – you’ll do one tomorrow.

Tuesday starts but you have a poorly resident and by the time you have helped your staff, liaised with the GP, arranged the hospital transfer and supported the family it's 5:00 o'clock and you're ready to go home – you’ll do one tomorrow.

Now it is the middle of the week and Wednesday is meetings day, so before you know where you are at 3:00 o'clock and you haven’t got time to do three audits to play catch up so you'll do it tomorrow.

Now it's Thursday and you got a new admission and they were expected to arrive at a certain time but it was a delayed discharge and when they did come they didn't have the medicines with them and they were more poorly than you , so you have to get the GP to see them and the family needed your support as they were really unsettled and the staff are quite concerned and before you know where you are it's time to go home and you really, really, don't feel like doing any file audits now.

OK, you think, you haven't done any so far this week, but you have nothing scheduled for tomorrow.

Friday comes and you have some staffing issues and you now going to have to redo the rota for the weekend and you're going to have to deal with a particular issue that has been raised from the night before and you absolutely don’t have either the time or to be truthful the energy to start looking a care files and indeed it's not your priority today.

So now there are 5 care file audits that you haven't done but it's the weekend and you have a regroup and next week you'll get back on top.

It's a new week and you are ready, but you come into work on Monday and it’s another manic Monday and you don't get a chance. Tuesday there's a new admission and by the time you sort everything out it's too late. Wednesday you've got even more meetings because you've got an area meeting, or you've got a meeting with the social worker that's turned up unexpectedly. Thursday you have a poorly resident and you need to support the team and relatives. Friday, wow another busy week, but now you have 10 care file audits you planned to complete not yet started.

you can see how the easy of completing one care file audit that would probably take 20 minutes now feels really hard as you have 10 to do.

Time to implement what I call the Non Negotiable Easies process

Step One????????????Identify

The first step of non-negotiable easies is to decide what your easies are. I've given the example of care files but it could be anything.

It could be medicine checks, staff supervisions, HR file audits or sending memos to staff to update the training matrix, it might be that you need to review and sign off on your maintenance checks.

Whatever you would class as your easies, those tasks that you know you need to keep on top of which turn from easy to hard when you get behind.

Step Two????????????Habit

Add your easies to your existing routine. There is a lot of research that suggests that if you're picking up a new habit, in this case doing a new easy which could be classed as a new habit, then piggybacking it onto an existing habit that you already have makes it far more likely that you'll stick to it.

Start by reviewing the personal routines you have during your daily work schedule.

It might be that you go round your service first thing in the morning and check that everything's OK before you go back into your office, you could pick up a care fire and audit it as part of your walk around.

Maybe you go around at lunchtime and help as part of protected mealtimes, you could do an audit straight after.

You might do a walk-round at the end of the day before you go where you add and audit to that habit.

The trick is to pick something that you do every day and add your Easy to that existing habit.

Step Three?????????Benefits

If there is a way to reduce stress then I am all for that and the benefits of having these non-negotiable Easy’s, which is anything that you need to do or oversee regularly is that you feel more organised and less likely to have pressure points created by stacked up tasks still to be completed.

Doing regular tasks such as audits or checks also shows your staff that you are committed to quality outputs which in turn raises their commitment.

You will feel less overwhelmed and way more in control if you're ticking off tasks’ day by day, building momentum.

So in our example, think how you would feel at the end of the week when you had checked five care files and identified what needs addressing and then at the end of two weeks when you had 10 care files audited and at the end of a month 20 care files audited.

If you are still to set your New Year resolutions or goals try implementing some non-negotiable easies and add them to the routines you already have.