The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Top productivity hacks for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Episode: 45: Productivity hacks for mental health professionals Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. With so many pressing demands coming from different directions it can be hard to know where to start in getting ourselves organized and getting things done. Here’s my top ideas for work-based productivity hacks. I hope you find them useful. What are your top tips for helping you get stuff done? Let me know in the comments. The Highlights: • 00:29: Welcome, and thanks for your enthusiasm about the new book. • 02:01: Competition time! • 03:26: Leaving me audio testimonials • 04:33: The plates I spin• 05:41: How to keep plates spinning and get stuff done at work! My top productivity hacks to get stuff done! • 06:04: Background to a CAPA service• 09:00: Tip 1! • 14:19: Chippy tea • 18:38: Balancing the needs of productivity and accomplishment versus team restrictions• 19:56: Avalon • 21:49: Top tip 2 • 24:00: Transparency about your behind-the-scenes activities• 26:14: Top tip 3• 26:51: Client confidentiality • 27:58: Top tip 4 • 28:43: Top tip 5 • 30:19: Come and chat with me in the free Facebook group• 30:49: Compassionate Q&A on 31/10/2022 at 7:30pm • 31:22: Note about making live comments on twitter• 32:09: Getting the support you need and deserve with ‘Marianne Mondays!’• 33:08: Come and connect with me and thanksLinks: Grab your copy of the new book: The Aspiring Psychologist Collective: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97  Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the upcoming Aspiring Psychologist Book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrentTo check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0 To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunityLike, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes. If you'd like to learn how to record and submit your own audio testimonial to be included in future shows head to:

Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field,

the principles can work for you. There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. episode. With Dr. Marianne Trent Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast.

I am Dr. Marianne Trent, clinical psychologist, and it's lovely to have you here listening. Thank you so much to everybody who's been so welcoming and enthusiastic and encouraging about the new book that was published last week, The Aspiring Psychologist Collective. It's really lovely to see so many of you excited to get your hands on it and to read it. So I do hope that you're finding that useful if you've got your copy already. If you haven't, there is always time, always time, but why not dive in and do that now? You can grab that on Amazon and it's available in paperback, ebook or hardback. The hardback is in full colour, which is why the price is a little bit steeper than might be ideal. I thought it would be nice to put together a hardback colour

option because they don't let you do a paperback black and white and a paperback colour. But I didn't quite realise how expensive it would be to make it colour. So it is a thing of beauty. You can also get colour in the e-book, but the hardback is in glorious Technicolour. It is a thing of beauty so um if your department has some spare cash or um you know you've got someone who wants to spend a little bit of money on you for christmas then the hardback is lovely um but the content is all the same apart from the color so take your pick see what works best for you paperback ebook or hardback. If you would like to enter into a competition to win a one-to-one psychology coaching session with me, you absolutely can do by buying a copy of either

the Clinical Psychologist Collective book between the 1st of September 2022 and Halloween the 31st of October 2022 and then sending me a unique proof of purchase to book at goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk and the details for that email address in case you missed it are in the show notes but it's book at goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk and you can also score some bonus point entries as well if you did buy it on amazon then you can leave me a verified purchase review and then send me proof of that once it's done and you don't you could have bought the clin psych or the aspiring psychologist collective book at any time but by doing the review for me within this period means that you can enter the contest if you let me know

between that bracket of the 1st of September and the 31st of October. And you can also score some bonus entries by leaving the audio testimonials about either the Clinical Psychologist Collective book or the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book. or if you bought them both, you could do both. That would be marvellous. And you could get two bonus entries. It is super simple to leave me audio testimonials. If you go to my website, www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk forward slash podcast, you just click on a link which opens a wonderful site called Bonjouro and it literally is just point and click. You know, you just pop your name in, pop your webcam on and go for it. But you can cover your webcam if you don't want it to be a video testimonial. If you're just happy for it to be audio, then do that.

But you need to do that and you need to get it done before the 31st of October because that is when the contest ends and you could use this session if you win which will take place on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of November to think about your doctorate in clinical psychology application form or another professional psychology application form or if you're qualified or not yet ready to apply, we could use that for thinking about just coaching and ways to help you be your optimal best self. So dive in and, yeah, take advantage and enter the competition. Right. So as you may have noticed, I do have lots of plates spinning. So for those of you who followed me on the podcast for a while, you might well know that I am a mummy. I'm a mummy to two young children. I'm also a clinician still.

So I do still see people for one to one trauma therapy usually, but also do anxiety, depression and grief too. So I do that. But I also support aspiring psychologists, you lovely folk. And I also create books, don't I? And so, you know, people are like, Marianne, how do you get enough time in the day? How do you organise yourself to get everything done, to get everything sorted? And so I thought that would be a really useful conversation for us to have together today about ways we can organise ourselves or help support ourselves optimally to be our best, energetic, energised, productive selves so um I've no idea how long today's podcast episode is going to be I've got a vague idea of um the top tips that I'm going to go through written myself a list

um which I've left just out of my reach um so I'm going to grab my list hold the line caller seamless I'm back and I've got the list um so um one of my main strategies for organizing myself for kind of making sense of what might feel like organized chaos if it wasn't for this one super duper top tip um is that I used to work in a service which employed the choice and partnership approach also abbreviated often as CAPA and I know that still runs in certain children and young people's services which is which was the type of service that I was working in and in that service it worked wonderfully for us because we were all quite compliant with the different ways of working. But in case you haven't heard of a CAPA service, let me briefly go through the basic tenets for that. So depending

on how many hours a week you work, it is closely calculated for how many clinical face-to-face hours it is expected of you to be able to do to be, you know, working at your full capacity. And you pick up new clients at a set ratio depending on your hours. So when I first started with the team, I was full-time and that meant that I would, for three weeks out of four I would pick up a new client and it's always in the same slot so for me it was a Thursday at 2 p.m so for three out of the four and if it was five Thursdays in a month it was three out of five for three out of those four or five Thursdays I would pick up a new client. And that's not a client that I'm choosing to see. That was a client that following assessment, following the choice

appointment, which was an assessment, if they were deemed to need the service, then they were dropped in with the next available choice clinician. So that might have been me, but it could have been someone else in the team as well. So I always knew that I had to be having throughput, had to be not a long-term service, but people were always having a goals-based service. But what was really useful about this service was that all of the clinicians had job plans that were unique and bespoke to them. And those job plans helped us to make sure we were using the available rooms optimally as well. So as I reflect back on that now, there were certain times in certain clinics, certainly Thursday afternoons, I had set rooms. I always quite like the same room as well so they'd be kind to me give me the same room creature of habit where possible

and you know there were set clinics so I would always do choice assessments on a Wednesday morning so I would do in my job plan two choice appointments. So one was at 9.30 and one was at 11. And then I would use the afternoon of that time usually to write those reports. So they were all done and dusted within the same day. But that was all blocked in. Admin time for the choice appointments was in my job plan. So it wasn't like I was trying to magically create time for admin. It was there. Okay. And similarly, a Friday afternoon, for me, seeing clients on a Friday afternoon, where you might suddenly get a safeguarding issue at 4pm, and I finished at 4.30 because of my commute, that was not for me. So I made sure in my job plan that I had a clinic with rooms booked on a Friday morning, but on a Friday afternoon

that was administration for issues related to my clients. If I was writing letters or if there was any additional referrals that I needed to use to write for the choice appointments for the assessment. So I know it can be common in services where we're doing assessments that we just haven't been able to factor in the time to write reports. But if that's the case, you know, I think we're potentially setting ourselves up to fail and to be feeling quite overwhelmed and distressed and to feel like we're not managing, we're not coping, there's too much on our plate. So if you're regularly doing assessments or perhaps supporting qualified members of staff with assessments and then helping out with the assessment report writing. There needs to be

time in your diary where you're going to do that otherwise you're going to be constantly squeezing you know it might be squeezing your lunch time it might be squeezing your start times or your finish times to get more hours in the day and so really have a look at what jobs you're doing every week and similarly supervision should ideally be in your job plan and should be a consistent, repeatable endeavour. OK, so mine certainly is. And similarly, if you're doing any meetings that you have to go to, then that should be in your job plan. And does that happen? You know, if the meeting is not that not that productive not that energetic do you need to be there every time or could you job plan it that across the team you share the load so you might go every other week or one in four um or three and four and then you know the fourth one you use as time to to do that admin know, you're not asking for the moon on a stick. As they say,

you're just asking for enough time to be able to do your job well, safely, robustly, to be able to do what you need to do. So if you're learning a particular skill or approach and you need to do reading or you're doing research, could you look at trying to include that within your job plan so certainly when I was an aspiring psychologist and I would attend assistant psychologist meetings and I would also attend research meetings then they would have been job planned if I was using job plans at that time because those job plans you know ideally are being agreed by your supervisor and or manager. They're saying, yes, those are important issues for us. So we do see that that's really important.

And it, you know, I still use a job plan now. So I still have Monday. So I have Mondays and Fridays where I do largely admin. I do things like today's a Friday I'm doing a podcast and I do the editing around that and I might write for the media and I might create content on Mondays and Fridays for my aspiring psychologist membership and you know try to do my non-client stuff on those days but Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursday mornings I do do see clients. So I run clinics, I run three clinics, 9.15, 10.15 and 11.15. And that's, that's predictable and repeatable. And I always have time to do my notes in between those sessions, unless they're overly complicated. But then I make time to do that before I stop for lunch. So I don't want any leftover projects,

you know, I want to be able to stop for lunch. And I've always stopped for lunch in whatever service I've worked in. I believe I've been told that I have a very good impact on team lunching and sociability because I always stop. So people are like, oh, Marian Marianne's there I'll sit down with her you know and we'll eat our salads together um or in my most recent NHS service I was known for chippy Tuesday so every now and then I'd be like come on let's you know there's a great chippy nearby and on a Tuesday they do a great pie um chips and sauce deal. So I would go for chicken and mushroom pie, the most amazing chips and curry sauce, and it would be like 350. And so I'd like try and get people in advance to sign up for sitting down and having Chippy Tuesday with me. And it was just really, really good. And so, you know, my lunchtime, usually 1230 till 1 when I was in NHS services was happening

every day I was bringing my lunch with me you know I was accountable I was making that usually the evening before um so that it would nourish me for the day so I'm a salad eater generally I don't I don't eat chippy Tuesdays every Tuesday um but they were delicious and I was if I still worked there I would still be instigating Chippy Tuesday because the chips are incredible. You know, you're just a really good chippy. And if you're not listening to this in the UK and you're like, what is she saying? What is she saying? A chippy? What's a chippy? A chippy tea um so that's when i was in south wales uh my friends from um lancashire

introduced me to the term chippy tea chippy it's a fish and chip shop um in case you're not familiar with chippy tea um did you ever think that you'd hear me talk about chippy teas and chippies so much i didn't I didn't know that was going to be my plan for today. But yeah, it's important to stop. It's important to look after yourself and to give yourself that appropriate self-care. So you need to make sure you're job planning your lunch break, job planning your start and finish times, because that helps make sure that you're not overloaded. You know, if there's a massive waiting list, then you can absolutely be moved by that distress

and think about what clever ways you can work in as you and as part of the team to reduce that workload. But, you know, seeing a massive amount of face-to-face clients, and I absolutely appreciate that for many of you listening certainly if you're you're listening to this working in IACT services you might well not have this flexibility so I know certain people in certain services are seeing you know 70 80 90 percent face-to-face time but that is that is gonna be very difficult to achieve long term that's gonna lead to burnout and you might just need to look at where you can factor in some self-care around that and you need

to make sure you're having regular supervision and that you're able to talk through the impact of this level of clinical work so when I was employed in AA level, which in case you're not familiar with bandings, the NHS agenda for change bandings usually have numbers and sometimes letters to denote which level of pay you're on, which grade. So band seven is where you qualify usually when you qualify as a clinical psychologist and a counselling psychologist. And band 8A is usually a level above that. And so when I was recruited to band 8A, I was recruited to be able to do 50% face-to-face time. But when I started that role, I was told by the others in the team it's not really possible you can't really do it because you can't get the rooms and I was like I am job planning this I am doing this you want 50%

you're getting 50% and I went out across the trust I saw people in a library I saw people in a health center I saw people in a different psychiatric base so So I was like, Madam Peripatetic, I was everywhere. So when I first started that role, I was four days a week. And when I went back after my second baby, I was three days a week. But when I was four days a week, I was in four different locations, five different locations, actually, because there was no rooms available in my clinic base. And so on a Tuesday afternoon I would go in into the team sit in the agile office and do my admin it was job planned that I would do my admin so that I at least saw the team whereas when I went down to three days a week it just was all

that level of moving around was a bit less sustainable and so I was able to get some rooms job planned and booked in advance I would book them six months in advance on the clinical systems to make sure that I was going to be able to see those clients, support my clients, pick up new clients, and, you know, support the team and reduce the waiting list because that was really important to me. So sometimes you might well be working in a service where you are pioneering, you are wanting to do these things, but processes move slower. And maybe that might well be a conversation for another day, but it's one I'm passionate about. So let's pause here for a brief break and I'll be back along with one, two, three more strategies to help think about how to organize yourself and be just an all-around

superstar catch up with you very soon if you're looking to become a psychologist then let this be your guide filled with lessons and experience that will help you get qualified. So come and take a look. It's right here in this book. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. Hello, my name is Avalon and I'm an undergraduate psychology student. I recently finished a year-long placement as an AP in the NHS and I'm now one week into my final year. I recently finished a year-long placement as an AP in the NHS and I'm

now one week into my final year. I loved reading the Clinical Psychologist Collective and I couldn't have come across it at a better time. I was starting to panic a bit about my options after uni and reading that there are so many different paths that have ultimately led people to the clinical psychology doctorate was really reassuring. Hearing about people's amazing experiences and wide range of backgrounds has really encouraged me to follow what interests me and to make the most of the journey rather than seeing everything that I do as a step towards the doctorate. It has also really helped me to reflect on my approach to work in previous years which

wasn't very healthy and now I can work on trying to get more balance and put less pressure on myself, as I know that these skills will be really important when I'm thinking about applying for the D2N Sci in a few years' time. Become a psychologist and let this be your guide. Filled with lessons and experience that will help you get qualified. So come and take a look. It's right here in this book. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. So how good is that? You absolutely don't just take my word for it um take um avalon's word for it too

um it really is worth you checking out okay so in the first half um we were discussing job plans and how they can help you be an all-round superstar basically to be able to get what you need to get done done um so i hope you found that helpful um my next little um tip would be um when you are noticing things that you think you might want to talk about in supervision it's just to be quite honest about that with clients so um i can't reach my diary because it's just over there. But if I'm with a client, I would say, for example, OK, I'm not quite sure about that or I haven't come across that exact set of circumstances before. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a note for myself to take that to my next supervision session and then I'll come back with you and we'll explore that together does that sound okay don't be you know don't be afraid of saying you don't know the answer and what I would do then is I would grab my diary and I would write in the section of my diary

because I've got an A4 diary I would write in the section issues for supervision and so when it comes to supervision I've already got that list ready to go I'm not having to find additional time to plan in what I need to talk about now of course you might have a duty of care to discuss clients at set intervals as well but it always can be useful to go into supervision with set questions you know so you know you might I might say okay so this cropped up in a session recently and i my supervision question for this might be how can i um help this client to how can we explore this more together or how can i um you know which evidence-based treatment could i use with them to

help shift this problem you know and I can't think of any examples off the top of my head without giving away client confidentiality but you'll know what I mean you know sometimes something comes up and you're not quite sure or you know I might say to someone it seems like you know we're not perhaps making as much progress as as we might expect have you you know have you noticed that so we might have would you discuss that that's the issue um and you know i wonder what that might be about and um what i might suggest is that i take this to supervision and we use really talking through um this this casework to make sure that we're doing everything that can possibly help advance and shape and help

you get the progress that you so need and you so deserve. So you're not making it sound like they're a special case. And I do say that, you know, so when I start working with a client, I will absolutely say, you know, even though I'm qualified, and I certainly used to say this when I wasn't qualified, as part of my clinical responsibilities and as part of safeguarding for clients, I have an obligation to do supervision. And what will happen during those sessions is that we'll talk about the work that we're doing together. And we'll only ever really use your first name. But I will also make a supervision record onto your notes to say what we've discussed and what the outcomes will be.

And if you're ever wondering what I've said in supervision or what we might be discussing, I'm absolutely OK for you to ask me that. It can be a transparent process, but I don't need to think that I'm asking my supervisor because, you know, you're a lost cause or this is, you know, you're a special case. This is something that I have an obligation to do with everybody. And so, you know, this really helps make sure that we're operating an effective and safe service. So that's why we do that. So I'm just going to make a note of that to think about anything that I might not have considered. Because sometimes when we're right in something with somebody, we can, you know, we're not seeing other options as well. So it can really help us think more holistically and think about different approaches that we might not yet have tried that might be really, really useful. So I've made a

note of that now in my diary and I'll come back to you. So that helps you not forget what you need to do, but also uses that in the moment processing to be able to think with clients and to help them shape, to help shape the experiences. But to be really transparent as well, which is always something I've enjoyed. OK, so we are fast advancing through my top tips. And this is another approach that I use within my business, and it's something called ClickUp, ClickUp, C-L-I-C-K, up, separate words, and I use that to set myself tasks, and it's a free app, you might not be able to get it on trust computers, if you work for an NHS trust, it might be blocked as a download, you might not even be able to get

it on your trust phone. So there is a ClickUp app, but you should certainly be able to get it on your personal phone. Now, when you're using your personal phone, please don't put any client data in, nothing identifiable. But if you know you've got to write reports then I would for example write myself a click up task set myself as the person that needs to do it give myself the deadline for when that needs to happen or if I've job planned it I would get that to pop up a point when I'm supposed to be writing it as a reminder and I would say write report from and then the date you know of the assessment so you're not giving away any identifiable data and similarly even if you're using that on your trust or your organization computers

it still makes sense to use that anonymously so yeah the way you do that is you set the deadline and then it will it will come up but it will also come up in your task list so if you suddenly find that you've got a DNA someone hasn't attended session, then you can just go to your task list and try and pick the task that you think you've got that fits that time so that you're using any dead time really, really usefully. And I also used to use, this reminded me, I also used to use sticky notes, which you will be able to get on your NHS computers or your organisation computers. If you just go to the search magnifying function at the bottom and put in sticky notes, it's like little post-it notes that stay attached to your desktop. So I would write myself lists when I was in the NHS of jobs I needed to do. And then, yeah, I would pick how much time I had and I would do them.

So, yeah, that's part of my super efficiency is to make sure that I'm using all of the job planned time. But any extra time that comes up, I am also using to the best of my ability too and my final little productivity tip is another free app so all of the above information applies about confidentiality and not disclosing things you shouldn't within a non-nhs non-encrypted app but slack is an app So if I need to remind myself to do something, I will set myself a reminder in Slack. So I'll write myself a message in my DMs, my direct messages in Slack, and then I'll set myself a reminder so that it comes up to do that. And you can probably do the same in your Outlook calendar as well, if you use that for work. So you can set yourself reminders of things you need to do and when I was using Outlook for my NHS work I would use that as job plan so I would colour code because my job plan was always colour coded I would colour code my clinics so I would have a 9.15 a 10.15

and 11.15 even when I was in the NHS on my clinic days and they would always be green and I'd have them as recurring appointments in my diary so I could see where my blank spaces were and then next to it if I booked a client I would create an additional green a green session appointment for the same time 9 15 to 10 0 5 and then I would be able to see quickly where I had spaces available and where I didn't because I wanted to where I had spaces available and where I didn't because I wanted to be running a fully booked system where I didn't have spaces because that is the way to be efficient that is the way to get clients advancing towards their goals more quickly so how has that been for you I hope you you found that useful. I would love to know

what your take-home messages were from this and whether it's invoked any thinking for you and whether it might be useful. And I'd love you to come along to the Facebook group, the Aspiring Psychologist Community, brackets, free group, which is my free community for helping aspiring psychologists. Also wanted to say that we've got a compassionate Q&A happening at 7.30pm on Monday, the 31st of October, and that will be running across all of my socials. So come and like them all, won't you? Dr. Marianne Trent, pretty much everywhere. It won't be on TikTok because I don't think I can manage to stream to TikTok at the same time as streaming everywhere else. But it will be on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook, on LinkedIn and Instagram.

That's the plan anyway. If you're going to be watching on Twitter, for some reason, they don't allow the comments to come through to the live broadcast. So if you have got questions, you might well want to watch from one of the other platforms because all of those comments and questions will come through there. But if you just want to tune in and watch, then you can do that via Twitter. But on the night itself, I'll remind you that if you're commenting via Twitter, I won't see you, unfortunately. But I'll know you're there because it will come up in my viewers. But I won't be able to see your comments until I look later on Twitter. So even then, I don't think the comments get kept on the live broadcast on Twitter. Come on, Twitter, sort yourselves out.

You know, girl's trying to run a business here. So, yeah, I hope you found that really useful. If you'd welcome some additional support during this psychology application season or beyond, please do consider joining us in the aspiring psychologist membership because the reviews i'm getting about how wonderfully enriching it is how we're helping people learn more about cbt how we're helping learn more about personal and professional issues how we're helping increase people's confidence to talk about themselves and to be reflective and learn about different psychological approaches. You know, it's good stuff. Someone said to me the other day, I love Marianne Mondays, you know,

because our stuff usually happens on a Monday, you know, and she was telling her parents about Marianne Mondays. And I just thought it's really, really nice, you know, being able to impact on people's lives in this way is just the greatest privilege and I'm having a blast doing it so thank you so much for listening if you do like what you hear please do like and subscribe if you're watching on YouTube please do subscribe to the channel um fling me a couple of comments on the episodes it's so gratefully received if you're listening on um Apple Podcasts please do subscribe, follow on Spotify, and write me a little review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts would be so wonderful. Thank you so much. This is episode 45, which means we're fast approaching a whole year of the Aspiring

Psychologist podcast. What a privilege. What a privilege that you're still listening. You're still finding it useful. You're liking the jingles. You're going out for your dog walks. You're running your, you know, running your show and finding a way to get me in it too. So thank you so much for being part of my world.

I will look forward to catching up with you very soon. Take care. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent. My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner. I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind of filled me of confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a

clinical psychologist I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay but trust me you will not put the book down once you start.