Never enough hours in the day

“How do you do it? How do you keep up with all this blogging, tweeting and writing whilst holding a job and keeping your family happy?”

It’s a question I invariably get asked when I speak about using social media in medical education.  I can talk about podcasts and keeping up to date with the literature, and there will always be a voice of dissension that wants to know “How?“

Life is about priorities, and my number one priority, contrary to popular belief, is not this website, our upcoming conference or Twitter but my family.

The distraction of hyperconnectivity

You may not have heard the term before, but you know exactly what it means. It’s that desire to check your phone for status updates before getting out of bed in the morning. It’s thumb-scrolling down pages of backlit tweets while your partner sleeps next to you.  It’s automatically reaching for your pocket whenever you hear the siren song of an e-mail notification.

When I first got on Twitter back in 2009, I was that person.  It has taken me a long time to break the habit at home. I don’t want my children’s abiding memories of me being a man more interested in a six-by-three-inch piece of glass and plastic than in what they got up to in kindergarten. I recently met up with someone with a master’s in medical simulation and a Twitter neophyte. He wanted to know how not to tweet.  And I think that is a much more important question to ask. Fortunately, Henry Goldstein has some great strategies to use so the telephone does not become your comfort blanket. As often as possible, I put my phone out of physical reach and leave well alone.

Larks and owls

I am very much a night person and hate being dragged out of my sleep in the small hours.  I have toyed with the idea of getting up early, before the rest of the house was awake, to get things done, but it is impossible.

My children have an innate ability to get up a minute or two after I do, so there is nothing to be gained from setting my alarm for 5 am.  Instead, I wait for them to settle and go to sleep, and then I get most of my work done. 

Studying for the Fellowship exam made me disciplined, and I stopped watching television and mothballed my Playstation. Now I watch things on my own terms, binge-watching television series like Luke Cage or Stranger Things.  That ability to not be reliant on the television is just as important as not being reliant on the telephone.  I enjoy reading, writing and researching blog posts in the same way sane people enjoy reading a cheap page-turner.

Enjoying what you do

I would not write for Don’t Forget the Bubbles if I did not enjoy it.  I am passionate about making better doctors, and I hope we are doing that by promoting better knowledge translation. I currently have ideas for about 20 blog posts in slow Brownian motion inside my head.  I get asked questions I don’t know the answers to, so I will look them up and write about them. Or I’m asked to do something and am told to do it because “it’s always been done that way”, and so I am excited to go to the primary literature to find that the gold standard we rely on every day is actually based on canine studies from the 1950s. Or, occasionally, a reader will write or tweet a request (and we are always happy about that).

My workflow is probably very different from Tessa’s, Ben’s, and Henry’s, so I’ll get them to chime in in the comments section. Once I have an idea, I will open up a blank Google document and write down everything I know and, more importantly, the questions  I want the answers to. Then, I will use Google and Google Scholar to search through potential blog posts and review articles written in the last two years.  They are my launching pad for further research as I look into their references and go back and try to challenge knowledge assumptions.  For a simple 1000-word post, I will probably read about 20 to 30 papers and have to say that enough is enough. Once the framework is in place, I like to put things in context. I have one of those memories for stupid facts that made me very popular on our local pub quiz team (‘The William G’s’ – after William G. Stewart of Fifteen to One if you really want to know). So, a book, film or historical event can add colour to a piece.

If I have enough peace and quiet (children are at kindergarten, and all the chores are done), I can blast through a post in a day.  Some of the longer ones take a week or so and multiple edits.  Rather than doubling up work, I try to link a blog post with a presentation I am doing or a paper I am writing.

So, if any of you think you can do what we do, please drop us a line. We are always happy to support anyone who wants to try their hand at blogging.  We all started somewhere ( I started slowly, thanks to the kindness of Casey Parker and Minh Le Cong).  Don’t Forget the Bubbles covers a broad range of topics relevant to anyone that looks after children but we’d love to have your help fill in the gaps.

Look at this excellent research from David Sinton and colleagues; you can clearly see the gaps in the curriculum. We are the first to acknowledge that we could do more, but we will need your help to do so.  If you know (or are) a guru of gynaecology,  a maven of mental health or a pro in the field of pre-hospital paediatrics, then we can help you share your knowledge.  And if you are none of those things but have something interesting or useful to say or have spent hours working on an amazing talk to which only five people turned up, we can help you find your voice.

References

Sinton DT, Fudge J, Sillet J, Prest R, Roland D, Lewis G. G247 (P) A Paediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) curriculum mapped Free Open Access Medical education (FOAMed) resource. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 2016 Apr 1;101(Suppl 1):A134-5.