Top productivity hacks for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals

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If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified, it's The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent.

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Hi. Welcome along to The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, a clinical psychologist, and it's lovely to have you here listening.

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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 ebook, but the hardback is in glorious technical. It is a thing of beauty.

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So if your department has some spare cash or you've got someone who wants to spend a little bit of money on you for Christmas, then the hard back is lovely, but the content is all the same, apart from the colour. So, take your pick, see what works best for you, paperback, ebook, or hardback.

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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@goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk, and the details for that email address, in case you missed it, are in the show notes, but it's book@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.

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And 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. Then you could get two bonus entries.

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It is super simple to leave me audio testimonials. If you go to my website www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast, you just click on a link which opens a wonderful site called Bonjoro, 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. Enter the competition.

(: 04:33

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 mommy, I'm a mommy 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 and depression, and grief too.

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So I do that, but I also support aspiring psychologists, you lovely folk, and I also create books, don't I? And so 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.

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So I have no idea how long today's podcast episode is going to be. I've got a vague idea of the top tips that I'm going to go through, written myself a list, which I've left just out of my reach. So I'm going to grab my list, hold the line, caller. Seamless, I'm back, and I've got the list.

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So, one of my main strategies for organising myself for kind of making sense of what might feel like organised chaos, if it wasn't for this one super duper top tip, 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 services, 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.

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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 working at your full capacity. And you pick up new clients, 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 2:00 PM. So for three out of the four, and if there was five Thursdays in a month, it was three out of five, but three out of those four or five Thursdays I would pick up a new client.

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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.

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So I always knew that I had to be having throughputs, 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.

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So, as I reflect back on that now, there were certain times in certain clinics, so certainly Thursday afternoons, I had set rooms. I always quite like the same room as well, so they'd be kind to me and give me the same room, creature of habit where possible. And 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 11:00. 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.

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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. And similarly, a Friday afternoon, for me, seeing clients on a Friday afternoon where you might suddenly get a safeguarding issue at 4:00 PM, 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 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 assessments.

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So, I know it can be common that 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, 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 are 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 are going to do that. Otherwise, you're going to be constantly squeezing. 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.

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So really have a look at what jobs you are doing every week. And similarly, supervision should ideally be in your job plan, and should be a consistent repeatable endeavour. Okay? So mine certainly is.

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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, if the meeting is 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, or three in four, and then the fourth one you use as time to do that admin. You 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.

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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've been job planned, if I was using job plans at that time. Because those job plans, 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."

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And I still use a job plan now. 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 try to do my non-client stuff on those days. Whereas Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursday mornings, I do see clients. So I run clinics, I run three clinics, 9:15, 10:15 and 11:15. And 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.

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So, I don't want any leftover projects. 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, Marianne's there. I'll sit down with her," and we'll eat our salads together. Or in my most recent NHS service, I was known for chippy Tuesday. So every now and then I'd be like, "Come on, there's a great chippy nearby." And on a Tuesday, they do a great pie, 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 3.50. And so I'd 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.

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And so my lunchtime, usually 12:30 till 1:00 when I was in NHS services, was happening every day. I was bringing my lunch with me. I was accountable. I was making that usually the evening before so that it would nourish me for the day. I'm a salad eater generally. I don't eat chippy Tuesdays every Tuesday. But they were delicious, and if I still worked there, I would still be instigating chippy Tuesday because the chips are incredible, you know when you 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. So, that's when I was in South Wales. My friends from Lancashire introduced me to the term chippy tea. Chippy. It's a fish and chip shop, in case you're not familiar with chippy tea. Did you ever think that you'd hear me talk about chippy teas and chippys so much? I didn't. I didn't know that was going to be my plan for today.

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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 your job planning your lunch break, job planning your start and finish times, because that helps make sure that you're not overloaded. 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.

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But seeing a massive amount of face-to-face clients, and I absolutely appreciate that for many of you listening, certainly if you're listening to this working in IAPT services, you might well not have this flexibility. So, I know certain people in certain services are seeing 70, 80, 90% face-to-face time, but that is going to be very difficult to achieve long term. That's going to 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.

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So, when I was employed in 8A 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 are 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.

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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, "Well, 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 are getting 50%." And I went out across the trust. I saw people in a library, I saw people in a health centre, I saw people in a different psychiatric base. So I was like Madame Peripatetic, I was everywhere.

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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 five different locations, actually, because there was no rooms available in my clinic base. And so on a Tuesday afternoon, I would go into the team, sit in the agile office, and do my admin. It was job planned that I would do my administrators, 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, 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 support the team and reduce the waiting list because that was really important to me.

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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 organise yourself and be just an all-around superstar. Catch up with you very soon.

(: 19:07

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.

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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 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 [inaudible 00:20:49] in a few years time.

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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.

(: 21:37

So, how good is that? You absolutely, don't just take my word for it. Take Avalon's word for it too. It really is worth you checking out.

(: 21:49

Okay, so in the first half, we were discussing job plans and how they can help you be an all-around superstar basically, to be able to get what you need to get done, done. So I hope you found that helpful. My next little tip would be 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.

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So, I can't reach my diary because it's just over there, but if I'm with a client I would say for example, "Oh, okay, 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?"

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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 A4 diary, I would write in the section, "Issues for supervision." 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.

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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. So I might say, "Okay, so this cropped up in a session recently, and my supervision question for this might be, how can I help this client to ... or, how can we explore this more together? Which evidence-based treatment could I use with them to help shift this problem?"

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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. Sometimes something comes up and you're not quite sure. I might say to someone, "It seems like we are not perhaps making as much progress as we might expect. Have you noticed that?" So we might [inaudible 00:24:05] discuss that that's the issue. And, you know, "I wonder what that might be about. And what I might suggest is that I take this to supervision and we use really talking through 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."

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So you're not making it sound like they're a special case, and I do say that. So when I start working with a client, I will absolutely say, 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 are 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.

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And if you are ever wondering what I've said in supervision or what we might be discussing, I'm absolutely okay for you to ask me that. It can be a transparent process, but I don't want you to think that I'm asking my supervisor because you're a lost cause or you're a special case. This is something that I have an obligation to do with everybody.

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And so 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'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.

(: 25:58

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 shape the experiences, but to be really transparent as well, which is always something I've enjoyed.

(: 26:14

Okay, 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 Click Up, Click Up, 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 Click Up app, but you should certainly be able to get it on your personal phone.

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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 at the point when I'm supposed to be writing it as a reminder. And I would say, "Write report from," and then the date 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 organisation computers, it still makes sense to use that anonymously.

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So yeah, the way you do that is you set the deadline and then 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 a 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.

(: 27:58

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.

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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.

(: 28:43

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 will set myself a reminder so that it comes up to do that.

(: 29:15

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 session appointment for the same time, 9:15 to 10:05. And then I would be able to see quickly 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.

(: 30:19

So, how has that been for you? I hope you found that useful. I would love to know what your take home messages were from this, and whether it's evoked 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 (FREE GROUP), which is my free community for helping aspiring psychologists.

(: 30:49

Also wanted to say that we've got a compassionate Q&A happening at 7:30 PM 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.

(: 31:22

If you are 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 are 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? A girl's trying to run a business here.

(: 32:09

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.

(: 32:48

Someone said to me the other day, "I love Marianne Mondays," because our stuff usually happens on a Monday, and she was telling her parents about Marianne Mondays and I just thought that'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.

(: 33:08

If you do like what you hear, please do like and subscribe. If you are watching on YouTube, please do subscribe to the channel. Fling me a couple of comments on the episodes. It's so gratefully received. If you are listening on Apple Podcast, please do subscribe, follow on Spotify, and write me a little review of the podcast on Apple Podcast. Would be so wonderful.

(: 33:33

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 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.

(: 34:05

If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified, it's The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent.