Nurse leaders expressed that administrative tasks were taking away time from connecting with their teams, prompting their chief nurse executive to provide them with a time management course.

Amid the upheaval caused by COVID-19 at the 14 hospitals of Allegheny Health Network, this specialized course alleviated feelings of overwhelm.

Claire Zangerle, DNP, MSN, MBA, RN, FAONL, NEA-BC, the chief nurse executive at AHN, noted that many nurse leaders felt they worked tirelessly yet achieved little, which negatively impacted their morale. The constant chaos left them wondering how to regain control over their day-to-day responsibilities.

Zangerle revealed that the overwhelming demands of staffing, discipline, budgeting, team development, and self-care left little room for meaningful engagement with their teams. After attending a beneficial time management course herself, Zangerle collaborated with Carol Perlman, PhD, a cognitive behavioral therapist with expertise in time management, who gathered insights from nurse leaders about their time management practices and feelings regarding their workload. This feedback led to the creation of a word cloud highlighting their main concerns, with the words busy and chaotic standing out.

Perlman then tailored a time management course specifically for the nurse leaders, aiming to help them establish a daily schedule, prioritize tasks, allocate time for self-care, and develop strategies for team engagement. The objective was to lower their stress levels and allow them to reclaim time for personal wellness activities like healthy eating, exercise, and meditation despite the chaos surrounding them. AHN facilitated this course for chief nursing officers, nursing directors, and nurse managers across all hospitals, providing each participant with an 18-month planner and a workbook. The 21-day course involved self-paced daily tasks that took under five minutes, combined with weekly virtual meetings and discipline-specific group sessions for knowledge sharing. A Google classroom was established for instructors to share lessons, and participants could collaborate, ask questions, and exchange tips.

Nurse managers recognized the value of the course and urged their assistant nurse managers and supervisors to participate, ensuring newer nurse leaders also learned vital skills such as task prioritization and effective time blocking. The over 300 nurse leaders who completed the course reported feeling more in control, significantly enhancing their overall well-being. The course also fostered additional benefits, as CNOs and hospital directors collaborated on lessons about delegation and succession planning. A follow-up questionnaire indicated impressive improvements:

A second word cloud generated post-course reflected a shift in mindset, with productive and good replacing busy and chaotic as the prominent sentiments. Perlman remarked that while chaos persists, the nurse leaders now perceive it as controlled chaos, emphasizing the importance of managing what can be controlled to better handle the inevitable challenges that arise.

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