PHYSICIAN TIME MANAGEMENT: How can I use the PERMA model to decide which projects are actually “Meaningful” (the M) to my career?
FAQ from the PCSI
As an academic physician, you will be bombarded with “asks” for your time, effort, and mental space. If you are not careful, you may end up managing clinical shifts, research questions, educational obligations, and administrative duties like a game of ‘whack-a-mole.’ Not fun.
We have found over the years that Martin Seligman’s PERMA model (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) provides an excellent framework for auditing current commitments and prioritizing future opportunities with our clients. The key concept is that, with this model, you evaluate a project based on how it supports your professional well-being rather than its CV weight.
So let’s review a typical PERMA project audit framework.
Positive Emotion (P)
The Project Audit Question: Does this project evoke anticipation, or do I dread seeing it on my calendar?
The Academic Lens: Be aware that knowing yourself matters in this process. This is because positive emotion isn’t just about happiness; it’s about daily job satisfaction, curiosity, and intellectual excitement/challenge.
Meaningful Choice: Subsequently, if a clinical trial or educational initiative or whatever excites you during brainstorming sessions, it passes the “P-filter.” If the proposed tasks feel like an administrative chore, it fails the “P-filter.”
Engagement (E)
The Project Audit Question: Does this project allow me to use my core strengths and experience, or is it fragmented by bureaucratic minutiae?
The Academic Lens: This comes back to that concept of flow - being so deeply immersed in a task that time flies. So again, knowing yourself matters. For example, you might have lower thresholds for flow during complex procedures, deep-dive data analysis, or highly interactive mentoring sessions. For myself, I found flow during mentoring sessions and when pipetting for large sequencing experiments (yes, I’m that old).
Meaningful Choice: Prioritize activities where the actual work leverages your unique expertise and/or strengths. For example, if you love deep conceptual writing but hate formatting spreadsheets, look for projects where you can own the manuscript narrative rather than the data entry.
Relationships (R)
The Project Audit Question: Who am I doing this with? Will this project deepen my connection to a valued colleague, open doors to inspiring collaborators, or allow me to meaningfully mentor trainees?
The Academic Lens: Academic medicine, and frankly, almost all human endeavors, thrives on collaboration. Nothing kills an effort more quickly than toxic or stagnant team dynamics. Subsequently, this element focuses on connection, mutual respect, and mentorship.
Meaningful Choice: The opportunity to work alongside a trusted peer or lift up a promising junior faculty member makes an effort profoundly meaningful, even if the subject of effort is only “meh.” Conversely, a high-impact effort with a dysfunctional team rarely feels worth it in retrospect.
Meaning (M)
The Project Audit Question: Why does this matter? If this effort succeeds, how does it align with my core values and professional legacy?
The Academic Lens: Most of us went into medicine to serve something larger than ourselves, whether by caring for patients, advancing medical knowledge, or educating the next generation of caregivers. For myself, a key goal was advocating for a culture that poised physicians to freely choose how they made a difference.
Meaningful Choice: This is the ultimate filter for late-career alignment. If a committee seat or paper doesn’t connect to a larger purpose that you believe in - even if it looks good on paper - it will still feel hollow. An exception to “it’s better to look good than to feel good.” Tip of the hat to Billy Crystal and his character Fernando.
Accomplishment (A)
The Project Audit Question: Does this project move the needle on goals that matter to me, or is it just generating “busywork” volume? Again, demonstrating the importance of knowing yourself.
The Academic Lens: Tangible achievement, mastery, and professional progress: in academic medicine, this translates to promotions, grants, publications, and successfully establishing new programs.
Meaningful Choice: Spend the introspective effort to ensure that projects offer a clear sense of closure or milestone achievement. Your efforts should contribute to your own personal growth (don’t undervalue that) and/or your institutional footprint, rather than just keeping you on a treadmill of endless, unmeasured maintenance.
With all this being said, we often work with our clients to navigate opportunities they are unsure about using these audit questions and a 1-5 scale. For example, if a proposed effort creates a positive emotion because you are in a position to build something from scratch, score it a 5/5 on the P-filter. In contrast, if that effort is purely bureaucratic and generates dread, score it a 1/5 on the P-filter. After scores are generated for the other filters, we typically find that this exercise rarely yields middle-range scores (8-14) if people are honest with themselves in answering the audit questions. Moreover, sometimes the latter is the real breakthrough challenge.
With some practice, by running through this audit approach, many people can find that previous tough decisions become clear, allowing them to say “no” to some high-prestige, low-fulfillment traps. This frees up bandwidth to pursue efforts that define the impact you want to immediately have and the imprint you actually want to leave behind.
So there you are.
These FAQ are questions we often receive during consultations or coaching sessions. They will eventually be part of a subscription package. However, through to the end of June, I’ll send them to everyone.
If you have questions that you would like me to answer, please leave them in the comments section. I’ll post a couple of these FAQs each week. Until then, please remember that compassion is made possible by you. Please don’t give up hope for either yourself or the world.