Managing your Bandwidth

Author: Aaron Qi Yang Goh, co-author, Unlocking the Leader Within: A Medical Student’s Guide to Practical Leadership

You’re presenting a patient to your attending during morning rounds, and a million thoughts are running through your head. As if the work of presenting is not already hard enough, you are faced with numerous distractions during your presentation – a bedside alarm going off, your cellphone buzzing… If you’ve ever encountered a similar situation, you may have experienced firsthand what is like to have a stretched bandwidth.

Bandwidth refers to the available mental capacity that you have available to perform any given task. Let’s break it down: if you were presenting a new patient in front of your attending, your bandwidth may be stretched over the following domains: 

• The actual work of presenting in front of your attending   
• Attempting to recall the patient’s presenting complaint and relevant history/physical examination findings 
• Distractions: A patient’s infusion pump starts beeping, signaling the completion of their antibiotic infusion 
• More distractions: you notice that a nursing colleague is beckoning for your attention as she had something to clarify with regards to an earlier patient note you had put up 
• Even more distractions: Radiology is calling you on your work phone to enquire about an MRI that you had ordered

In situations calling for focused, deep work, having an awareness of your bandwidth and managing your bandwidth are crucial to ensure task achievement and mastery.

Being Aware of Your Bandwidth 

All of us have a finite amount of bandwidth, attention, and energy. The more complex, stressful, or high stakes a task is (like presenting to your attending!), the more of our bandwidth it occupies.  

When our bandwidth is stretched, we invariably make more mistakes, become easily overwhelmed, and feel increasingly exhausted by the task at hand. For these reasons, your bandwidth is one of your most valuable cognitive resources. Aim to protect it, especially in moments requiring prolonged attention and attentiveness.  

Managing your Bandwidth

Focus on one thing at a time. Our ‘always on’ environment exposes us to a constant stream of information, and in such a culture it is easy to falsely assume that we must multitask to cope with the information overload. However, studies have found that multitasking may be more inefficient than focusing on a single task, and is associated with a greater rate of making errors.¹ Instead, strive for sustained, focused attention on a single task. 

Minimize Distractions. In a similar vein, aim to minimize distractions to improve sustained attention. If you are studying for an exam, aim to separate social media and cellphone usage from your revision time, and choose a suitable environment free from distractions. In a clinical setting, it may not always be possible to remove or avoid distractions – studies showed that emergency physicians receive up to 15 distractions per hour!² Instead, a more practical approach would be to practice prioritization as described below.  

Prioritize. Many things will call out for your attention; it is up to you to decide what is urgent, what is important and how quickly each task should be responded to. The Eisenhower Matrix provides a useful starting point for this:  

Take a moment to reflect:

How stretched is your bandwidth right now? How can you better manage your bandwidth to function at your best?