Fill Your Notebooks, Fill Your Buckets
For those of you who know me, you know that one of my weaknesses is my tendency to procrastinate in pretty much all things. My nursing schoolwork, presentations, articles, work projects, housework, yard work, packing, completing abstracts … really all areas of my life. I just really believe I can get the work done at the last minute. Most of the time I can, or I stay up late proving that I can. So, this year, I was really on top of things for my kids and got their back-to-school shopping finished at the end of July, a whole month before they went back to school!
As I was getting all the items from their lists, this year, I started to think about what it means to start a new year and the promises and opportunities that come with it. As I looked at the one-subject composition notebooks with the wide ruled paper I was placing in my cart, I remembered the many three-subject notebooks I filled during my years in nursing school. At the start of the school year, like the start of a new project, it can seem insurmountable. Yet, time, classes, and meetings, continue, and before you know it the project is almost at “Go-Live”, and that notebook is almost full of the handwritten notes you have taken during the semester.
Now, as I look forward to this coming fall, there is the 2024 AMSN Annual Convention in Toronto, Canada! I hope to see many of you there at our first international conference, which we hope will gain support from our neighbors from the north. If you have your passport ready and would like to attend, you can find more information and registration details here.
Now when I attend the AMSN Annual Convention, I consider what new and exciting information I can bring back to share with my colleagues to improve our workflows or patient outcome, what new products are out there that can impact my organization, and how are others utilizing virtual care and if would it work for us. I fill up my notebook’s pages again, albeit a much smaller one than I had in college. One of the other reasons I love convention is the connection with my medical-surgical colleagues within the nursing and AMSN community. Many I have worked with through AMSN, or during my nursing career, and I am so excited to see everyone! Also, I enjoy making connections with new nurses at conferences. If you see me walking around at the conference, please stop me and say hello!
This year, we will have the Med-Surg Moments Podcast co-hosts recording at convention. If you haven’t had a chance to catch the podcast yet, please take a moment to give it a listen. You can listen on the Monitor or wherever you listen to podcasts. The co-hosts are medical-surgical nurses who are just discussing the day-to-day issues that impact medical-surgical nurses. This week, I was part of the podcast, which is always a fun and insightful time for me to discuss topics that are meaningful for our medical-surgical nurses. Listen to that episode here.
This month, I hope you have the opportunity to fill up your notebooks with notes from a nursing conference, from a class, while journaling, or with something that fills your bucket.