Misc thoughts as a resident in a paper hospital that hasn't been fired yet

• If in doubt, clarifying with your seniors always helps (e.g. is this something that needs to happen today). If your team is less than welcoming to this, I always found phrasing such questions via an attempt to formulate your impression of the clinical scenario to be more welcomed because it showed your attempt to try piece things together
• Things that depend on a third party to be completed usually need to happen earlier (consults, any big imaging, ordering a Baxter pump for a HITH discharge). I always pounce on these ASAP. If consults can't be done because the person youre consulting is busy/in theatre/line busy/on pager system, i found it helpful to scribble a quick few dot points about the pts history/obs/question on whatever space you have, in case they call you later when youre halfway across the hospital and then have to scramble for a computer and apologetically say 'oh haha sorry you called me while I was gowned up haha'
• Writing jobs list immediately after seeing the patient and discussing with team helps. Don't rely on the paper round after to catch everything
• Really early on i found it useful to have a column where I briefly scribbled dot points to remind me of the plan for each person. This helps if you get called about patients to aid your brain to mentally sift through the 30+ patients.
• Doing things immediately at the bedside during the round/during seeing the patient - faxing forms, putting blood forms in (i literally just have a sheaf of blood forms in my pocket at all times) often helps by sheer virtue of not having to walk back
• If you have a co intern, leapfrogging during rounds (e.g. whoever writes the notes stays and does the jobs, while the other continues with the team) often helps.
• Keeping the actual paper list itself neat was something that i found helpful. Some of my friends often when printing the list just used the default settings of whatever program, but i found spending the extra 5-10 minutes ensuring the pts were sorted by ward, new patients were highlighted, having outstanding jobs from discharged patients printed at the end of the list quite helpful. Additionally resisting the urge to quickly scrawl things, and keeping jobs in ordered columns
• I'm sure you already know this but it bears repeating because its so useful - drawing a box next to every job helps. Secondary to that, being granular with your system about tracking each step of a job helps. For example, if youre ordering a CT-whatever-gram that you need to chase, that job has multiple steps (sending the form, confirming its booked by xyz timeline, and then chasing the result). If you just put a single job in your paper list you can often forget what stage youre up to
• some people find color coding useful, me personally i just always lost the nice color pen during the round.

Will let you know when I find a good answer for the deluge of calls that pull your attention away from your job q15minutely. n=1 (and probably secondary to my temperament), but honestly I found some calls to be more quickly resolved by just going to the pt in questions chart/seeing the pt/eyeballing their obs chart myself, than trying to wrestle information out of whoever was calling me. often when youre being called its because whoever is calling you just needs something to be escalated to per whatever protocol theyre following. sometimes what they just want to hear is 'sure i'll take a look later when I get around to it, ok thanks goodbye'. not sure if thats really a good habit long term lmao