Are there days where you realize at the end of the day, you did nothing but attend meetings, respond to messages and emails, and answer questions? Do you feel great about how productive you were that day? Most often not.
In the last several years of my healthcare administrative career, I would have around 7-8 hours of meetings per day and would get about 600-800 emails per day. 75% of those needed a response. How productive do you think I was ? Not very. Each day I would go home frustrated and sit after dinner and try to get through at least 300-400 of those emails.
In the past few months I have been working with a writing coach who focuses on thinking deep. This has taken me down a path of lots of reflection. It then led me to read a book by Cal Newport, Deep Work. This is a very insightful book and has helped me understand why it was so difficult the last few years to really impact significant change in healthcare. “Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve skills and are hard to replicate.”
A couple concepts that I am touching on today is the impact of distraction and attention residue. When you think about moving from meeting to meeting every 30-60 minutes on totally different topics, you take with you attention residue from the previous meeting. By noon your mind has layers of residue that negatively impact your ability to concentrate and focus on a project or assignment. In between these meetings and sometimes during meetings you get urgent instant messages or emails that further take away your focus and attention. Thus, no meaningful deep work is possible.
Flash back to several years ago. The organization I worked for supported deep work. We would have all day or multi day quality improvement events. We were required to close our laptops and put down our phones, except on breaks. It never ceased to amaze me the amount of problems we could resolve or the amount of improvement we could design to improve healthcare delivery with a mind on all the interdependencies.
We had the right people in the room, pre work had been completed and presented, participants would learn so much about our systems. We learned the impact changes would have on other departments, and how to negotiate significant improvement that would have lasting impact. These projects completely stopped with COVID, and the impact is so evident that we no longer have focused time to research, redesign, and deeply improve our care delivery. The impact on the bottom line is notable, it’s not a surprise that so many health systems are struggling to break even or show a profit. The few that are doing well are still taking the time to do the hard work.
I am excited to help healthcare organizations to return to deep and impactful work.