This blog was going to be called ‘who is next?’.
It was going to be a blog about how many people can we possibly help and when should we stop helping people and start helping ourselves and at what point when you have a list of messages or requests from people to give them a hand with something which is outside your own sphere, should you stop helping them and help yourself and do your own thing.
I had a chat to Alex about this the other day because he spent a long-time last night helping someone who's in need, which is not going to be of any benefit to him.
I also had a message from somebody who was asking for a telephone call for something which is going to be helpful to them, but not helpful to me.
And so, I was going to write about that when I realised that this blog is actually a little update about the email blog from last week.
It's easy to help people when you have enough time to help them, and it's a wonderful thing to do, and it makes society better, and it comes back in the end, and we should do as much as we can, but we can't do any of that when we're overwhelmed.
And so, when in the middle of your email list there is a message from someone asking for assistance or help doing this or that, and it gets lost in this wash of information in this fire hose of data that's coming at you day by day, it's impossible to think about how you would help or why you should even bother when you have so much of your own life to try to sort out.
I'd written the blog last week about emails, which seems to me to be old news and something we should have been away from a long time ago but then I had some messages saying, What's the answer?
The answer lives in all the tech stack blogs that I wrote earlier this year, which are listed here.
The answer also lies in meeting up with people from different parts of dentistry and different parts of business and figure out how they are overcoming the problems instead of just staying in the same rut that you're always in and hoping by working harder or longer hours that it will get a little bit better.
And so, to me, the answer is threefold.
1. Put a sender filter on your emails.
I've talked about this many times before, but just change the message in your out of office reply to something along the lines of “I only answer emails on a Friday, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If there’s a problem, phone this number *”.
Tick so this message is on all the time and then people start to get the message that you don't get back to emails on the same day.
You can if you want to get back to them on the same day but now you have no imperative to do so because people have been told of another route, they can get you if they absolutely have to (they don't have to).
2. Don't use WhatsApp for anything other than your Son's football team and communicating with your family.
To be in professional groups on WhatsApp is an absolute disgrace.
There is no way that you can track that back, no way you can keep control of that and no way you can bring yourself to leave the groups without looking like someone who doesn't give a shit anymore and therefore you're more worried about how you look than the function of the group.
3. Transfer everything in your own business into Slack.
I went to visit a lab set up in Yorkshire this week, which is extremely complex and massively innovative, and Alex and I were delighted to see as we walked into this visit that everybody is on slack and communicating on Slack all the time.
They don't have emails to communicate with each other because as soon as they open an email, they're either getting an offer to buy some clothes or a pair of trainers or a holiday god knows where, or a complaint from a patient or somebody else nagging at them for something that isn't to do with why they opened their emails in the first place.
It's absolutely possible. We have done it, the lab has done it, and it's totally essential.
Those are the answers.
Once you've created an extraordinary amount of time by doing these things, then you can start to help out anybody else you want in the spare time you have available.
Blog Post Number - 3450