I wrote this blog on a Monday morning, it’s 10:15 and I’m on my way to meet my great friend Carl Dunstan for a coffee and a moan and an exchange of how difficult it is to be us.
We don’t do this often enough and when we do we both think we’re meeting up because we need help when in fact what happens is we both help the other one.
I’m only getting to do this today though because of last night.
My son is nine and I often put him to bed, it’s often my job as long as i’m at home. I put him to bed last night and went into my office which is next to his bedroom, pulled out my Olympus dictation machine and dictated responses to all the emails that were in my inboxes (two of them – 60 emails) I dictated four blogs and I dictated the email to the parent and boys in the football team after we’d tragically lost our semi-final cup match that day 1 – 0.
I’m on a clinical session day today at the practice but in case you don’t read the blog regularly or you didn’t realise, I have a registrar Monday and Tuesday.
Beatriz Sanchez is not a registrar, she is a fully qualified exceptional dentist with a huge amount of CPD in implants and an MSc in implants but she works side by side with me in the practice and much of the clinical work I would do she is able to do for me. I get paid less money because I pay Beatriz to be side by side with me but I don’t get paid no money and I get more time.
This morning I got up at 6:20, had a short coffee and rode my bike for two and a half hours and nearly fifty miles. I came home for breakfast then went to meet Carl and dictated this blog in the car after I’d had a short conversation on the phone with someone very high up in a dental supply company who was helping me out with a problem.
The moral of this blog is this – I would never have got to have the cool Monday morning without the dictaphone which allowed me to answer three hours of emails in thirty minutes so the first half of my Monday morning was already done on a Sunday night between 8:30 and 9:00. I ‘paid it forwards’
I worked all day Saturday on the Sinus Grafting Course doing live surgery as my audio visual system started to break down in the middle of the course and I tore a sinus membrane and made surgery much more difficult than it should have been. But at the end of that course we were discussing time management and consent and I presented how I dictate the op notes using my dictation machine. While the audience (nine of them) were quite receptive I don’t think anybody will walk away and buy a dictation machine and make it work and I’m sad about that. One of the guys I’m sure if I heard him right said that I was the ‘Yoda of time management’. I’m not and my wife would be horrified to see that. I do not strike a perfect balance in my life, I just try to strike a balance that I sometimes get right and sometimes don’t (I certainly didn’t get it right last week) but on days like today as I pull up to the coffee shop, it seems it works at least some of the time.
Blog Post Number - 1263
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