Take a minute… and then… give yourself a break.
I was working at home this afternoon. I'd worked at home all of yesterday afternoon and evening (at least most of it) because I wanted to carve out some time from my Monday admin day to ride my bike this morning. And so, I could manufacture things during the weekend to work there and then ride my bike with my friend Simon (100 kilometres – knee is doing well).
When I got to work around 1:30 pm I was able to check my Slack messages and see what was going on with work (I'd actually sent two verbal Slack messages from the cafe stop on the bike ride to ask for some information from a couple of guys before I had a meeting at 2 pm)
Following that, I was answering clinical queries on Slack, among other things, had a full video for 4.5 minutes from one of my guys about a large treatment plan for a patient that I was able to review in (asynchronously), adjust the plan a little bit based on my experience to send it back and get them going, various other slack messages around direction of the clinic, issues, problems, stuff that's going on that I could sort.
I'm using my son's pool table as a desk with a stool beside it, drinking freezing cold water out of a big drink bottle with a pair of shorts on.
I'm a dentist.
Even 5 years ago, most of this type of work was unthinkable. Even five years ago, most dentists were looking at eight, nine, or ten sessions of clinical work a week. Ten years ago, I was doing eight sessions of clinical work a week, or else the business wouldn't work, trying to squeeze the rest of running a business into 2 days.
I think, for all its worth taking a step back once in a while (definitely for me). The world has changed and is changing so catastrophically fast that it's almost impossible to keep up in one direction, let alone the enormous multiple directions that are happening.
The fear, the risk, the urge, is that we grab everything all at once.
It's impossible.
If I've heard it once now, I've heard it a million times "Oh, do you not have this app?", "Oh, have you not seen this platform?" "Oh, do you not have whatever the f*ck the new thing is?".
While I appreciate people might think that I am now an analogue watch in a digital world, one of the things that is catastrophically missing from everything that's going on is depth; the ability to think about things deeply with a considerable amount of information to help make your long-term decisions going forward. It's not getting better (obviously), it's getting worse.
Going forward, the guys who are able to think about things like that, to take a breath for a minute, to see how to navigate the extraordinarily complex environment in front of them those are the guys that will do better, those are the guys that will stay, at least in part, healthy in their heads.
Continually grabbing at the new, continually changing for change's sake, it won't work.
It's one thing to innovate in a linear direction to a target over there; it's another thing to invest and innovate and change in every direction, all at once.
Let's all take a minute, every so often.
Life is different from what it used to be, and we need to adapt and adjust and then carry on again.
Blog Post Number - 4224