The Price of the “Efficiency Trap”

“Not valuing time with other physicians or allowing for informal conversations leads to a soulless efficiency and professional isolation.”   John Frey, MD (substitute your own profession if not a physician)

For many working in healthcare, our education process and clinical practice has programmed into us a “necessary” efficiency as we try to get through our overstuffed survival mode days.  In doing so, we often find ourselves treating our professional relationships (and even our patient care) as yet one more functional transaction that we have to navigate through as we sprint to get to the “end of the day.” 

Indeed, some of us drive ourselves as if we had only one gear, leaving us no ability to downshift both during and outside our work.   I’ve certainly fallen into that trap on too many occasions.  But not being present and connecting regularly with our colleagues and teams in a meaningful manner has a cost. 

In fact, I recently received feedback from one of my colleagues in the midst of a video meeting with them that I seemed distracted, and that they had something important to talk about with me but were withholding it because they needed for me to be more present.  I immediately felt “caught” practicing the soulless efficiency referenced above (yes, I was trying to answer an e-mail) and expressed my gratitude that they had taken the time and risk to provide me such feedback.  After recovering from my embarrassment, it led to a wonderful and uplifting conversation for which you can be certain I was fully engaged!      

None of us wants to go through our professional days in such a state of disconnection to each other.  What gets in the way?  “Reality!” you might exclaim.  We all know the litany of reasons and have likely recited them in our thoughts many times.  But settling for that “reality” costs us our own well-being AND our humanity!   As psychiatrist Dan Seigel writes, “Relationships are the most important part of our having well-being in being human.  It’s that simple.  And it’s that important.”  “Isolated soullessness” is a tragic and unnecessary price to pay when we allow “efficiency” to have the final word!  

The purpose of PeerRxMed is to make it easy (not efficient) to connect with colleagues, and to put to rest the myth we tell ourselves that we don’t have time.  If you’re reading this, you have likely already made the conscious decision to make collegial connection a priority and if the premise behind PeerRxMed is correct, you have benefited from it.  But there are still too many around us who are “efficiency-ing” their way through their days and telling themselves it has to be this way.  We need to help them.   So this week, reach out to a few of them for the simple purpose of connecting, remembering that doing so doesn’t have to take a lot of time, and it will help them (and you?) to escape the efficiency trap. In the bigger picture, that will always be time well-invested. 

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