Did You Take Care of Your People Today?

If you could only accomplish one thing today, what would that be? How would you decide?

We have so many inboxes to contend with: work and personal email, clinical inboxes in our electronic medical records (EMRs), text messages, and occasional phone calls. These inputs arrive from multiple sources, all demanding time and attention. Where do you start?

You could make a list, starting from the top and working your way down. You could highlight the most pressing items. You might use the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize tasks into urgent, not urgent, important, and not important work:

You could use pen and paper to draw asterisks next to critical items, or use an app to assign flags and priorities. We have so many tools, both digital and analog, to slice and dice this work. But what are the principles that guide it?

In health administration, my work is broad. It ranges from meeting individual physicians to address patient concerns, to meeting with government officials for health system planning. It's easy to capture and build the "to-do" list, but there are only so many hours in a day to see it through.

So, back to the question: how do we decide what to do?

What if we viewed our tasks across all our different roles from a single perspective: What do I need to accomplish today to look after my people? Which actions will leave my teams better off than when they started?

My calendar is overflowing with meetings and encounters, a mix of virtual and in-person. I’ve found that the best meetings are the ones where I genuinely help move something forward for my teams. It can be as small as hearing out a concern, or as monumental as approving a new funding model.

If you are in clinical practice, you know the feeling. It's the gratification of placing that last suture, receiving the X-ray report that confirms the pneumonia you suspected and want to treat, or hearing a patient say, "Thank you for looking after me."

No matter what these accomplishments look like, the end result is the same: looking after our people is where the real work is, and where the value lies.

This idea resonates with my goals for this site. In a sea of productivity blogs, I have always felt there were gaps in applying that advice to medicine and health care administration. If the content on this site helps just one person be a better physician, a more effective communicator, or a stronger leader, then I can go to bed knowing that I looked after my people.