Monthly Archives: March 2016

Looks better than mine, even w/o butter.* I observed something this morning when making toast.  I don't make toast often, but when I do, I tend to let it go for a few minutes before heading back into the kitchen to check on it, hovering outside the toaster oven to make sure I grab it when it's "just right." Now, like you (I suspect), I tend to be a little annoyed by wasted time. Standing next to the toaster oven, tapping my foot impatiently, that's definitely wasted time.  So I have developed a habit of "prepping" for the toast by scooping up the butter I'll use on it and putting it on my plate.  But today it finally dawned on me that this prep routine (which I've done for years) really saves no time at all. It's no quicker to pick the butter up off plate and put it on my toast than it would be to just take the butter out of its own container and spread it; the step of transferring it to the plate in advance is meaningless.  (In fact, when I do this the entire process usually ends up taking longer, since I rarely get just the right amount of butter on my plate -- a mistake I wouldn't make when just buttering the bread from the tub.) Of course, I do get a personal payoff from this little activity: I am less bored while I wait for my toast. But even though I feel like I'm doing something, it actually makes me no more (and usually a bit less) productive. Naturally, when I realized this, my mind immediately jumped to practice workflow, and how easy it is to be deceived by activities that feel like progress but actually have no effect -- or even slow things down. My favorite one of these, a subject that we wind up discussing with almost every practice we work with, is the central vitals station. Transferring patients from the reception area to the vitals station, then from the vitals station to the exam room, is one of