Emergency room triage

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Cheryl

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
Theophrastus
d. 278 B.C.

On several occasions over the years, I’ve had the unfortunate experience of taking someone to an emergency room at a hospital. After a hospital staffer gets the patient’s name and information, the patient is sent to triage: a nurse checks the patient’s vital signs, collects basic information about the reason for the visit and then makes a decision about the next step.

The choices are either to proceed with immediate treatment or — as happens in most cases — to send the patient to the waiting room. Generally, the waiting rooms I saw were teeming with folks, all thinking they have an emergency and waiting for hours to get medical attention.

For a variety of reasons, there is widespread abuse of today’s emergency rooms. But that’s not the point of today’s lesson. Today’s lesson is about learning from the triage process.

I’m not an expert on triage, but we can learn a lot by taking a high-level view of the concept. Basically, in triage, a nurse makes a decision about the urgency of each patient’s condition and determines who will be treated first. Think about what would happen if patients were served in order of arrival. Medical problems aren’t all equal; some can wait, but delaying treatment of others could result in loss of life.

So how does this process relate to our business and personal lives? It’s simple. We need to set up a triage process for our lives. We need to sort through and prioritize all the things we want and need to do. Some of the things on our “to do” list should be shuffled off to the waiting room. Others ought to be put on high alert. But without a system for separating the life-altering from the mundane, we often focus on the wrong thing.

Apply the process of triage to your to-do list. Keep only the most important items on your primary list. A second list can contain the things to do after you’ve finished the items on the first list.

There are also a couple of questions you can ask yourself to determine if you’re working on the most important tasks.

  1. What is the highest and best use of my time right now?
  2. What is the worst thing that can happen if ____ is not done today?
  3. Is there anything I can delegate to someone else?
  4. Is there anything I can totally eliminate from my list?

If you set up a triage process for your life, the important things will get done before the mundane ones. As a result, you will always be working on the highest value task.

Don’t worry about time management; work on task management. It’s much easier and more productive.

I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passers-by to drop their unused minutes into it.
Bernard Berenson
1865 – 1959

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How do you view yourself?

Posted on February 13, 2012 by John Chancellor

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.
Alexander Graham Bell
1847 – 1922

When you look in the mirror, how do you perceive yourself? Do you see a person possessing limited resources and abilities? Or do you see someone capable of learning and growing, and therefore able to get what they want from life?

No one knows your reaction but you. But if we answered honestly, I suspect a high number of us would confess to believing their resources and abilities are limited.

According to Sam Sommers, a psychology professor at Tufts University, “seeing the self as a static and stable entity is what puts us on the defensive and mandates chronic self-deception. You should train yourself to view intellect – and any other aspect of your personal skill set – as a muscle that grows with effort and atrophies with neglect.”

In fact, your perception of your own abilities can have a bigger impact on your success than you might think.

There was a study conducted at Stanford University where students were asked to send letters of encouragement to at-risk middle school students, to explain that there was hope for them. As part of each letter, the college students were told to relate the struggles they had faced and the obstacles they had overcome. The writers were instructed to emphasize the idea that natural intelligence is overrated; persistence is more important.

Did the letters help? We don’t know, because they were never mailed; the study was actually designed to measure the impact on their authors. And the simple experience of writing these letters had a profound impact on the college students. Their attitude towards school improved greatly, as did their grade point average – by one-third point on a four point scale. They took their own advice.

So what’s the lesson? That you shouldn’t think of yourself as having limited resources or fixed skill sets. Focus on effort. Remember that intellect and skills are like muscles: they grow with use. Make sure you’re building up your skills by using them and allowing them to grow.

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you are probably right.
Henry Ford
1863 – 1947

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Does “why” matter?

Posted on February 6, 2012 by John Chancellor

Our greatest duty and our main responsibility is to help others.
Dalai Lama
1935 -

When you’re charged with a task, whether it’s at work, home or with friends, does the reason why matter? Does your manager try to motivate you by instilling a sense of purpose in your work? Do you try to motivate your family members by sharing why you want them to do specific things a certain way? We often focus on the tasks we want done and the desired results, yet fail to understand the importance of why.

To illustrate the point, let me share an experiment done by Professor Adam Grant from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He was called in by another major university in an effort to improve the morale and productivity of the university’s call center. Most universities have call centers that regularly phone their alumni seeking donations –  a very challenging task. A high percentage of calls are unproductive and many folks are extremely rude to the callers, so the turnover rate is typically 400 percent.

Professor Grant asked about the intended use of the donations and learned that most of the money went to fund scholarships. Based on that information, he divided the call center employees into three groups.

The control group received no motivational speech. The second group was given a five minute pep talk about the skills they were learning in the call center and how the experience would benefit them later in life. The third group was given a five minute talk by a scholarship recipient; this student told call center employees how the scholarship had impacted his or her life and expressed gratitude for the valuable work performed by the call center staff.

The results? The first group’s collections remained at the same level. Surprisingly, the second group also showed no improvement. But the third group’s actual time on the phone went up by a factor of three. The number of calls they made per hour doubled. And the amount of donations they received went up fivefold.

What caused such dramatic change? It seems that when we work to benefit others, when we understand that we’re changing someone’s life for the better, we’re much more motivated to provide our best efforts.

It’s difficult to stay motivated by focusing on the benefits you will receive. Understand how your actions benefit someone else. If you want more out of life, find ways to help others.

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.
Winston Churchill
1874 – 1965

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Nine steps to a more successful you, Part 5

Posted on January 30, 2012 by John Chancellor

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.
Booker T. Washington
1856 – 1915

Today we’ll examine the final of the nine steps to greater success: focusing on what you will do, not what you won’t do.

Research has shown that when we try not to focus on a thought, that thought becomes more active in our minds. The same principle holds true for behavior: when we try to avoid doing something, the impulse to do it becomes stronger. So going back to “if, then” plans, make sure that you don’t use negatives in your plan. Don’t focus on what you want to avoid; focus only on what you will do.

Let’s recap the nine steps so you’ll have them all in one place.

  1. Get specific about what you want and write it down. Determine what actions you’ll need to take to accomplish your goals. Engage in mental contrasting – switch focus between your goals and the actions required to reach them.
  2. Set aside a specific time to take action on your goals. Use “if, then” planning to program your mind to take action.
  3. Know how much more you need to do to achieve your goal. Emphasizing how far you’ve come can cause you to relax your efforts.
  4. Be a realistic optimist. Believe that you can achieve your goals but don’t underestimate the effort necessary.
  5. Focus on getting better rather than on being good. Realize that you’re going to make mistakes when trying something new. It’s okay to make errors: it’s part of the process of learning and growing.
  6. You won’t achieve any worthwhile goal unless you stick with it. You need grit. Stick with your plan long enough to succeed.
  7. Build your willpower. Willpower is like a muscle; it strengthens with use. But give yourself a break when you’re tired and your energy is low.
  8. Don’t tempt fate. It’s much easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
  9. Focus on what you will do, not what you want to avoid.

These nine steps are taken from the book Nine Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Halvorson. It’s available as an eBook on Amazon.com for a little over $3. It’s short and easy to read, and it’s well worth the price.

If you haven’t been able to keep your New Year’s resolutions or to reach other goals, I strongly suggest you use these nine steps to develop a more successful you.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
1879 – 1955

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Nine steps to a more successful you, Part 4

Posted on January 23, 2012 by John Chancellor

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
Mahatma Gandhi
1869 – 1948

We continue our series of the ways to be more successful with steps six, seven and eight.

Step six involves having grit: the persistence and commitment to your long-term goals. Study after study has shown that one key ingredient to success is deliberate practice. There’s no such thing as overnight success; success requires lots of work. It’s both easy and tempting to give up when things get a little uncomfortable. You need grit to stick it out.

According to Halvorson, “Grit is all about not giving up in the face of difficulty, even when you are tired, discouraged or just plain bored.”

Put this concept into action by examining your long held beliefs about what you’re capable of accomplishing. If you believe something is beyond your abilities, you’ll find ways to sabotage your results. Once you decide on a goal, make up your mind to stick with it until the end.

Step seven is in a similar vein: increasing your willpower. Willpower is like a muscle: it grows with proper exercise and use. So the more you exert your willpower, the more you’ll have.

Here are some tips for increasing your willpower.

  • Don’t try difficult or demanding tasks when you’re tired or emotionally drained.
  • If your willpower is running low, give yourself a rest before taking on something new and challenging.
  • Don’t start by tackling large or difficult goals. Begin with easier goals and work your way up.
  • Only pursue one major goal at a time.

To build your willpower muscle, remember to start small. If you’re feeling low, speed up your willpower recovery by doing something to lift your spirits or reward yourself.

Step eight is to avoid tempting fate. Don’t tax your willpower when you don’t need to do so; it’s much better and easier to avoid temptation than to fight it. We often think that we have more willpower than we actually do and put ourselves in situations where that willpower is sorely tested. Casually entering such situations is asking for trouble. You should identify specific circumstances that undermine your goals and drain your willpower so you can avoid them. For instance, if your goal is to lose weight, consider the times you strayed from healthy eating in the past; if a particular person, place, or activity caused you to overeat, you should avoid it whenever possible. It’s much better to steer clear of temptation than to try to resist it.

Think about your goals and what you want to accomplish, then think about times in the past when your good intentions were derailed. Seek ways to avoid temptation rather than using up your willpower unnecessarily. Remember the Lay’s potato chip ad: “nobody can eat just one.”

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
Chinese Proverb

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