Elementary School Kids can do this, so Should Surgeons
Doctors are faced with innumerable tasks that they must discharge in a day. We go from charting, to seeing a patient, to answering a phone call, to email and back again hundreds if not thousands of times a day. Have you ever been working on something that requires cognitive energy, such as focusing on a complicated problem, only to be interrupted and have trouble restarting the task? Cognitive disruptions like this happen to physicians but on a much larger scale and can be powerful distractions. We may be dealing with a complicated patient only to be interrupted by a phone call, an office worker asking for assistance, or any number of other interruptions. When this happens, we may often say “what were we doing again?” Instead of consciously dealing with this we allow it to create frustration and a sense of malaise.
Recently, I was having a chat with friend whose wife is a teacher. We were discussing how children in elementary school are given sometimes five minutes to go from one activity to another. This creates the expectation that you need five minutes minimum before restarting a new activity. Being astute, the teacher recognized this was mentally bad for the children and instituted a 90 second transition period. Did the students react poorly? No, they rose to the occasion quickly transitioning from their one activity to another. This transition was filled with positive energy and excitement.
There is a physiological basis for the latency you experience switching tasks, where your brain uses energy to hold focus on a task in its working memory. When an interruption happens, the brain must reboot and reload the original task back into the working memory. The same is also true when you want to switch from one distinct task to the next. There is a metabolic cost called a switching cost, that makes fast transitions uncomfortable. But like the children in elementary school, it is possible with dedicated training to become more efficient at task switching. This skill is indispensable for surgeons and doctors.
Our jobs as physicians is to be like the elementary students. Recognize that it is possible to switch our attention at lightning speed and consciously try to do it as much as possible through the day. Give yourself 90 seconds. Use A timer. Let me know how it goes.
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