What’s On Your Bucket List?

Sept 2019 DSM Article by Lisa Fischer-Herdt

I screw up. Oh, I know, I’m sure I’m the only one. I can see you all in the comfy coziness of your glass houses. 

When I make mistakes, I like to evaluate what happened and what the root cause is so I can prevent a repeat performance. I look at the event, ask the 5 whys, consult my colleagues, and ALWAYS seek the counsel of my Mom. 

92% of the time (I made that statistic up, BTW), I find that my missteps can be traced back to my attempts to do too much. I’m either over-committing to aggressive timelines, forgetting there are only 24 hours in a day, sacrificing personal life activities for work activities, OR insisting on managing everything myself. 

Do you know what the corrective action is for each of these? 1 word: DELEGATION! You cannot be a master of all trades. Tiger Woods is a great golfer but I haven’t seen him win an Oscar. Peyton Manning is a heckuva quarterback but the expertise and dedication required mean that he’s probably not picking up his own dry cleaning or preparing the gourmet meal at Saturday’s dinner party for 10. I do a pretty darn good job leading a team of medical billers and heading up a customer support team. I run into trouble though when I also have to function as counselor, project manager, fitness coach, and everything in between. You just can’t do it all. At least I know I can’t. Neither can Peyton Manning or Tiger Woods so at least I’m in good company.

So what do you do? Again, you DELEGATE. Evaluate the tasks that make up your week & place them in 3 buckets. 

1. Bucket #1 – These are tasks that only you can do. These should be high value activities that only you can do because of your unique education, licensing, capabilities, or experience. Think crown preps, placing an implant or delivering an oral appliance.
2. Bucket #2 – These are activities that you can delegate. These can be low value or high value tasks. They are usually tedious, require very specific knowledge sets that you don’t inherently possess, or are absolutely necessary but can be managed by someone else. A few ideas that come to mind are medical billing for your sleep cases, financial discussions about treatment, or completing your Medicare credentialing.
3. Bucket #3 – This is stuff that you’re doing but NO ONE needs to do. These may be artifacts of the past. Don’t feel guilty about it. They probably made total sense at one time but they don’t really matter anymore. Get these tasks off your “to do” list. Kicking this bucket will free you up to work on things in Bucket #1 or work on that golf game with Tiger.