Your practice efficiency wins are hiding in plain sight

How many times have you struggled looking for something only to realize it’s immediately in front of your face? (Ahem…hello soy sauce).

Turns out, the same phenomenon applies to our practice efficiency.

How? Brain habituation.

Back up – what is brain habituation?

Brain habituation is when your brain adapts to situations – even uncomfortable or painful ones – to the point where you don’t even notice them anymore. In the big picture, this is an advantageous feature to have.

However, when you’re trying to improve your practice efficiency so you have more time, fewer tasks or more headspace (all three?!), your brain’s ability to ignore fixable pain points makes spotting practice inefficiencies way harder.

An embarrassing personal example

I’m a self-proclaimed travelling circus, travelling between multiple sites in my community practice. A couple days a week, I have a longer commute.

Love these drives, they feed my audiobook obsession (thank you Diary of a CEO for inspiring this post).

But inevitably, after happily sipping my tea along the way, I’d be dying for a bathroom by the time I got to the hospital. Like casually hunch over and quickly shuffle to avoid wetting myself. Very demure. Very professional.

This pattern continued multiple times a week for 2.5 years. 🤯

Yes, for two and a half years this trying-not-to-wet-my-pants struggle was something I’d just accepted as part of my longer drive days. Despite being physically uncomfortable, my brain had adapted to the point where I didn’t question if there was a way to avoid this recurrent scenario.

I just kept doing the same thing.

Brain habituation absolutely affects your practice efficiency

This is a non-medical example, but brain habituation impacts our practice efficiency constantly.

Maybe your schedule is booked a certain way because that’s how it’s always been done when you joined a group. Despite there being ways you know it could be improved, you’ve adapted and now don’t really notice.

Maybe you admit patients after a certain procedure because that’s what the group does, even though the hematoma check could potentially be done over the phone.

Maybe you don’t offer a certain service in your office, which means another day gets bogged down with extra visits that could have been dealt with at the time of consult. Introducing that service would mean only one trip for the patient and one less preventable follow-up on your list.

Taking a step back reveals the obvious

If you take a step back, or even think about the frustrations you had early in your practice, you might find some obvious small tweaks that could make meaningful (and time and task saving!) differences in your day.

In the case of my not-wetting-my-pants struggle, the final straw was needing to run into a gas station 200 meters from the hospital because I was that desperate. Something needed to change.

Now on my longer commute days I don’t start drinking my tea until passing the halfway point of my drive. The simplest tweak. No more hunched, desperate shuffle. Real difference.

What’s hiding in your practice?

How many simple changes with real differences to your practice efficiency might be hidden because of brain habituation?

Start by asking yourself: what frustrated you in your first few months of practice? What small annoyances have you just accepted as “the way things are”?

Those answers might be your easiest and biggest opportunities to kick up practice efficiency and start saving time, energy and possible physical pain.