Doodling is not a waste of time.
…drawing out the things we want to remember can be a powerful technique to combat our natural declines in memory, better even than repeatedly writing them down or listing characteristics and descriptors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/smarter-living/memory-tricks-mnemonics
Creating a to-do list is the right tool for recording nursing notes because we remember what we have to do, not what we have done.
…to-do lists…dampen anxiety about the chaos of life; they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to; and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/10/the-psychology-of-the-to-do-list-why-your-brain-loves-ordered-tasks
Nobody likes a troublemaker at work. We’ve all had colleagues who annoy us or deviate from the script with no heads-up, causing conflict or wasting time: jerks and show-offs who seem to be difficult for no good reason and people who break rules just for the sake of it and make others worse off in the process. But there are also people who know how to turn rule breaking into a contribution.
https://hbr.org/2018/04/when-solving-problems-think-about-what-you-could-do-not-what-you-should-do
Never ask what should you do. Asking what could I do leads to the scrutiny of options and the exploration of alternatives which leads to novel insights. Even in emergencies.
Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy.
People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-persistent-appeal-of-pessimism/
People have a negativity bias. The good news is that the world is doing better than you think.
…when you are young and experiencing lots of new stimuli—everything is new—time actually seems to be passing more slowly.
https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age/
You “see” more slowly so it feels like time is passing faster as the brain takes longer to process visual information.
Learning new things in short chunks is an overlooked gem that is hiding in plain sight.
Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc.
https://fs.blog/2019/01/great-things/
And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives
Idle time needs to built into any system so you can do what you need to do.
In the accident and emergency department, by contrast, remaining “inefficient” in this sense is a matter of life and death. If there is an exclusive focus on using the staff’s time as efficiently as possible, the result will be a department too busy to accommodate unpredictable arrivals, which are the whole reason it exists.
The difference between 1/3 and 1/4.
People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2019/01/02/thirdsday-the-holiday-thats-33-33-better-than-any-other/
Without consciously realizing it we place a high confidence in our intuition. And why wouldn’t we? It’s right far more often than it’s wrong. But confidence is a poor proxy for correctness and often means that when you’re wrong, you’re really wrong.
https://fs.blog/2012/03/daniel-kahneman-on-intuition/
Nurses experience that feeling every shift when your intuition is more right then wrong. It’s another way we save time.
Engrossing article about how blood has been perceived over time and around the world. Blood transfusions were banned from orthodox medicine for 150 years after early failures in transfusions experiments.
blood…travels in the body every day: some twelve thousand miles
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/the-history-of-blood
