 |
| Take time for the most important things. |
I was once told that “People are not an interruption of our
work, they are our work.” This was in reference to all the phone calls, extra
questions, broken appliances and other things that interrupted the scheduled
work in a busy medical office. It was a reminder that although we had tasks to
complete, those tasks were for the patients coming to our office to receive
services. We were in the business of
treating people, not things.
This is not so different from our daily lives. Why do we do all those THINGS that somehow
encumber us from day to day? I described
my day yesterday as one spent jumping through hoops. This simply means I was tending to tasks that
had to be done, yet seemed an interruption of things that I thought were truly
important. Some of those hoops, were
just that – required busy work. However,
some of the interruptions were directly related to individuals’ needs. At the end of the day I thought, “I didn’t
get anything done today!” I took a
moment to evaluate the day and realized that some very important things had,
indeed, been accomplished. Some of those
things directly involved people and their needs while others, like registering
my automobile, indirectly served individuals. (It’s a long story, but it
required two trips to the DMV 20 miles away.)
It is important to keep in mind that the laundry, the
dishes, and the bill paying, are all a service of some sort. They seem like busy work that needs to be
done, but someone needs clean clothes and food on the table and a legally
driven vehicle.
It
is also important to keep in mind that although completing the busy work might
be a worthy goal for the day, sometimes people and their immediate needs will
interrupt us. Don’t forget that they are
your true work. Without them, all the
other stuff wouldn't matter.
