Patrick McKenzie on X:
I hate to sound intellectually vacuous but choose to get more done. At the relevant margins, get more done. Life : culture / peers will routinely tell you it is OK to get less done and you should politely insist on getting more done. The amount of doneness you get is not fixed.
I have been thinking along these lines ever since reading, some dozen years ago, an article about a particularly successful cystic fibrosis center, whose outcomes were an order of magnitude better than average. This was before any new drugs or promising trials were available, and the only reason why they were so much better was that they did more of everything: more frequent follow-up, more intensive manual therapy, more changes to treatment regimen with subtle changes in condition, less complacency.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the inpatient service. It is incredibly easy to coast with reflexive and defensive medicine, putting out small fires like hospital-acquired infections or patient falls, passing on the buck to the next team, shrugging your shoulders about that 60-year-old with questionable CHF (or is it COPD/asthma) exacerbation who is not following the script and doesn’t seem to be getting any better despite being treated for everything. Patients hang around a bit longer, suffer a bit more iatrogenesis, die a bit sooner, not enough for it to be obvious in any particular case but just enough for the outcomes to be worse in aggregate.
Make no mistake: this is how many (most?) American hospitals operate, for the simple reason that there simply aren’t enough doctors and nurses around for the level of attention sick patients with many active complex disorders deserve. But doing more is the American ethos (see the X-post above); not being able to provide more focused care, we dig into the seemingly infinite supply of more drugs, more procedures, more iatrogenesis to which to expose patients, making their condition all the more complex.
Outside of medicine, this is also the difference you can see in “good” and “bad” (for collaboration) institutions: good ones throw water at embers before they become a fire, communicate more frequently and openly, do not leave documents for review “for after the long weekend”. They do more; or rather, each individual there does more and does not pass on the buck to forces unknown which are beyond their control (and the bigger the institution is, the more numerous and more complacent those forces are; incredible how that works). The not-so-good institutions also do more: of emailing, usually, to tell you that something can’t be done.
So yes, choose to get more done, and also make sure you are doing more of the right thing.