Decision fatigue

Strange title for today's blog post but please stay with me for a moment.I was watching one of my favourite reality TV shows recently. One of the people on it became over-stressed and started making a series of really poor decisions. You could see that this person's brain had melted and they just kept digging a deeper and deeper hole for themselves.

The dental office can, on occasions, be a high stress environment. If the dentist's (or even the front desk person's) brain melts then they may well make decisions that they later wish they hadn't.

One of the key things for dental teams is to ponder how they manage stress in the office so that everyone comes to problems and challenges with a fresh, clear mind.

I'll give you a suggestion that I go into in great detail in my seminar The Art of Efficient Dentistry.

That suggestion is to make as many as possible of the processes and decisions in the dental office automatic. Work out in advance how you want things to run and then make it all happen mechanically.

This achieve two things. Firstly, it reduces stress because most things happen without the need for thought or worry. Secondly, if problems occur and your decision making ability become impaired it means that it is likely that the office will continue to run normally until you recover your equilibrium.