Efficiency is not...

When I visit dental offices I sometimes see dentists running around like crazy people. Such dentists say that they are busy and all of them think that they are efficient.

They jump from surgery to surgery, patient to patient and yet when you add up their daily production it is usually unimpressive.

A technical definition of efficiency is "the ratio of the useful work performed by a process to the total energy expended".

Put in this light, the most efficient dentist is the one who gets the most work done with the least expenditure of effort.

Dentists who run around like crazy people are definitely expending lots of energy. Every moment of the day is filled with some task or other. And, the moments that are not filled with tasks are spent annoying the staff.

However, their ratio of work done to energy expended is very low.

Yet, I have seen the opposite. There are dentists who move around the office like sloths (hardly expending any energy) and despite that, at the finish of the day, their production of dentistry is enormous.

Some of you will say that you are busy and happy and you don't care about being efficient.But, some of you will say you want to get more done with less work.

For those of you who want to me be more efficient, this blog post and several over the coming weeks are dedicated to you.