“In an age obsessed with practicality, productivity, and efficiency, I frequently worry that we are leaving little room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are, ideas that we may later transform into new combinations with applications both practical and metaphysical.”
—The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge | Brain Pickings
Other SJ bloggers say it's not their job to educate you? Fine, I will try to do it instead.
I have seen a very unhelpful attitude around that basically says:
- Privileged people hurt others unconsciously through insensitive and biased actions which they don’t recognize to be bad.
- It is a cruel manifestation of such privilege for privileged people to ask marginalized people to educate them.
But this raises a question…
If you are not here to educate people and raise awareness, just what sort of social justice activism are you doing? Just getting angry at things?
“In any event, it is a bit difficult to take seriously arguments about efficiency in a society that devotes enormous resources to waste and destruction. As everyone knows, the very concept of efficiency is dripping with ideology. Maximization of commodities is hardly the only measure of a decent existence.”
—Noam Chomsky - Government in the FutureLean Hospital: What every hospital should embrace!
Most experts in the healthcare sector believe that every hospital should embrace lean methods to increase their bottom line in today’s society. Basically, hospital management would adapt a variety of techniques and tools to create a lean environment. This would result in a lean hospital with improved business processes, productivity, assets, human resources as well as quality of customer services and products.
Absolutely! As long as the physicians and administrators take part in the improvement projects, lean principles can be implemented successfully. Lean is actually a methodology for process improvement and a management improvement system. One of the basic tenets of this system is to engage employees at all levels and encourage them to improve their work. Of course, managers must also be involved.
In a lean environment, managers will go outside their offices and visit different departments to identify problems. This allows them to get a firsthand view, instead of relying on the budget reports. The key is to implement lean methods in a working environment that is driven by unique values which surrounds patient care.
Just like other industries, patients will always come first in a lean hospital environment. The needs of patients are paramount and the work environment must be driven by shared passion and values in delivering high quality services and products. Patient care (service) or test results inside the laboratory (product) will play a very important role when it comes to saving lives. This helps to make lean principles even more important in the health care industry.
As the population grows, the healthcare facilities have to find ways to fulfill the high demand for services. Without Lean, hospitals and other healthcare facilities will have difficulties to satisfy those demands at a reduced cost. A lean environment will solve space problems without incurring huge building costs or downsizing staff and improve turnaround time.
Today, lean management system has been copied in many different industries and its becoming the standard for most hospitals in the US. The main reason for creating a lean hospital is to streamline processes, improve finances, increase employee satisfaction and enhance patient care.
# The Ultimate E-mail Lifehack
I’ve found it, the holy grail every productivity pioneer - from David Allen to the guys at Asian Efficiency - has been looking for: the ultimate e-mail lifehack.
Many have pondered over the fact that the ‘Inbox’ is broken, that there must be some other way to do it. GTD-fetishists (under whom I count myself) have adopted the ‘Defer-Delegate-Delete-Respond-Do’-approach, made famous by Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox Zero’-talks.
This got me thinking: why do I keep putting a self-induced system on top of the infrastructure that is the e-mail inbox? Why not try and rebuild that infrastructure to make processing my e-mails a little easier?
And I’ve come up with something that appears to be too simple for words, but that has profoundly changed my life over the last couple of weeks:
The Smart Unread Inbox
I’ve taken Apple’s Mail.app option to create ‘custom inboxes’ based on rules to create a virtual inbox which consists of items that comply to these two rules:
- Are in the inbox
- Are unread
I’ve hidden all other inboxes and folders, with just two of these “Smart Unread Inboxes”, one for work-mail, one for personal mail.
(Other e-mail clients offer the same option.)
Why?
So what is this ‘magic’ you talk about? Those are just the unread messages in your inbox, you weird wizard of the East?
Well, that’s the genius of it. Once you start reading a message in this Smart Unread Inbox, it’s actually not part of it anymore. It’s in this sort of Schrödinger state, which only exists as long as you keep the e-mail open. So you have to act upon it, otherwise it will disappear forever into the mists that are the cloud.
Try it, you’ll be amazed.
