This morning I awoke at 4.50am with several thoughts buzzing through my head and the quadrants seemed to be a very useful concept for those struggling with work overload (me):

Covey talks about 4 quadrants with tasks that are important and/or urgent (I = Important & Urgent, II = Important but not Urgent, III=Not important but Urgent, and IV = Not important and not Urgent). We tend to spend a lot of time in I and III with the odd excursion into IV (the fun stuff) at the expense of II. The problem is that II is what makes people highly effective – the non-urgent but important tasks of planning, prioritising, communicating, reflecting, blogging etc. Alik Levin’s blog sums this up nicely.

Of course you have to know where you are heading (your goals) to know what is important and not, and you have to be proactive too, otherwise everyone else’s priorities will find their way into your to-do list via email before you can set up your “I’m out of the office” response…

I think the main problem is having the text chat facility – I’m not so good at listening, thinking and typing at the same time (or listening, thinking and reading) – one of them gets lost, so I tend to miss what the speaker is saying while I’m ‘asking a question’ or ‘listening’ to another audience member comment.

This leads me on to conlclude that I’m clearly not a digital native/net generation/homozappien and, perhaps contrary to what David White mentioned in Thursday’s session, this multi-multi-tasking ability in “today’s youf” is a significant ability. It also made me wonder if a study has been done on accidents caused by use of mobile phones while driving, separated into age-groups – perhaps we will see an increased ability of young drivers to multi-task at the wheel without increasing their likelihood of having a crash. Or perhaps homozappiens are just good at spreading concentration evenly over many tasks, so in the end none get what they deserve?

Now that made me think about how stressful students might find this sort of training and whether we might need to consider a gentler approach for them. Talking with a colleague who shared my concerns made me even more interested in this possibility and looking at Linda’s blog entry on the Calgary Cambridge method (that is being used as a model) added a little more impetus to my exploration.

My visit yesterday to the Copenhagen vet school (thanks Søren for arranging it at such short notice!) was very valuabe in many respects and I think the way Rikke Langebæk is approaching communication skills with her students, may just be that gentler way that I was thinking about. One subtle (but I think significant difference) is that Rikke doesn’t use trained actors but plays the role of the client herself having built up a relationship with the students. Part of the preparation of students involves discussing video clips of consultations that go well and also some that don’t. Fun is a big and important part of the session. None of this knocks Calgary Cambridge per say, but I believe the subtelties of how the session is run could be very significant.

I’m wondering if the use of actors might then be reserved for students who have already been gently introduced to communication skills with someone they know and respect and who is actually not quite as skilled as the actor in playing a role – for me (and I believe for the experienced emergency medicine clinician who played the 2nd year vet student trying to get information from the very stressed client about their collapsed puppy) the actor was so good it was like reality, only this time - to add to the stress there were 9 staff observing too!