Bullshit Jobs

Over the holidays I’ve been enjoying a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. It’s very amusing and makes you think about the work you do every day.

The contention of the book is that a lot of jobs achieve no useful purpose. They are like rituals that people go through but if you stopped doing them tomorrow then most likely no one would notice.

Of course, dentistry is useful but it made me think whether many of the things we do in the office are really useful or may just be BS. That is, if we stopped doing them would anyone really notice?

Please let me throw out a few suggestions of possible BS for you to consider.

• Morning “huddle”
  What does this meeting achieve? Doesn’t everyone already know what to do? Wouldn’t we just be better off if we simply got on with it?

• Practice management reports
  They take a long while to compile but are they helpful? How does knowing our case acceptance rate was 43% last month help us?

• New patient forms
  Are all the questions we ask really necessary? Will it change our treatment if we know that the person has kidney disease?

• Internal forms
  in an office I visited the dentist had to fill in a paper form when they dismissed every patient. It served no purpose that I could see.

• Practice managers
  I’ve seen extremely successful practices that don’t have a practice manager. It made me wonder what PMs really do.

It struck me that identifying BS jobs in our office has benefits.

Firstly it frees up time for useful jobs. Secondly it reduces the frustration inherent in doing something you know is pointless.

Do you have any BS jobs in your office? Feel free to put a comment or send me an email.