In praise of the quick win

In praise of the quick win

5th March 2024

[The Probe, February 2024]

As dentists we can often feel like we are standing at the foot of a huge mountain of immediate and pressing things to be completed. We might be facing challenging situations, complex patient treatments, detailed presentations to prep, time-intensive continuing personal development, key lectures to deliver, events to attend and any number of ever-present time constraints. My biggest motivator is the quick win. 

I look at my outstanding things to do list and always start by getting through a few of the smaller tasks. This is my preferred way to do most things – and it also serves to (eventually) get the bigger projects done. 

In my book, a quick win can be anything that takes less than half an hour and ideally less than fifteen minutes. It might be replying to a few emails, making on-the-spot decisions, reviewing a patient case file, delegating, planning or making some phone calls. But what’s really useful to me is doing the quick wins that prepare the groundwork that allow me to tackle the more demanding projects. Sometimes, simply getting off a blank page is all you need to kickstart your more time-intensive work.

There are a few well-known animal kingdom analogies here including eating bite-size pieces of frog or elephant – you’ll know the ones. The idea is that you pick your most difficult or undesirable project first to get it out of the way. “Eat the frog” and then you can go on with your day knowing the worst is behind you. I’m not sure I agree with the entire sentiment of this. Difficult things are always made up of a series of smaller, sequential actions. In effect, the quick wins are effective precursors to completing the more complex issues. Sometimes you can’t get it all done at once – especially if you work in a team or have an ongoing treatment plan you are working through with a patient.

Rooting everything in Kaizen theory (as is my life’s philosophy), achievements can and should be made through incremental progress. Kaizen means ‘good change’ and reflects the results of slowly and continuously improving. “Kaizen allows for continuous change in a way that doesn’t ask too much of people’s time and energy. It is people-friendly and easy” (Captain J Travis Doyle, Dover Air Force Base). 

When it comes to any learning experience, the quick wins are joyful and quite tangible. Each one bolsters confidence and lays the steps for the next layer of understanding. A succession of instant achievements becomes something much bigger and, together, has a greater impact. When I am teaching I like to adopt this approach as it provides a step-by-step route for students to a feeling of positivity and accomplishment. Also, without the small steps you are not likely to make much real progress towards your final goals: quickly get to grips with A and then we can move onto A+B and so on.

A quick win is really satisfying as you can chart your progress, tick things off and see how you are moving forward. So why not apply the principle of the quick win with a little bit of Kaizen magic to the larger challenges, seeing them as a series of smaller tasks that make up the whole? 

Quick wins are just all the steps we need to take to completing the more complicated or time-consuming things we face but in manageable chunks of time and effort. So instead of looking up at the mountain, start small and keep going. In no time you’ll be right at the top without realising it.