Let It Go…

There are times when I question myself. How did I get that all done? Sadly, there are things—tasks and responsibilities—that get overlooked or forgotten. This blog is one of them. :/  I was supposed to upload this yesterday and I completely forgot.

I am not sure what your schedule has been, but spring break “breaks” me every year. If you don’t have children, you likely work during spring break. And, well, without the expletive—let me just say it was a “rough” week. 

I am glad to have staff who can go on vacations with their families and we encourage time out of the office, but this year it was just a bit harder to handle. We had staff members who were intermittently off prior to spring break, then the week before spring break the vacations started. Running on a skeleton crew and seeing more little humans in one week than I want to even count reminds me of why I am a general dentist and not running a specialty practice for little humans. We survived and I am grateful to have my team back in full force (well, nearly). That being said, my original blog was about “spring cleaning.”  

I have never been one of those people who says, “It is spring, so it is time to do spring cleaning,” but as the weather warms I naturally become more motivated to attack the overlooked piles of this and that. I found myself recently going through some things at the office. What a frightening task. I graduated in 2003, and I still have “stuff” from back then. I am not a hoarder, per se, but, for some reason, my educational materials have always been hard for me to part with. I have everything very organized, but I rarely (actually, never) reference anything from my notes/texts, but yet I can’t seem to just throw it all away. It is of no value to me or anyone else, but I still keep it. Does anyone else have this problem?  

Then there is the “free stuff”—you know, the goodies that you get at annual meetings or CE courses. I have three brand-new, still in the package, cord-packing instruments. I use Traxodent, but I still haven’t offed the instruments. They are nicely stacked on a shelf in my office. Then there are the models, burs, and files you get at the participation classes. It’s your badge of honor from class, but no one is going to care or even see it, but it still sits there, in the back corner of the drawer.  

I have been unloading a lot of paper though, so I have been getting better about that. Handouts, thankfully, are a thing of the past, so I am not accumulating as many as I used to.

But the issue remains: What do you save? What do you keep? How often do you purge? Both personally and professionally, it feels good to clean house every once and a while. I just need to get more consistent and stronger about letting “things” go. So, here’s my challenge to you: Let things go.

Colleen B. DeLacy, DDS, FAGD