Planner Reads

Saw a great show on the growing Nursing Crisis on NOW the other night. Now comes at the end of a series of newsweekly shows (Greater Boston, McLaughlin Group, Washington Week) that generally occupies the attention of my media junky family on Friday evening so I’m usually pretty burned out on current events by then, but this show caught my attention.

The segment began by describing how important nurses were–the proportion of well-trained nurses to patients has huge impact on survival rates–and then went on to detail the causes behind the nurse shortage.

While the majority of the show was about the nurse shortage, I’m writing about the first half of the show here because it reminded me once again that the exhausting, repetitive, caring, tedious work of just paying attention–or what we can call listening now that “listening” is a technical term–is often more important than the single, grand deductive insight in achieving a successful and satisfying outcome.

Maybe it’s because I had spent several hours of that day monitoring radian6 feeds and optimizing keywords for a paid search. Or maybe it was because the earlier half of my week was spent listening to franchisees talk about ...