Consistency is Key!
January 31, 2017
If I have learned nothing over these many years I have learned this, consistency is the key to being a really good abstractor. Many of you have heard me give this talk but I think it bears repeating for some of our new team members. Each of us is a unique person with unique talents, strengths and weaknesses, things that work for say Lisa or Rodney may totally upset my apple cart and I am sure the same would hold true for them. I had a supervisor once who insisted that I chain my title back then run owners in a particular order that was completely foreign to me, it was a total disaster, my files were taking me twice as long to do because I was forcing my brain to do something it just wasn’t used to. I finally got with the program but in order for me to do that I had to develop a consistent set of checks and balances that worked toward my strengths and guarded against my weaknesses. Our run sheet in PABS has been designed with this idea in mind, it offers us a way to make notes to ourselves, to document which instrument cancels or alter another, to remind ourselves to go back and order copies for instance. It is really funny when we were abstracting in the courthouse it was nothing to pull a hundred books in a day, and now it seems like such a chore to have to log back into to a website you thought you were done with. Oh how times have changed! The same can be said with the run sheet, handwriting them took forever, now it literally takes two seconds to type a phrase, or jot down a note to yourself. I know that parts of the run sheet seem repetitive but it is there to make sure nothing gets forgotten, so instead of putting your initials or N/A just to get past a prompt, type it out. Notes don’t need to be fancy a simple not available, not requested, Assigns mob—/—-whatever we need to remind ourselves of. I know this seems be pretty basic but sometimes the simplest things can be the hardest to see. Have a great day every one.