My Board

Adam, I agree this point of view is pretty far-fetched. Obviously, there are many situations out there like station 23’s that prohibit a “perfect prevention” scenario. I am aware of how much time and effort you have put into this topic and I am very grateful for your efforts! However, I feel that culturally we have a lot more work to do before people start to embrace the idea of firefighter heath and wellness.

While I agree with the author about changing the way we approach the exposure of firefighters to toxic environments, I disagree with his approach to predicting when lives are savable. We cannot just assume everyone is dead. Many other factors contribute to survivability other than the sound of smoke detectors. He is correct in saying that we should be treating scenes more like hazmat events. We need to implement decontamination as a standard part of our operation. We should also make decontamination in returning equipment to service a much higher priority. There are several steps we can take to reduce our exposure. Just look around the station at some of the material posted about cancer awareness. The problem is that people don’t do it. This same lack of action is true about many other areas of firefighter wellness and safety. Whether it is returning from a structure fire, taking the time to exercise or choosing to improve your diet, we need to do a better job of taking care of ourselves. Coach Urban Meyer describes these actions as “below the line behavior” in his book Above the Line. They are referred to as BCD’s. Blame (others), complain (about circumstances), and defend (yourself), or BCD’s. When there is a lot of BCD going on, it means people are not owning their mistakes, not being accountable, and it typically means you are continually hearing excuses for why things don’t happen (Meyer, 2015). As leaders we must continuously maintain our expectations and hold each other accountable. This may not be a popular choice, but in the end people will be thankful.

What strategies do you use to manage your time effectively? I use my Microsoft calendar to help keep track of events and items I need to accomplish. I also send myself emails as reminders to do things. Often times, I will have a thought enter my head that reminds me "hey don't forget you need to do this thing". I send my self an email reminder to do it or make a plan for it. This allows me to put it out of my mind and get back to time with he family. I also recently learned about an email management system that helps to sort the things I need to do. This allows me to keep track of things that are ongoing projects.

What are some of your biggest obstacles to you managing your time effectively? One obstacle is email. It just comes in all day and constantly reminds me of other things I need to do. Even though, I have found a better way to manage them, it still interrupts my thought process. I think I need to schedule times to deal with email and not worry about them until it is the appropriate time. 

What can you do to remove some of these obstacles? As I stated above, I think I will need to schedule time for emails rather than dealing with them as they are received. I also think that more daily exercise with help to improve my thought process and energy to deal with them.