One of the most annoying things for any professional is to be face-to-face with the person you are serving — whether it be your customer, client or patient — in the limited time available to you, and feel that your attention is being diverted from the main problem at hand.

It happens to all of us. We are all human.

For a doctor, it may come in the form of having a patient start going off on what appears to be a tangent about a different issue, completely unrelated to what they are immediately dealing with.

You could be a cardiologist, and the patient tells you about their cataracts that have been bothering them for a couple of years.