The 3am Rolodex

It’s 3am and your mental Rolodex of clinical and non-clinical tasks is running: if you know it, this episode is for you. On The Practice Rounds Podcast we talk about how in practice, the problems keeping you up at night, logging on to the EMR on weekends and being mentally absent at the dinner table isn’t the medicine. It’s everything else that goes into running a practice.

Why the Usual Advice Doesn't Work

Yoga, mindfulness, boundary-setting: real tools but they solve different problems. None of them touch a schedule that's already an hour behind before your first patient sits down. Efficiency doesn't save you either. Being able to do everything just means you're the one doing everything, in less and less time.

"They don't change how our days run. They don't change that at the end of the day we have a mountain of work that we need to do and only so many hours in the day."

How to get time back so you can show up as the person and the doctor you want to be

The fix isn't another wellness habit. It's how you manage your practice. Small changes that compound into hours of your time back. Fewer evenings on the EMR, engaged at home, starting to live the “better” you imagined in residency. And doing it while still practicing medicine the way you want to.

Where to Start

Name the one task eating the most of your time, and get specific. That answer is the first target to start getting your time back.

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Episode Takeaways

1. Efficiency is no longer the answer, because it just means you're the person doing everything in less and less time.
2. The tools we talk about most, yoga, mindfulness, boundary setting, are important and have their place. None of them change how your day at work actually goes. None of them help you get your work done at work.
3. Small changes ripple into big differences. 5 minutes saved a day becomes 15. Fifteen becomes an hour. It doesn't require a whole overhaul of your practice to start getting time back.

Timestamps

00:00 — The 3am Rolodex and the realization the medicine wasn't the problem

02:05 — The hallway conversation every female physician has had, never feeling like it's enough

04:36 — The efficiency trap, and why being more efficient was never going to fix it

08:01 — The real tool: how you manage your practice, and what changes when it runs better

10:19 — Small changes, not an overhaul, and how five minutes becomes an hour

If You're Asking These Questions, This Is For You

• Why do I feel like I'm never doing enough as a doctor?
• How do Canadian female physicians get their time back without cutting back on patients?
• Why does running my practice feel harder than residency ever did?
• What is the real reason I'm still doing charts on a Sunday night?
• Is there a way for a fee-for-service physician to see more patients and work fewer hours?
• Why doesn't yoga or work-life balance fix how exhausted I feel at the end of clinic?
• What's the difference between being efficient and having real time back as a doctor?