Balancing Your Personal and Professional Lives

Although practicing medicine can be a gratifying, rewarding profession, for many physicians it’s an increasingly stressful job filled with increasingly unpleasant busywork that doesn’t add anything to the bottom line. Sometimes the answer is to work a little less.

Work a little less and walk into the office a happier human being. If you’re a happier human being, you’ll produce more money and your staff will be happier.

Here are 23 steps to balancing your personal and professional life.

1. Embrace Lifelong Learning. Make a commitment to education, formal or informal. A medical career is not a destination, it’s a journey. Take the time to learn new things.

2. Be Ethical. The medical profession involves facing ethical questions every day. Typically, the best ethical response is to do what is in the best interest of the patient. Many state medical licensing boards require continuing medical education courses in ethics. Think of it as an opportunity, not a burden.

3. Don’t Be Too Efficient. Physicians are not robots. Sometimes the best thing you can do is listen to a patient, even if it takes a couple of minutes out of your schedule. This interaction can be a surprisingly enriching experience for you!

4. Leave It at Work. At the end of your workday, write down the things that really bugged you. Then leave the list — and your issues — at the office and go home.

5. Take Control of Your Finances. How much debt do physicians leave medical school with? A lot. So, clearly, when you start out, you have a lot of debt to pay off. But learn to save as well. You want financial security at the end of your career, when you can truly enjoy practicing medicine, not because you’re paying bills.

6. Learn to Say “No.” The road to burnout is paved with saying “Yes” to everything. It is possible to take on too many projects or accept too many responsibilities. Before you accept, ask yourself: Will it enhance my career? Will it take away from my time with family and friends? Will it lead to balance or imbalance in my life? Sometimes the best possible answer is “No.”

7. Prioritize. What epitaph will be written on your tombstone? Have you ever seen one that said, “She sure spent a lot of time at the office”? No. People on their deathbeds don’t wish they’d spent more time at work. They wished they’d spent more time with family and friends.

8. Accept Your Limitations. Doctors can’t save all patients. Doctors can’t do everything. Sometimes your to-do list just won’t be completed. Accept it and move on.

9. Take Vacation. Take days off on a regular basis. Do it often enough and regularly enough that your staff and patients become used to the idea. Let yourself become accustomed to the idea without guilt.

10. Find a Niche. What do you most want to do as a physician? What are you best at? Focus on that. Focusing your energies on a single area of expertise or interest can lead to amazing success.

11. Spread Out Your Interactions. We get into the habit of spending time with people our age starting in kindergarten. But once we’re out of school, a great deal of enrichment can come from spending time with people younger and older than us.

12. Exceed Patients’ Expectations. There’s great pleasure to be found in going the extra mile for patients. Your patients will remember you for it and keep coming back.

13. Ask: What Do You Need? Ask your family and staff what they need most from you. Their answers might surprise you.

14. Don’t Talk About Work. When you’re socializing with other physicians, try to talk about something other than medicine. Yes, there’s a whole wide world out there.

15. Don’t Procrastinate. Clean up your inbox, prioritize your tasks, break them down into manageable chunks, complete medical records before they pile up. Respond to emails quickly and efficiently, return phone calls in a timely fashion. Be a disciplined doctor and a decider, not a procrastinator.

16. Multitask. Except when you need to really concentrate on one thing with all your focus and attention. And learn to tell which is which.

17. Dine Together. Eat at least one meal a day with family or friends.

18. Create a Support System. Nobody performs well in a vacuum. Everybody needs somebody who will listen to them, who understands them better than they understand themselves — somebody who can say, “You really need a vacation,” or “You’re under too much stress; take a break.”

19. Take Weekends Off When You Can. When you’re not scheduled to work, take the weekend off...and don’t work. Don’t go into the office to get caught up — you rarely do. Tell friends and family what you’re trying to do so they can help you break the habit.

20. Make Non-doctor Friends. Yes, make friends with people who are not physicians, nurses, and who don’t want you to be their doctor.

21. Be Flexible. Balance is a shifting concept. Stress and busy periods are a part of any career, but learning to balance it and deal with it is the key to survival.

22. Take Your Own Road. Everybody’s journey through life is different. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. Recognize that the challenges you face are yours alone and, although they may be shared, they’re unique to you. Try to pause and enjoy the journey along the way.

23. Have Fun. Take your profession seriously, but use some humor. Smile. Laugh. Enjoy what you’re doing.

Action Step: Make a list of 5 things you would like to do more often. Review daily and little by little begin to do more of those activities, explaining to family, coworkers and friends your mission. Keep a daily log to list activities that you start to spend more time on from your list.

Adapted from 31½ Essentials for Running Your Medical Practice by Dr. John Guiliana and Dr. Hal Ornstein.