Connecting with re-creation
I went to the American College of Physicians meeting in Orlando this year and attended a meeting about balancing life and work. Seems a little early in my career for such self-help I know, but I’ve always been a little too self-aware.
The speaker was Linda Clever, an internist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who is also a dynamic woman who has written books on living life with a busy career. The 1-hour group discussion was a nice change of pace in a conference full of experts talking about guidelines. I sat down next to an older couple as I settled in for the hour, delighted there was not a PowerPoint in sight. We were quickly asked to break into small groups to talk about strategies for avoiding burnout; my group ended up being me, and the couple.
They must have been in their 70s, maybe even 80s, both retired. He had been a neurologist for more than 40 years (in his day neurology was part of internal medicine, thus his presence at ACP), and she had been a journalist. It seemed fitting that here I was, in my first year as an attending, looking forward into a career and unclear exactly where it was headed, filled with uncertainty; and there they were, an entire career and life behind them, comfortable and confident for the ride they had had. We got started.
I asked them what they had done to try and maintain balance, to have a life amongst a career, or rather a career amongst a life. The wife, short and plump with round thin-rimmed glasses tucked into white hair, could have been plucked right out of a story about the North Pole. She began to recount some of the lessons they had learned. She talked lovingly of her husband and how he was always so engaged and interested in everything and that he was always volunteering to be on this committee or that committee. He sat smiling with big, bushy, white eyebrows, clean-shaven face with a yellow short-sleeve dress shirt and a red and blue tie that hung 2 or 3 inches above his belt. Short like his wife, his legs seemed to swing back and forth under the chair like a child at a playground.
"It always was interesting!" he exclaimed, waving his hands in excitement. "To me it never felt like work. Even in medical school I wanted to be involved in anything."
I thought back to my own days of medical school, involved in or leading multiple activist groups, often to the detriment of grades, and now my already growing list of committees and "nonclinical" activities.
"Once we had children," the wife went on, "I would tell his secretary to schedule school performances and sporting events, right there in his appointment book. If we did that, he never missed an event. In fact, the kids never even knew how busy he was because he was always there. It wasn’t until they grew up that they understood how much he was juggling." His smile just pulsed into an even bigger smile, chuckling here and there as she talked. "So that would be my recommendation to you. Be deliberate about your time with your family; schedule it like you would anything else. "
I made a mental note, arguing briefly with myself that I’m not even very good at scheduling things for work, but then I quickly vowed to do better with both.
I tried to point out that even with scheduling family time, it sure seemed like he worked a lot. How did he stay fresh over such a long career? He paused, raising those animated eyebrows as he deliberated. "Vacations and sabbaticals," he finally determined. "But when you go on vacation it has to be away. In my day you were nearly always available for patient phone calls. The only way to truly be on vacation would be to go far away from phones. Unplugged.
"And then, every 5 years, I would take a 6-month sabbatical. No seeing patients. We would pack up the kids and go to London. Sometimes I would come back at 3 months to take care of a few things, but I think sabbaticals are instrumental in rejuvenating a career. I would work on other projects or write. It made things harder financially, and we had to plan for it, but I came back to my practice refreshed, and the kids learned a lot, too." He settled back into his seat, arms crossed, his smile now looking more pleased and proud than amused.
