A year and a half between posts is a long time.
It started with trying to return my writing focus to fiction after a long hiatus that lasted through undergrad, medical school, and most of residency. There was a brief start in winter of 2019-2020 and then dormancy again with the onset of the COVID19 pandemic and frantically trying to relearn my non-specialty medical knowledge in case of redeployment. Transition to staffhood was busy, plus some other to-dos (*cough* renos *cough*), but things actually settled down a little bit in late spring/early summer 2023. Creative writing slowly started again…until a colleague who was a cornerstone of my division unexpectedly and suddenly passed away in summer of 2023.
It was tragic. This death rippled through the local medical community like shockwaves. I know I walked around in a daze, operating below usual capacity and efficiency. And yet, we had to ramp up our workload. A significant void in patient care was left in the wake of this passing, let alone the leadership roles this colleague held. We learned of the death the first day after the weekend. Emergency meeting held the same week to divide up the workload to try to ensure seamless care where possible. Those in my division were working at max capacity that our lives had been set up for, and yet all pitched in to stretch further. And wasn’t it telling that the order of meeting first went into division of work – and then we finally gave ourselves a chance to mourn collectively for this good, talented, caring human being who was now gone from the world far too early.
You are remembered. You are missed.
The months that followed felt like trying to endlessly cram in more into the same amount of time that existed prior. To compound this was the frustration and demoralization with how long it took for the health authority to even put up a posting for the position, let alone the time needed for recruitment.
But enough complaining.
This isn’t a post about the woes of being overworked or inefficiencies of large systems (which is hardly unique to the field of medicine), or the sadness of death that even working alongside mortality does not prepare you for.
Do Something About It
Even before summer 2023, I was starting to feel worn down – it was only in May/June-ish 2023 that I thought I was finally getting off the burnout ramp, but still on board to work less. It wasn’t just me – it seemed like very few people felt good about taking away. This same colleague who sadly passed had wanted to take an epic trip with family for a landmark birthday, but eventually settled for much less time spent away due to being unable to find a locum and not wanting to overly burden local colleagues. I think back and really wish this trip had happened. If there was more baseline slack built into the system, it would have.
The stars slowly aligned, and I ended up meeting a wonderful colleague who came out to further her training but was otherwise on the same timeline as me. We finished our subspecialty training at the same time, she worked for a year as a staff and then came here for a change of pace and do a fellowship while she was at it. We shared similar interests, both wanted more flexibility in our lives, and – most importantly – she seemed like a great human being to whom I could entrust my patients and my teams. Even before my colleague passed away in summer 2023, I could see that our current system needed more give built in. It was even more evident as we worked ourselves to exhaustion in the second half of 2023.
January of 2024, she and I started job-sharing.
Job-Sharing
What is job-sharing, you might ask?
It was one of the hospitalists I work with who shared with me that she and another hospitalist job-share. For them, this looked like practicing typical clinic-based family medicine for a week, then hospital-based family medicine for a week. They swapped roles and were never in the same place at the same time. It added good variety, had the benefit of a built-in second opinion for patients, and gave them flexibility to take time off as they had each other covering.
No coming back to mountains of emails. Or lab work to review. Or letters to review.
No omnipresent fear in the back of the mind while on vacation that patients weren’t being taken care of by someone who knew them.
Guilt. Free. Worry. Free. Time. Off.
This was brilliant, I thought. Would need to adjusted for my specialty, but that was only a matter of length of rotations, not the concept itself.
Some time later, I met my current counterpart, and we talked about the possibility of job sharing as one of her options for after she finished her fellowship.
Lucky for me, she said yes! (^‿^)
How Things Are Now
It is now April, and job-sharing is still in its early days, but the handovers thus far have been pretty smooth. I felt rusty coming back on after a month away in from mid-January to mid-February, but it worked out. Patients were a bit baffled when I started preparing them in November and December for this change, but understood they were getting a two-for-one deal on physicians and a guarantee that one of us will always be here to ensure continuity of care. Our teams adjusted to this new flow, and if they like her better than they like me, they have been kind enough not to share that with me! (-‿-“) And I was able to work longer days without feeling like there was no light at the end of the tunnel, because, hey, there was! Another month off was coming.
My month off was slightly delayed in coming as a colleague had forgotten she did not actually arrange spring break coverage. I was able to step in. Slack in the system is helpful. Who would have thought.
So here I am, writing this in my second week of time off.
What have I done with my downtime, some may wonder?
In the first month, I:
- Spent a week on vacation with Mr. Sparks (pre-arranged long before I knew if job-sharing was going to happen)
- Spent a week of the Lunar New Year with my in-laws – this was guilt-free as it occurred during the scheduled time off where previously, I would have felt quite bad taking time off so soon after the first week
- Completed arranging for tiling of the kitchen
- Had daytime to deal with urgent renter issues
- Collated documents and records for personal and corporate taxes for myself and Mr. Sparks
- Started investigating the Medicus pension plan for physicians (for an excellent post outlining some pros and cons of different kinds of pensions for self-employed professionals and business owners, see this post by the Loonie Doctor).
- Arranged for cleaners after putting this off for about nine months and having the home slowly slide down…down…down…(my mother confessed she didn’t want to come visit us at our home before, lol)
- Arranged and was able to be present for the garage door to be fixed
- Unpacked a significant more number of boxes (though more yet remain…and we moved in July 2023…)
- Covered a day for a colleague at work
- Finished pulling together data and drafting a letter advocating for a specific resource for one of the medical teams I work with (I had started this in spring 2023 and it went into hiatus for the second half of 2023 for reasons outlined above).
- Helped with a friend’s baby shower preparations
- Continued to deepen new friendships and nurture long-time friendships
- Spending time with my parents, who made the move here a month and a half ago
Of that list above, I probably could only have done about 1/3 of that if I crammed it all into evenings. And even then, with great difficulty, as contractors here don’t tend to work evenings or weekends. And to be honest, I would likely have prioritized time with family and friends.
Where To from Here
Not sure what the road ahead will look like, but I am feeling happy and grateful for the present state of affairs. Scaling back obviously results in a pay cut, but the returns in happiness have significantly outweighed the change in pay. My relationship with Mr. Sparks is foundational to my life and he has been supportive throughout of the transition to job-sharing, from the first inkling of an idea to its fruition these last three months. With home expenses hopefully settling down, I will be reassessing where Mr. Sparks and I are at on the journey to FI, but it has been very bracing to learn that, throughout all of this, our net worth has continued to increase (albeit at a much slower pace).
That’s all for now!
Until next time (which hopefully won’t be two years from now, lol),
Dr. FIREfly
Thanks for sharing this. It is interesting. We had something similar happen in our division early on in my career. I was both sad on a personal level, but it was also a wake-up call. I started job-sharing my outpatient practice shortly after that. Finding someone compatible is key, but even if you both work 3/4 time, the amount of benefit that 1/4 slack feels more like 50%. It is outsized because the stress of dealing with that last increment with no wiggle room is so disproportionate.
This post is extremely important because the most common response that I receive from people who are burnt-out and want to pull back, but don’t: “I can’t. There is no one to replace me.” There always is eventually, but that can be hard, or easy – if you plan for it in advance. Having some job-sharing makes a difference and is possible if you open your mind to the fact that others can do some of the work in a compatible way.
-LD
Thanks for sharing your experience, Loonie Doc. I was at a conference the last few days, and the topic of work life balance came up a lot, as well as ways to increase longevity in the medical career and losses various fields have had from good physicians leaving early. On a separate topic, also met physicians for whom the realm of personal finance was uncharted territory, and was able to direct them your blog and podcast’s way. Very excited they’re now on the path to increasing financial resiliency – another path to bypassing burnout!
Great to see you back behind the keyboard!! Catch up soon.
Happy to be back behind the keyboard! I’ve been lurking in the FI space – including the FI Garage. Always enjoyable to hear you and the Accountant and the Economist banter and share info – I think I get a lot of my local news through you guys, haha!