Your efficiency is self-sabotage

[00:00:00] If we want to have and live out this career that we have trained how many years for. Every day can’t be a sprint. Every day can be busy, but every moment can’t be a sprint ’cause there’s only so long that we can do it. And there is a point where I think we have out efficiency ourselves and I suspect that many of us are actually already there.

[00:00:22] You didn’t survive residency to struggle in practice. I’m Kate Reconstructive plastic surgeon and this is the Practice Runs podcast. Small changes to how we run our practices to get real time back. So that we can show up in our lives as the person and the doctor that we wanna be. Grab your tea, coffee, and let’s chat.

[00:00:41] Raise your hand if you consider efficiency to be one of your superpowers. I’m gonna guess that as a female physician in practice, your hand is hopefully, if you’re driving safely off the wheel, but nonetheless in the air, if efficient has been one of your favorite words your entire life, this episode is for you.

[00:00:59] I’ll start by saying that I have been so obsessed with efficiency that I opened my CaRMS application letter, which is to residency if you’re listening from the outside of Canada with the word efficient. Why? Because it worked and it is a huge part of the reason that all of us are where we are in med school.

[00:01:17] Got into med school, got into the residency hopefully that we wanted, and then built a practice. The problem though. That efficiency, your efficiency, your super human efficiency is actually probably now a form of self-sabotage. Hear me up before You have to abandon your favorite word. It was a process for me too, but the problem with efficiency.

[00:01:38] Is that it does not reduce your workload. It only increases it because being efficient means that you just keep taking on more and more tasks and do it to the quality that it needs to be done, that you expect of yourself, but in less and less time. Why? Because we’ve proven, you’ve proven that you can.

[00:02:00] This saying, yes, I’ll do it. Yes, I’ll take care of it. I’ve got it. This was rewarded. It’s how we got into med school. It was necessary to get through residency and thrive in that environment. Well, maybe thrive academically, if not, you know, as a human. And then getting into practice. But the chances are that many of the things that you’ve automatically said, yes, I’ll do it, don’t need to be on your plate anymore.

[00:02:25] They don’t need your expertise as a physician to do them. And at this stage of life, once we’re in practice, once you are in practice, there are so many things that need to be done. They don’t all need us to do them, and at this stage of life, we have more on our plates than we ever have before. Not just clinically, but also probably in our lives, right?

[00:02:49] Each of us has a unique dynamic that we are, and we’re taking on more and more in all of them and running our practice. That’s not just medicine, right? In residency it was primarily learning and doing the medicine part of it, but running a practice, the medicine almost feels easy compared to everything else that we have to do.

[00:03:06] So a year into practice, I was lying awake at 3:00 AM and having surpassed every efficiency sort of record that I’d ever set. And I was still running through how much charting I had left to do for the weekend. I was still thinking about the paperwork that was just standing to be done. I was still.

[00:03:23] Wondering how we were gonna get printer paper without me having to run to Staples over the weekend. And I was doing everything as efficiently as I ever had, but I realized that being more efficient wasn’t going to change this pattern. And that if I kept making efficiency, my goal, that this was gonna be my life for the rest of my career if I didn’t change.

[00:03:46] And that for me was going to be probably. The cause if I was gonna burn out, that was probably gonna be the cause of it. Now, I have never run a marathon, so bear with me here for anyone who has, but sprinting the entire way for a marathon does not seem like a great strategy. And as an efficiency girly, it is an all out sprint because you just keep saying, yes, yes, yes, I’ll do it.

[00:04:11] I’ll take it on. Don’t worry, I have it. But you have to do all of those things. In less and less time to be able to keep up, which is a form of a sprint. And if we want to stay in medicine, if we want to have and live out this career that we have trained how many years for every day, can’t be a sprint.

[00:04:31] Every day can be busy, but every moment can’t be a sprint. ’cause there’s only so long that we can do it. And there is a point where I think we have out efficiency ourselves, and I suspect that many of us are actually already there. This is something I’d never heard anyone talk about in medicine and as desperately Googling times to figure out how the heck to change what I was doing because I didn’t have the words.

[00:04:58] I didn’t have the language. I didn’t have the mindset to think about how can I approach this differently so that I can stay in this career in a way that will allow me to do it and be the person that I wanna be. I did some Googling, which naturally didn’t, you know, get me very far. So I started listening to business audiobooks, and I do have to credit fully Dan Martel’s book, buy Back Your Time, because this was the book that gave me different words or different mindset to think about it.

[00:05:26] In the book, he talks about doing things the most effective way or doing things the best way, which is gonna be whole other episodes and truly the premise of this entire thing. But he talks about why efficiency won’t work. That was the words that at least I needed to hear to change my mindset because he explained, and I could just see it, that by saying yes, by taking it on, by continuing that super power superwoman efficiency that we have all honed.

[00:05:59] It could only go so far. And then we would also be spending, even if we could be super efficient in the way that we did it, we were still spending, I was still spending the time doing things that was not getting me to my goal and my like real goal that real better I imagined after residency was being able to show up as the person in my life that I wanted to be and show up as a doctor.

[00:06:23] That I wanted to be. And if I was saying yes to doing little things because I was so efficient and I could do it the most efficient of anybody, that still meant I was spending that time that you are probably spending that time doing things that aren’t getting you to be in there. And that’s another big piece of burnout.

[00:06:39] We know not. Getting to be the person that we wanna be to, to have that energy, that bandwidth, that control to show up in those other aspects of our lives. Efficiency is an incredible skill to have and it is something that you’re never going to lose if you’ve made it this far. But the beautiful thing about when efficiency is no longer your goal, when the goalpost is now, what is the best way to get a task done?

[00:07:07] Once you figure out what you actually need to do, what actually needs your time, then you can be efficient about it. Then that superpower can really take flight and help get you more time back. But the first question, the first mindset, the first goalpost to change is that the goal isn’t just to be more efficient.

[00:07:25] The goal is to figure out what do you actually need to do? What are the things that you actually should apply your efficiency superpower to and what things don’t? And that question, figuring out what you don’t need to spend your efficiency superpower on is gonna be The thing is, single handedly the thing that has gotten me the most time back, that’s like quite literally eight plus hours of extra clinical work outside of the regular hours a week.

[00:07:54] Off of my plate, to then allow those efficiency muscles to thrive in the things that actually need your expertise, your doctor training to do them. So if you answered yes to my opening question, do you consider efficiency to your superpower? Welcome to the Recovering Efficiency Girls Club. Admittedly, today’s episode is not an immediate time back win on your commute that you can start, you know, working on, but I believe it to be truly the single biggest mindset shift.

[00:08:28] That allows you to get time back and with time back, energy back, and then using that for whatever your better is to get you to start getting closer to that better. So there isn’t a thing to do today other than ask yourself, what is your efficiency actually costing you? How many extra things, uh, have you taken on?

[00:08:47] Are you doing, are you spending time? Even if it’s not a lot doing, because it has always just seemed easier. To say, yes, I’ll do it. I’ll take care of it. Chances are a lot, a lot of time, a lot of energy, and there’s no doubt that you could probably find a better way, a way that makes you feel more fulfilled to spend that time.

[00:09:11] If you would like to, I’d love to hear what has efficiency as a mindset done as to you as a physician in practice? And if you have a friend, a physician colleague who also calls efficiency her with superpower, let’s start changing how we think about efficiency and send this episode to her so that we can all start asking ourselves, what is my efficiency costing me?

[00:09:33] And more importantly, if I change the goal post to getting things done the best way, how much more time back can you get but still use those efficiency muscles on the things that you actually need to do? All right. Thank you for coming. This is quite possibly my favorite topic to talk about. It will probably can be coming up again, but I hope that was interesting.

[00:09:54] I hope it was something that just makes you pause and think. Your efficiency is incredible. It’s what big part, if not the reason. We are. You are where you are. We are where we are at practice, but it’s not the thing that’s gonna serve us to keep us practicing medicine and allow us to be the person that we wanna be.

[00:10:13] As always, thank you for being here. Now go get some time back and have a great day. Chat again next Tuesday.