I'm no efficiency expert. Not by a long shot. Yet I have somehow convinced many of you that I am super-efficient, am incredibly productive, and have a large amount of bandwidth. Believe it or not, I have been asked multiple times to share my secrets. I'm not sure I have any, but I'll share what I know and do and hopefully the comments section will be where the real action is. You all know I love lists, so let's make a list. We'll call it the…
Top 10 WCI Efficiency Secrets
Now, before we get into this too far, I want to point something out. We're talking about economic efficiency here. Obviously there is more to life than economics and a ruthlessly economical life may not be worth living. My life is far from being perfectly efficient and there are other purposes to living and even your career than simply maximizing the economic benefit from it. With that out of the way, let's get started.
# 1 Kill Your TV
Okay, maybe that is a little extreme. But television is a gigantic time suck for the vast majority of our population. I can count the number of hours of TV I watched last Fall on two hands. I think there were 8 episodes of The Walking Dead and I watched parts of a few college football games. There is a good chance if you simply unplug the TV that your productiveness will go up dramatically. This also includes using the internet or a gaming console like TV. This is where I'm guilty. It is amazing how much time you can kill surfing back and forth between your ten favorite websites seeing if there is something new. In fact, you should probably just close your computer right now and go do something else instead of reading the rest of this post.
Multi-tasking at its best. Who says you can't blog and spend time with your kids at the same time?
# 2 Some Time Is More Productive Than Other Time
This is a very important concept to understand. Benjamin Franklin said “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” The Army says “We do more before 9 am than most people do all day.” What these quotes are hinting at is the fact that some of your hours are much more productive than others. In my case, I'm twice as productive in the morning as in the afternoon, and my productivity drops to perhaps 10% in the evening. And after midnight? Forget it. Somebody better be deathly ill or terribly injured if I'm going to be doing anything worthwhile. While there are some true night owls, I suspect most of us have noticed this trend in our lives. So what to do about it? Move the more fun stuff that you don't need much motivation or life energy to do into the afternoons and put the really fun (or wasteful) stuff in the evenings. Then cut the evening short and go to bed so your morning is longer and your evening is shorter. Yup, you're adulting now. My kids think staying up all night must be awesome. As an emergency physician, I've stayed up all night I don't know how many times in my life. Certainly, it is in the hundreds. More than an entire year's worth of all-nighters. Not only is it a cardiac risk factor, but I don't get much done at night nor the entire next day. Working nights is incredibly non-productive.
# 3 Eliminate Financial Chores
I do very few financial chores. I don't do any research on individual stocks or mutual funds. We only look at our spending once a month and at our investments even more rarely. We don't go meet with a financial advisor. All our bills are on auto-payment. I even pay my taxes online with a credit card now. All this time savings can be used to do something more productive.
# 4 Marry the Right Person (and be the right person)
My wife is amazing. People tell me that all the time. Nobody ever tells my wife that I'm amazing, of course. At any rate, she's a very productive person and she has very high expectations for me. We push each other to be healthy, productive, contributing members of the family and our community. Get this one thing right in life and you can screw up a lot of other stuff and still end up being productive and happy.
# 5 Focus on Family Efficiency, Not Personal Efficiency
[Update: 6/16/17: I managed to unintentionally offend a lot of people due to my own insensitivity with the next two paragraphs as they were originally written. So I rewrote them as I wish I had originally written them. To those who were offended, please accept my sincerest apologies, know that I will work harder to be sensitive to people in different situations from my own, and know that I ALWAYS welcome guest posts from regular readers about their successes and struggles with their financial lives. ]
Remember that we're discussing economic efficiency here and that life isn't all about maximizing economic efficiency. But if you're looking for ways to maximize the economic efficiency (time and money) of your household, I think there is an important point that has to be made. There are a lot of things that need to be done to run a household, I'm sure your list looks a lot like mine:
- Earn money
- Buy food
- Care for young children
- Run older children to activities
- Supervise homework
- Repair the house
- Prepare the meals
- Laundry
- Run errands
- Clean
- Yardwork
- Financial chores
The list goes on and on and on. However, if you (or your partner) is a high-earner, chances are that maximum economic efficiency is not found by having your partner also be a high-earner. High-earning professional jobs tend to take up a lot of time and life energy that cannot be dedicated to the other tasks on the list. That's not to say that those pursuits are not worthwhile, for personal development and societal enrichment. But strictly from a household economic perspective, it's not an efficient set-up. My wife and I realized this relatively early in our career. It didn't make much sense for both of us to have a career in a traditional sense. So I focused on medical school and residency and attending duties and she filled a support role with a major focus on raising kids and running a household. Actually, I probably ought to reverse that statement. She filled the primary role of raising kids and running a household and I filled a support role in making sure we had the money to keep food on the table. But either way you look at it, it is amazing how much you can accomplish when someone else is taking care of huge sectors of what you want and need done in your life. The converse is also true. As my practice has become less demanding on me over the years she has been able to branch out into her other interests. The fact that I, like most other physicians and other high-income professionals, earn gobs of money basically eliminates financial concerns from her life.
Imagine what you could do with your life if someone just handed you thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars each month without you ever having to manage a traditional career or “go to work?” All of a sudden you can run a church organization, direct a soccer league, coach two teams, teach a refereeing class, take up a new sport, raise four kids, organize a family reunion, plan vacations, serve on community boards, go help out an aunt, work in the side business, and volunteer in the schools like my wife does.
Obviously, the converse is also true. Having two stay-at-home parents is also not particularly efficient. While you might have the cleanest house on the block, it's eventually going to get foreclosed on. I don't know exactly what the maximally efficient combination is for a couple. Perhaps it is one partner working 3/4 time and one working 1/4 time. It is probably different for everyone. But the chances of it being two people working full-time, paying huge amounts of taxes (including two sets of Social Security and Medicare taxes for little additional benefit), and having to hire out child care, house cleaning, yard maintenance, food preparation, financial advisory services etc seems low to me.
Every couple needs to work out a fair division of labor and that combination will be different for everyone, but it's worth at least considering efficiency when making those decisions.
# 6 Let It Go
Life is short. You cannot do everything. Figure out what your priorities are and throw the rest out. Learn to say no and don't feel guilty about it. When WCI ramped up, I dropped a couple of hobbies and a volunteer job. I can always go back to them, but I had to decide where to use my limited bandwidth. Sometimes our house is really messy. I mean REALLY messy. We just decide sometimes that keeping it clean isn't our priority. It's not the end of the world. It turns out you can clean toilets every other week (or every other month) and nothing really bad happens. Our driveway faces South. If we don't shovel it, it will melt off a few days after the storm anyway. There is really no point in shoveling after March 1st. If you just came home from a trip and you're going on a similar one in two weeks, that stuff can sit in a pile in the garage (or even stay in the car) until then rather than being put away and then pulled back out. You can't do it all. Stop trying.
It's a lot like a shift in a busy emergency department. You don't have time to do everything for everybody, so you have to prioritize. The guy in room 1 needs intubated, better do that. The lady in room four needs a central line for her pressors but is on her way to the intensivist. They still know how to put in central lines, so leave that to them. The woman in room 17 wants her fibromyalgia worked up- that can be done in a primary care clinic. Discharge. You can do a billable review of systems very quickly or very slowly, so you learn to ask questions like “Any seizures, blindness, sore throat, chest pain, shortness of breath, vomiting, vaginal discharge, new rashes, fevers, or hallucinations?” and move on. You catch up on charts instead of chit-chatting with everyone cruising through the department so you can leave at the end of the shift. As you approach the end of the shift, you're all over radiology and the lab to make sure everything you need done before you go is actually cooking. As you constantly look for ways to be more efficient, you learn a few tricks. All those lessons can be applied to the rest of your life.
# 7 Sharpen the Saw
Stephen Covey's (RIP) 7 Habits of Highly Successful People has a 7th habit called Sharpen the Saw. What he means by that is sometimes you will finish a woodcutting job faster by taking 5 minutes out to go sharpen the saw, rather than fighting through the log with a dull saw for an hour. We need to take the time to do those things that will help us to be more efficient. While it seems like we're wasting time we don't have, it actually makes the rest of our time more productive. The classic example is exercise. If you exercise, you will be more fit, have more energy, be more alert, and can work longer. You will also develop a discipline that will carry over into the rest of your life.
# 8 Work Less to Work Smarter
One of my great secrets, and the one that allowed me to really do the WCI thing, is that I don't work all that much. When I was full-time (I went to 3/4 time in 2016), I was working fifteen 8-hour shifts. Granted, you would sometimes get out an hour late and there were some administrative duties, but if you do all the multiplication, the actual average number of hours at the hospital was close to 30 per week. To make things even better, 80% of those hours occurred at what are traditionally less productive hours- evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays. That left me all kinds of “productive time” (weekday mornings) to do something else. We're all workaholics in medicine, whether we want to admit it or not. Limiting your work hours is likely to make you more productive at work AND at home.
# 9 Regular, Uninterrupted Sleep Is Better
Here's another lesson learned from being an emergency doctor. Actually, that's not entirely true. I really learned it from NOT being an emergency doctor, i.e. dropping my overnight shifts. Now I never miss out on my entire anchor sleep. Anchor sleep is a concept well known to shift workers. Basically, sleep that occurs between 10 pm and 8 am is more valuable than sleep that occurs at other times of the day. It's probably a hormonal thing. That's why a shift that ends at 3 am is nowhere near as painful as one that ends at 7 am. You only lost some of your anchor sleep. But since I cut back to 12 shifts and dropped my overnight shifts, I am amazed at how much less time I spend in bed. My sleep is MUCH more regular. Except for 3-4 days a month when I work the late shift, I go to bed within an hour of the same time every night. Where maybe I used to sleep 9 hours and still not wake up refreshed, now I wake up after 6 1/2 or 7 hours ready to go. When working late shifts, it is hard to switch back to a day type schedule, so you don't. You just stay on this schedule all month where you sleep until 10 or 11 in the morning, and you lose out on a lot of those really productive pre-noon hours. For many specialties, interrupted sleep is a big deal. Limiting your call (and educating those who call you so they won't have to call you next time) can pay huge dividends in productivity and happiness. Small children and extensive call are a bad combination for productive sleep.
# 10 Do Multiple Things At Once
Some people say there is no such thing as multi-tasking. That's not entirely true. Let me give you a few examples. I keep a list of articles I want to share in my newsletter each month. Where do I keep them? I keep a lot of them on my Twitter feed. In many ways, I can “recycle” the same material for the blog, the book, Twitter, Facebook, the forum, a live presentation, the newsletter, the podcast etc. Very few of you guys do WCI in more than 1 or 2 of those ways. Nobody is reading or listening to EVERYTHING I do, so it's fine to have some overlap. Besides, repetition is a useful learning strategy anyway. If I write for another publication, I'll use it for a blog post or mention it in the newsletter. Blog posts can be packaged up into a book. Lots of efficiencies to be gained there.
In summary, efficiency and productivity enable you to accomplish more of what you would like to accomplish in your life. Following these tips may help you to make incremental changes that over time will dramatically boost your productivity.
What do you think? Are you a productive person? How did you become that way? What tips do you have for people who want to accomplish more? Comment below!
To add on to the “let it go” tip, I would suggest delegating as much as possible. Don’t like mowing the lawn? Pay someone to do it. Don’t like writing notes? Hire a scribe or mid-level provider. Focus on the highest-paying, most interesting parts of your job/life and delegate the rest.
-WSP
Katie, your husband is amazing.
Cheers!
-PoF
p.s. I’ll be spending much of the day driving and listening to podcasts simultaneously. #efficiency
Expanding on #1, distraction in general is a huge issue in this age of every app and website competing for our attention. In many ways, it’s a necessary evil if you want to live in the modern world. I am easily distracted by a new email, tweet, etc., so I have to turn off all notifications.
I may delete the Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone to see what happens. On one hand phone apps allow you to “work” when you are not in front of a computer, but they also provide endless distraction once you get sucked in.
Dr. C
I did this when studying for my boards. Great for efficiency, but I when I put them back on my phone I felt like there was a whole world I was missing. I guess that’s life these days!
Another name for the “whole world I was missing” is “fear of missing out.” Maybe you were missing something, but I bet it wasn’t much. My rule of thumb: focus on MY LIFE for 95% and allow 5% for watching others (facebook, twitter, news, blogs). This is a variant of something else I’ve seen called “the low information diet.”
I told someone I had my wife change my FB password so I wouldn’t waste so much time on it, so I now get on maybe twice a month. They asked if I felt like I was “missing out.” I explained that I’m actually missing out whole lot less, because I don’t have social media pulling me away from my wife and kids. I’d argue I was missing out a lot more on what matters when I was on FB all the time. If something big happens, my wife usually tells me.
You are too modest! Compared to most people you are clearly very productive and you have some good tips here.
I think #1 is a huge one for many people. I cut cable many years ago and haven’t watched much TV in years. Cutting out TV could easily double or triple your “free” time each evening if you have a busy job and/or young family. You could certainly broaden this to include internet surfing/shopping now too. I can easily waste 30-60 minutes each evening doing this if I’m not careful.
I’d also broaden #3 to eliminate or automate many other “maintenance” items. One option is outsourcing (lawncare, cleaning, etc) but an even better one is designing your life so little maintenance is needed. A smaller house and yard is much easier (and cheaper) to maintain. Do not call/mail lists stop the junk mail and marketing calls. Higher quality but fewer items can cut down on maintenance and storage needs. The list of things you can do is quite large. It just depends on your personal preferences and where you truly get value after thinking carefully about it.
Thanks for the reminders/tips!
Deleted Facebook from my phone months ago. Wow, took doing that to actually realize what a time suck it was in my life. About 4-5 months later, I can tell you, I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything. The occasional times I have logged in on my computer since then, I realized how little I was actually getting out of it. Those quick little checks on the phone, would turn into 30 min to an hour lost, zoned out and disconnected from the world immediately around me. The nice downstream effect is I seem to have a lot more time around the house (with wife and kids) and time to read books or other pursuits. Feel social media is a time suck and that is it for 98% of people. The exceptions are those who have actually managed to monetize it. Caveat is Im in my 40s and was never a huge social media user to begin with (only ever had a Facebook account, no twitter, snapchat, or whatever else is out there).
I second that – deleting Facebook has definitely made me more productive and happy. Focusing on real people in my actual day-to-day life and not constantly comparing what I’m doing or not doing to that guy I sort of knew in med school has made a huge difference in my quality of life.
Third this. I’ve read many more books, spent better quality time with my wife and kids, gotten many more things done around the house. It’s really improved my quality of life and satisfaction.
Funny. Our family had been thinking alot about #1. We watch a lot of TV, mostly binge DVR our favorite shows, live sports, and of course kids shows and movies. But I hate the local cable company and I hate playing the game of “renogiating” every few years. I am also not at all a techie. But we decided to cut cable a few weeks back and go with a popular TV streaming service. What a great decision. Save a ton of money, watch less TV, but actually still have almost all the same channels and unlimited cloud DVR. No more bogus fees. No more arguing with cable companies every few years. I’d be surprised if hard wire cable is around in 5 years.
Interesting post. I watch almost no TV. I find I do waste some time on Facebook watching animal videos. We all have some sort of secret vice. I think I invented multitasking. No one who is productive can function without having this ability. Some people get confused and irritable when they are expected to be doing more than one task. I have noticed this in some employees over the years. I also like to do “intellectual tasks” in the early morning. My reading comprehension is best at this time. When I was in school this was when I tackled new material. I find I comprehend anything with numbers at any time. I usually get up early and read for an hour or so before any one else is up.
While I was in undergrad and finally decided to commit to medicine I basically had “the eye of the tiger.” I was a productivity machine. Stellar grades, president of multiple clubs, in a fraternity, doing multiple research projects, maintaining a relationship, working, shadowing, helping my parents out with the home, and still managing to have a great deal of fun and hobbies.
There were many things I couldn’t do that I thought I’d get done in my gap year while I have only been working a 9-5. I’m not busy at all anymore and it almost feels like a contagious disease. I haven’t gotten much done except for finally learning about personal finance. It seems that the less busy I am, the less efficient I am.
Oh and I’ve gone on a ton of dates with my girlfriend and some sweet camping trips so I guess that counts although it’s not quite “productive”
Don’t devalue that enjoyable time. You’re only young once. My favorite month of my life was during 4th year of med school when I blew off rotations for an “approved” elective of riding my bike cross country to “raise awareness” of global health issues. But it was really to go on a month long camping trip and ride bikes. And it was awesome, and I have a ton of really fun memories from that time.
Of course, the bitter makes the sweet better. The hard work and keeping the nose to the grindstone feels good, too. All I’m saying is be sure to really enjoy the moment you have of camping and being with that lady-friend. Nothing better than waking up while camping in Monument Valley with a beautiful companion . . .
#10…
Not going to lie, I read/respond to work emails and WCI posts while on the pooper. Gross? Maybe. Efficient? Yes.
The iphone has dramatically helped this process….it was a bit bulky when doing it with a laptop.
🙂
You aren’t ‘babysitting’, you are ‘being a dad’.
My wife points that out every time I use that word. Changed to parenting, which is, of course, more accurate. Duly chastised.
Thank you!
You “babysit” your OWN KIDS??? I feel so sorry for your wife and kids. Parenting is so important, too bad you can’t see that your time with them is more than a job. I hope you can grow in this area of your life and think of more than just your time as being money.
“Babysit” changed to “parent”.
It’s called PARENTING, not babysitting. This is how disconnected one becomes when they say they are babysitting their own child.
“Babysit” changed to “parent”.
#5 is offensive. You could have written in a much less smug manner. Not every woman is fulfilled by supporting her husnand by staying home. Also not an option for many of families even if that was their dream.
Also, it isn’t babysitting when it is your own kid.
I think parts of this make you sound like an ass which is unfortunate because I have not gotten that impression before
“Babysit” changed to “parent”.
Sorry I came across as a smug ass. Not the intent. I assure you my wife is not fulfilled by staying home. In fact, she isn’t really a stay-at-home parent. I now spend more time at home than she does. In fact, she returns today from 10 days in Europe. As noted in the post, she spends a great deal of her time doing the following:
This is literally all stuff she is currently doing, or at least will be again once she returns from Europe.
# 5 has been mostly rewritten, and hopefully with a better tone.
Good tips buried in this piece, although hard to focus on them with the overall self-centered view this post takes. Yes if we could all be so great and make gobs of money and our spouse could run around doing whatever they like with no cares in the world. This seems to take an old fashioned view of the husband as bread winner and woman as house wife. I work full time EM, provide most of the support for our family, do 75% of kid/family/house and 100% financial duties. And we both work because we want to. Life isn’t all about efficiency and money. Wish there was some balance here!
Thanks for your valuable feedback. Section # 5 was rewritten and hopefully works better now.
I’m not sure that EMDOCGIRL is unhappy about working full-time along with household and financial duties? Maybe she is content with things how they are and I don’t understand the need to suggest marital counseling?
Dual-career households can be efficient and don’t need to be approached with “heavy skepticism” and described as “trying to do it all and failing”.
I’m skeptical that two full-time high-earning workers, whether two men, two women, or one man and one woman in any combination, is just as efficient at raising a family and running a household as some combination that involves less full-time work by one or both partners. Several reasons for this:
# 1 A full-time career takes up a lot of time and energy that cannot be used doing anything else
# 2 A high-earner by definition already makes enough money to run the household. Additional income doesn’t increase efficiency with regards to the total sum of tasks that need to be done.
# 3 The income tax code is very progressive.
# 4 A second earner pays all those payroll taxes again, but may not even get any benefit for them given the way SS benefits are paid out (i.e. the lower earner can just take 1/2 of the higher earner’s social security benefit.)
And that’s completely ignoring wage discrimination, which exists in many fields. When a man and a woman decide that one of them should focus on the household, it’s not unreasonable for them to decide to send the one less likely to be discriminated against out to work. It’s simply more efficient.
As far as the marital counseling, I can tell you this- if I was working full-time, doing 100% of the financial duties, and doing 75% of everything else I’d be having some very frank discussions with my partner and if things didn’t change fast, going to marital counseling. Am I missing something? That seems like an awfully unfair division of labor to me.
1) All of this depends on goals and values. Maybe a full-time career is fulfilling someone’s dream and that is where they want to apply their energy and focus.
2) For many the career is not about money, but about self-fulfillment.
3) True, no argument. It is less efficient from a financial perspective for 2 high earners to both work – less take-home pay with higher incomes
4) If both partners are working, don’t they BOTH get the social security benefit, so it is DOUBLE compared to 1-earner household? In addition, both earners can contribute maximally to their retirement plans, and a high earning couple could perhaps put away as much $113k in deductible, pre-tax, tax-advantaged accounts? If a dual high-earning couple saves maximally, and lives off one income, they could retire early if they desired.
5) Perhaps we should fight against wage discrimination instead of assuming it’s preferred for someone to focus on the household. They may may want to be working full-time for competitive wages
6) Division of labor may be unfair in your eyes, but EMDocGirl didn’t say that. Maybe she enjoys it? Every family dynamic is different.
Your book, blog, and website are great. Thank you also for responding to comments and changing the wording in your article.
4) Yes they both get SS (i.e. they could both qualify for a full SS benefit), but they would get 3/4 of that benefit without one of them working.
Thanks for the info. What happens in divorce? The lesser earning spouse would get 1/2 the higher earner benefit only if they were married 10y and didn’t remarry? Might be hard to live on that. What happens in death of the higher earning spouse?
Dual high-earning couples could contribute 2x what a single earner could. In case of divorce less likely retirement assets would have to be split. While no one plans to get divorced, 1/2 of marriages end that way.
Thanks for your responses and engagement on this topic.
(apologies if this posts twice…there was a website error)
The good news is much less than half of physician marriages end in divorce but even so, I suppose it’s good to know the SS rules governing divorce. Mike Piper does a nice job summarizing these in his book Social Security Made Simple. He will also be discussing them at the WCI conference next Spring. Here’s the government on the subject:
https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/divspouse.html
If you are divorced, but your marriage lasted 10 years or longer, you can receive benefits on your ex-spouse’s record (even if they have remarried) if:
You are unmarried;
You are age 62 or older;
Your ex-spouse is entitled to Social Security retirement or disability benefits and
The benefit you are entitled to receive based on your own work is less than the benefit you would receive based on your ex-spouse’s work.
Note: Your benefit as a divorced spouse is equal to one-half of your ex-spouse’s full retirement amount (or disability benefit) if you start receiving benefits at your full retirement age. The benefits do not include any delayed retirement credits your ex-spouse may receive.
I think that you bring up excellent points (and I absolute respect what works for your family personally), but I think that your acknowledgement of wage discrimination highlights that the “efficiency” discussed in this post is a bit shortsighted. If our shared (dual physician) family goal is financial security for our whole family, then having me working (and thus slowly chipping away at wage discrimination instead of accepting it as insurmountable), is likely to increase the lifetime earning potential if our two daughters. If the two of them make twenty percent more each paycheck than they would if all of the women stayed home, I would call that an effective and efficient use of my time.
Perhaps that effect occurs from all the women out there working, but the contribution from you personally being out there working is so small it cannot even be measured.
It can be measured when an individual woman advances in her career to leadership roles and becomes Department Chair, Dean of the School of Medicine, Medical Society President, CEO, COO, Senator, and even President. It can be measured when enough women are in the workforce, and our children seen them in professional roles as examples of how to be efficient and raise families. It can be measured when young people are inspired by women in visible leadership roles and believe “Hey, I can do that too!”.
If each of us said our contribution is “so small it cannot be measured”, how would we achieve anything? How would we enact change in the world?
WCI, I think that you bring up excellent points (and I absolute respect what works for your family personally), but I think that your acknowledgement of wage discrimination in your comments highlights that the “efficiency” discussed in this post may strike some as a bit shortsighted. If our shared (dual physician) family goal is financial security for our whole family, then having me working (and thus slowly chipping away at wage discrimination instead of accepting it as insurmountable), is likely to increase the lifetime earning potential if our two daughters. If the two of them make twenty percent more each paycheck than they would if all of the women stayed home, I would call that an effective and efficient use of my time.
You know you already made that exact comment and I already responded to it, right? I typically just delete duplicate comments, but I didn’t want you to think I was somehow censoring you for being critical of the post.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/top-ten-wci-efficiency-secrets/#comment-453076
I usually enjoy your blog, but any good tips in your most recent post get lost in the unbelievable arrogance. Believe it or not, dads don’t “babysit” their own kids. It’s called parenting. And talk about condescending! Your wife gets your “gobs of money” while “not having to go to work” and getting to run church groups?! Your references to women have condescending tone.
And maybe having a dual professional household is not your plan, but many of us make that model work wonderfully. Your article is condescending to dual professional households and reads as if you think a woman’s place is “in the home.”
Your article is being hotly debated on a major women physician group and has officially angered about 10,000 successful female physicians.
“Babysit” changed to “parent”.
While it may be true that there is no such thing as bad publicity in this business, I certainly did not intend to anger 10,000 successful female physicians. Hopefully the extra publicity helps further my goal of increasing physician financial literacy.
Thank you for changing the wording.
Please, it is amazing how people become offended so easily!! This piece was an OPINION, almost all of which I agree with, on how to be more efficient.
My wife and I are both practicing full time physicians, and I completely agree with WCI’s view on #5!!!
I was pretty turned off by the caption about babysitting your child, too. It makes sense in the context of your #5, though. I work full time as an MD and have a stay-at-home husband, but don’t make the gobs of money you do. Nonetheless, I help raise the kids and run the household beyond merely providing the money. The fact that your wife has only been able to pursue her own interests as your practice demands have declined over the years is sad. Maybe you should have helped her more early on, not just considered raising your children “babysitting” and she would have been able to pursue some of those interests earlier.
I always learn a lot from your posts, but there are also many things that I can’t relate to as a female physician. It does provide nice conversation-starters for my teenage sons, though, when want to discuss the concept of “male privilege” with them.
“Babysit” changed to “parent”.
Maybe I should have helped her more early on. But let’s be quite clear that I spend more time parenting than 90% of physicians, and at least when not deployed to the Middle East, always have.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I think it speaks volumes about society, however, that the other responses have been mostly that those of us who did not care for the information in that particular point are being overly sensitive, rather than actually engaging in conversation.
The instinct to dismiss a concern raised by a woman, or, in this case, multiple women, as arising from “insecurities”, a “chip on the shoulder”, or “semantics” rather than trying to understand the concern is commonplace. Telling someone to “Relax, people” is a way of silencing those you disagree with without having to actually listen to their concerns.
Dismissing our critiques of that point because you “weren’t trying to offend” is also something most women encounter every day in the workplace. Just because someone doesn’t mean to be rude doesn’t mean s/he should get pass on it.
Also, just because WCI has written many outstanding articles doesn’t mean he is immune from responses to this one. That is what a public blog actually calls for–engagement. I have learned a great deal from this blog and will continue to do so. I also usually learn a lot from the comments, as they are often thoughtful considerations of the writing presented here. WCI frequently states that he has a thick skin; I think he can take it.
You lost me with #5. Eeesh. Tone deaf much?
I think you females are being too hard on WCI. I can say this because I am a female and probably the oldest female who comments on this blog. He was not trying to offend any body. Every couple has to work out a division of labor that works for them. He was just trying to give us tips on time management and he needed 10 reasons for clickbait.
Agree with Hatton1. Regarding #5, there are always 5-10% of people on the internet who like to be outraged at anything related to people making their own decisions about how to live their lives. Frankly, it says more about their insecurities than anything else (a chip on the shoulder looking for “evidence” to confirm their world view). Any couple has the right to decide how to divide labor between them. If you’ve ever learned much about economics, specialization is very effective (and efficient). Dividing up bread winning vs home operations can be very effective. Just because more women are choosing the breadwinner role, it is not necessary to always be on the lookout to cast dispersion on those who choose a “traditional” approach. Relax, people.
Oh, it’s probably justified for hammering me for using the word babysitting. My wife also hammers me when I use it. But I guess I always think of “parenting” as what I do with a 4 year old, a 7 year old, or a 13 year old and babysitting as what I do with a 1 year old. I guess that somewhere along the line the term picked up some sort of negative connotation, I don’t know. Maybe this hammering will help me remember not to use the word any more.
I totally agree with your division of labor comment.
The internet is my biggest and most wasteful use of my time. Right now I just wasted about 45 minutes just screwing around doing nothing of value. I could have gone bike riding during that time.
I really need to block all these sites from my router since I have no will power of my own.
Wow dude….You are getting hammered on semantics for this post. Can you say losing the forest for the trees?
I don’t understand why so many people are insanely offended by #5? Isn’t feminism about allowing a woman to make her own choices in life and not judging them for it?
The tone I read Dr. Dahle’s #5 is that of team work and gratititude for his wife. It is clear to me that he believes he would absolutely not have been able to “make gobs of money” if it were not for his wife taking care of every other aspect of his family. He even says that she serves the PRIMARY (read: more important) role of taking care of the family and he functions as the SUPPORT (read: less important) role of earning an income.
Moreover, from reading his book which was written before the WCI was making him a ton of money that “gobs of money” he was referring too is an above average physician income which many women in this blog make. A woman physician can just as easily support a stay at home husband and allow him to take on the more important familial duties.
This visceral reaction so many people seem to have bothers me so much because I have read tons of article written by Dr. Dahle and seen his presence both on student doctor forums and this forum. I also listen to his podcast. He has never shown anything less than a deep appreciation of his wife. People should not make her or him feel bad for choosing to be a stay at home mom.
Thanks for mansplaining @strider, totally helps me think about this differently.
Over explaining my point out of fear it would be misconstrued as sexist and offensive to some women just as it was with Dr. Dahle.
I didn’t know that posting my opinion about the tone of an article, which is obviously subjective based on this post, qualifies as mansplaining.
I guess I need someone to mansplain me the meaning of mansplaining and when it okay to post your opinion on a blog as a man if you are going disagree with a woman and try to make it clear exactly as to why you’re disagreeing.
When you respond to an argument from guilt by association, don’t expect to make any progress, Strider 🙂
Your “mansplaining” was spot-on! Dr. Dahle and his wife have made a choice based on their own unique circumstances, and they are free to do so. And Dr. Dahle has repeatedly expressed gratitude and understanding of the value of both sides of the equation. Seems like a well-intentioned, bargained-for exchange between two competent and consenting adults, but apparently that’s not good enough for some people who assume they know better!
The negative reaction is towards his judgmental tone and “heavy skepticism” toward dual-career families, and that they are “trying to do it all and failing”, not the choice he and his wife made together.
I didn’t read his tone as judgemental. It is interesting that two people can read the same words and get such a different opinion of it. I respect the way you feel about his writing, I just felt the need to defend him because he was getting crushed in the comments in a way that I felt was unfair based on my interpretation of the article.
Ahh….that explains it. I was trying to figure out where the tone went bad. I can see how that phrase could be unintentionally offensive. I’ll change that one too.
Yes, that was it.
I think almost everyone would find it more efficient to have one partner free to handle the household needs, as long as income isn’t a factor. However, efficiency isn’t the only consideration, and that arrangement won’t be best for everyone. No reason to suggest other arrangements will fail.
Personally, I’d be ecstatic if my wife was a physician who loved her job and wanted me to stay home to handle the household. Although she has three undergrad degrees and an MBA, I earn much more than she ever did, and we don’t need more income. Because she doesn’t need to work, she prefers to stay home, and I’m so happy that I can provide that option for her. She loves her life now.
We don’t even have kids, but my life would be so much worse if I had to handle everything at home. For example, our basement floods with every rain and we’ve had a parade of contractors in and out of the house for the last month. My wife handles all of that while I’m stressed out at work trying to keep up with the patient load. Can’t imagine how I’d deal with that and a very demanding job at the same time.
My kudos to every couple who can handle two demanding careers and kids too. I’m fairly sure that I could not (while remaining sane).
Im a female physician (and feminist) in residency married to a man who has alternated btwn working full time in a demanding career (80-100 h/week) while I was a med student and is now working part time so he can do a lot of the parenting while I’m on call. I did not find this offensive in the least. It was very hard to have 2 adults working 60-100 hour weeks with young kids and life is much better now that my husband is home more. We were able to make things work with 2 full time+ careers but our stress levels were high and our quality of life as a family suffered. I think this is true for many families, though I think each family should weigh the risks/benefits of the options themselves. Staying at home with kids is hard (often thankless) work, and it’s important to validate and honor the partner who is choosing to stay home. WCI evidently appreciates all the work that Mrs. WCI does helping their family function.
Our long term plan is for my husband to work full time after I’m done with residency, but I’m also it a field with little call and fairly regular hours. I did not feel like he was implying that women should stay home with kids, but the reality remains that kids add a lot of work and unpredictability to life and having a cushion to absorb this makes life easier. This cushion can also be a nanny/au pair/family member which is how many 2 income families make things work.
Excellent point about the au pair. If I were smarter, I would have included that in that section. Lots of dual professional couples I know using that option which I think is a great way to increase efficiency.
Agree with FemaleDoc’s second paragraph. I also don’t think that WCI is implicating the female parent/ professional as the one who necessarily makes the decision to “do it all and fail.” There are other factors that go into a family’s decision to have a one-income vs two-income household. That may include:
1. The proximity of extended family (aunts, grandparents, etc)
2. The specialty of the MD parents
3. Prior experience with daycare facilities and au pairs.
My wife and I are both physicians, we’re in our early 50s, and we raised 3 great kids, sans au pair. However, something had to give, and hiring an au pair is not always the answer. My wife grew up with two MD specialist parents herself, and her experience with the au pair was not great. Grumpy Eastern European woman.
We tried to raise our kids on our own, with two full-time academic jobs. At the beginning, that meant dropping the kids off at preschool at 630am, and sometimes, picking them up 12 hours later. At that time, we were living 2000 miles from our closest relatives, and we had few people to turn to. I guess you can say that we tried to do it all, and we did fail. Then came the decision to move across the country, in part, to be closer to relatives and, in part, to live in an awesome corner of the country. My sub-specialty income was significantly higher than my wife’s primary care income, so WE made the decision that she would work 60% time. Something has to give, and each decision is accompanied by a certain set of compromises.
Sheesh, folks, I don’t think the tone is meant to be offensive or incendiary.
Great Post!
I’m a female physician married to a physician, and I agree with #5. I work 0.5 FTE, while my husband works full time. It is much better for our family that I have time off during the week to keep the fridge stocked, run errands, call the landscaping company, and spend time with children than the benefit of my extra income would be. It helps that I am in a low paying, outpatient only speciality while my husband makes more as a radiologist. We are fortunate to have this opportunity – it would obviously be a lot more difficult if he were in a low paying speciality as well!
I really liked this article. I agree with every single point. I cannot agree more with the productivity of the early morning hours. I am a full-time physician with young children, so the only time I have to dedicate to my non-physician, non-family related aspirations is in the first two hours of the day (5-7 am for me). I have been surprised what a little time (30 minutes) spent on something every day can produce (for me right now, it is working on a book). Also, as a physician who takes quite a bit of overnight call, which as I age becomes every more difficult, I hope to someday follow in WCI’s footsteps.
The only thing I would add is this. Take some time to rest and reflect. For me, I try my best (not always successfully) to take one day off a week or a sabbath to do this. I believe we were created to require not only daily rest (sleep) but weekly rest from work to recharge. I have also recently begun to take a short evening walk every day after dinner (15 minutes).
Great article!!!
Yikes. With respect to #5, maybe what you meant to say was that dual full-timers are more likely to struggle to maintain a sense of balance. To say that they are failing, well that’s not a fair assessment.
I agree that “struggling” is a better representation than “failing”, and might have caused less of a hubbub.
My husband and I both work full-time, and at times it is difficult to maintain a household with 2 young children. It was nice during my maternity leaves that I could be the point person for household stuff without also juggling a job.
Our long-term goal for a more manageable solution is probably for both of us to work, but neither full time, as described in #5.
Yup. Duly chastised and wording changed.