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!
Very good post! I read past #1 (multi tasking on the toilet, can’t let that go). I have started reading again after watching much less television. I think what happens with TV is you think you need to keep watching a series, even if it’s not that great, because you started it. Nope, you don’t.
There are a handful of pretty good TV shows that came and went, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and there may be a few more that rank up with those, but there are also tons of others like this I watched maybe one or two episodes and said, meh. Orange is the New Black and Mad Men come to mind. To each their own, I guess.
You don’t need to watch MORE TV! In fact, I’d probably rather watch one of my top favorite old television shows again, if I watch anything, than trying to find more ways to waste time watching TV. Also, it’s Summer, so go outside or something!
PS – I’m not a doctor, but I really enjoy your blog, one of the better ones out there in the financial advice area.
Isn’t it ironic that in the comments section of a blog post about increasing efficiency, the 2 most repeated points are 1) the Internet is a huge time waster and 2) people are offended by this post because the website they frequent is hotly debating it. I think I will follow WCI’s advice from point #1: “you should probably just close your computer right now and go do something else.”
Thanks for the Great tips WCI!!
You presented a great list of tips on how to achieve efficiency, many of which I agree with.
It is surprising to see people get offended at tip #5. This is something that my family is dealing with right now, as my wife and I are both full time physicians. I agree that a family probably does not run best when there are two parents working 40+ hours per week. It is the unfortunate reality that many households have to deal with though, and there are probably many families that make the best of it.
We will continue working full time for the “short term” until close to FI, but at some point, you have to ask yourself “how much money do I really need” as well as “what will make me most happy”. We do not need so much money such that both of us need to continue working 30+ years. We would also be happier spending more time with family.
Some people may really enjoy working their 60 hour job, and some people may actually see their family life suffer the more time they spend at home. Therefore, on many levels, this becomes a very personal issue, but there is no doubt that more QUALITY family time is directly correlated to a better life!
From #5. re: two-professional family.
” But I have a heavy skepticism that it is actually a more efficient way for a family to go through life.”
The louder the squeals, the truer the statement. If it were not true, the female docs would have rolled their eyes and scrolled on.
I point out the above, as the wife in a surgeon/ER doc family with 3 grown kids. The less I worked , the happier the home life.
I have to agree with you – my husband is ortho and I’m anesthesia and when I cut my hours back to an actual 40 work hours life became much more manageable with 4 kids!
Real quick
“Babysit” changed to “parent” ?
Yea, in the caption of the photo.
I am a female physician. My husband is a professor. We both work full time. I am a member of the 10,000 female physician facebook group mentioned above. I work full time so we can pay off my medical school loans and my husband works full time because if he doesn’t he won’t get tenure and that is career suicide. We have two awesome kids who are not in school yet. We have no family nearby. It isn’t easy, but nothing worth doing is easy. We moved to an area where our commutes, salaries, and hours are the best possible. We pay people to cut the grass, clean the house, and a fantastic nanny to take the kids to their activities when we can’t be home. We talk all the time about how to boost efficiency and how to maximize our family time. When I work weekends, my family will come join me for chocolate milk and a cookie in the lounge. When my husband has a long experiment running, I take the kids and we have a picnic in his office. We turn work conferences into family vacations.
We readers have spent a lot of time critiquing WCI for several semantics today . One I haven’t seen discussed is his comment in #5 that efficiency is worth considering. Yes, yes, yes.
Everything is worth considering. All options, what works for different people and different families will vary. But what a great point – consider how you can be more efficient.
What a great tree to focus on in this forest.
I appreciate that you were able to focus on the main points of the post despite the distraction of the poor writing, tone, and word choice.
Great post (except the babysitting part)
My advice is to first think about what you want. If you want to win the Nobel prize/be a full professor at a top 10 medical school/etc your priorities are going to be very different than if you want to work 40 hours a week, spend time with your family and retire at 50. One isn’t necessarily better, but you need to know what you are working toward
I am some where in the middle but in particular realize I have significant interests outside medicine (e.g. running at least until I got so old I started breaking down, reading , spending time with my family) so work less than many of by compatriots in academia but more than some
Would just like to comment as a long time WCI reader and surgeon in dual surgeon family with three kids under 5. First of, it’s annoying to hear that an entire group of women physicians take offense. I’m part of that group and do not take offense. I do disagree with the comment about efficiency. I think if we compared schedules my household is probably more efficient since we don’t have time for any inefficiency. Our household schedule is made in advanced in 3 month blocks, vacations made 1 year our. Anything that is a ‘waste’ of time is outsourced and we use our ‘gobs’ of money to make household chores a well-oiled machine. However, it’s exhausting and we spend less time ‘parenting’ then we’d like and once we have a safety net of money, I plan to cut down. Can we keep going as we are with au pair, day care, before & after school care, gardener, roof/gutter person, home cleaning person, takeout/delivery etc etc? Yes, but is not sustainable for us. I can do efficiency, but doesn’t necessary equate to well balanced and low stress life.
Excellent point that maximizing efficiency does not necessarily minimize stress nor maximize happiness.
I read this article and didn’t read the caption on the photo that stirred this controversy. In the past I got myself in trouble as well with the term “babysitting,” but now I often use it facetiously for that very reason.
The connotation brought up is quite valid — oversight of your children is a responsibility, but this argument is also about a bit of semantics. If I say I have to “watch” my kids, no one takes offense. I’ve never heard my wife or any mother say she can’t go out somewhere because she has to “parent” the kids (if you’re actually a stay-at-home-parent that’s a little different).
The division of labor issue is a more intricate topic. We’ve struggled with that in our house as well. If you have two parents both working 60+ hours a week (not us though), then obviously something has to give in terms of responsibilities at home and time with the kids. That’s not a value statement, it’s just a recognition of the amount of time you have in a week. Priorities have to be a little more clear, outsourcing tasks is more important, and that lifestyle it may or may not impact family satisfaction/happiness. It often DOES negatively impact happiness and balance, which is why many people end up having one person go part time or stop working for awhile. I don’t think that’s an inevitable outcome though.
Hi WCI,
As a female MD about to (finally) enter the work force after a decade of post-graduate training, I have learned a lot from your website, especially on physician mortgages and back door Roth. However, I found your article and your replies to your dissenters a bit tone deaf. You have obviously come so far just being yourself, so this advice may go unheeded. However, given that you currently occupy a unique position of educating professionals/physicians with a platform for expansion, I would consider listening to those female MDs who were turned off by your tone and engaging with them on why they were turned off (it’s more than just the poor wording choice that you quickly fixed from: ‘changing babysitting to parenting,’ and ‘failure to struggling’). Seriously talk to your female MD colleagues in your field, or even better, female MDs who are in a different field, who live in a different area (maybe in one of the HCOL cities), those who are in dual physician or dual professional relationships; ask them to read or discuss your original blog post as initially published (and sent out to subscribers) and ask them how you can change. I think your blog is great, and it has a potential to reach a wider audience, but you should really consider your branding and your audience.
I think I did engage. I’ve read every comment on this post, made at least a dozen comments on this post already on the topic, removed the parts identified as offensive, and exchanged emails and texts with many readers. How do you suggest I engage more?
Is there really something that I can do that would make you feel I have atoned sufficiently for being “tone deaf?” I’m guessing not since your comment was posted after I did all of that. I’m kind of ready to give up engaging on this topic as I’m starting to feel it is literally impossible to please those criticizing a handful of lines in a 2000 word blog post on a 1000 post website that the majority of commenters state was not offensive before, is definitely no longer offensive, and was certainly not meant to be offensive. But if you would like me to talk to a female MD that is a member of a dual income couple in a HCOL area (besides the one I exchanged 30 texts with last night) give me a call as I’m guessing that describes you. Seriously, give me a call. My cell number is in your inbox.
I had a nice chat with “MD” this afternoon and she offered a lot of great suggestions for the site. I subsequently rewrote the infamous “# 5” above to reflect better what I was thinking hopefully without being arrogant or offensive.
She also suggested a Pro/Con about whether a dual professional couple can be efficient or not (since this was clearly a controversial topic). Any volunteers to write either the Pro or Con side?
Hi WCI – thanks for our nice telephone conversation. I thought the re-edit was nice and thanks for the acknowledgement / apology regarding post #5 and being cognizant of your female MD reader base. Good luck with your blog.
It’s interesting that you bring up this point because a while ago WCI had a post called “Unique Challenges for Female High Income Professionals”. I was really interested to read what was going to be said in the comments section but was disappointed that not a whole lot of women commented.
Efficiency is a topic that is especially important to women because the fact of the matter remains that a lot of mothers, professional or not, feel a strong(er) responsibility to running the home and family than their spouses. So it can be off-putting when you read a title to a post that feels like it will help you, but instead one of the tips essentially reads as “Hey everything is taken care of at home and I don’t feel the slightest bit of guilt about not having to deal with the tantrums, poopy diapers, and laundry! Hot dang I’m doing great! Y’all over there trying to manage it all are fools!” (sorry Jim, I know that’s not what you meant, but I’m trying to help you out here).
And to add insult to injury, your pager just went off.
I’ve given up on trying to find a blog that offers advice on how to improve this aspect of my life. So I will take the other good pearls of wisdom in this blog, and ignore the stuff that doesn’t pertain to me.
Thanks, Nerdy Wife. A helpful perspective.
Nerdymom, you sound like me! Have you checked out Bonnie Koo’s blog? She’s a big WCI fan and shares many of his approaches, but it speaks to many of the unique challenges of our situations being physicians without stay at home spouses. Just throwing out something I’ve found helpful
https://missbonniemd.com/
Actually I’m not a physician, I’m a mechanical engineer married to a physician and both of my sisters are physician mothers, so this is a topic we struggle with and talk about regularly. Thanks for this site! I will most definitely check it out and share with my sisters.
In my few decades on this earth, I’ve learned not only that you can’t please everyone but that there are many people looking for reasons to be offended. It’s okay to let them be offended. Thank them for their perspective and move on. Keep on being yourself. Keep on being brash and straightforward. That’s how you became so successful and that’s why you have such a loyal following.
+1.
I think Brigham Young’s words are apt:
Learning not to be offended easily is a pretty useful life skill. Of course, so is avoiding being offensive!
Well said, my sentiments as well. My path through medicine mirrors WCI with a wonderful supportive wife all the way. Why that is perceived as a negative thing is beyond me. If others path takes a different course and everyone is happy, well good for you. Don’t complain because others didn’t take your path. I have observed that those who are crying loudest about bias and acceptance and inclusiveness are often the ones who least demonstrate those traits.
That’s too bad. I was hoping over time as this blog evolved that topics would be covered for “non-traditional” situations. I already got the frugal living, index fund investing, disability insurance, estate planning, etc. stuff down. Now I’m ready for new stuff. It’s fine to gear your posts to traditional home arrangements and continue along that path, but perhaps you should preface your advice posts with that. Just a suggestion for the future if you are unwilling to expand your readership, although I realize that this sort of back and forth in the comments section only serves to improve hits to the site and increase your revenue, without really offering much benefit to your readers. There was a time when WCI held a weary eye for insurance and real estate agents which resounded very strongly with your early readers, but now I’m seeing ads everywhere on this site for them. Like I said, you can stay within your lane or expand to new things.
It’s a tricky thing with blogging. You want to be authentic, which means you have to write about your own situation, but you also want to reach as many people as you can, which means writing about situations different from your own. I try to fill that niche by publishing a guest post every week. If you have gotten to the point where you’ve already “got the frugal living, index fund investing, disability insurance, estate planning, etc. stuff down” I bet a lot of readers would benefit from hearing your story and your secrets in a guest post.
I’m open to any other suggestions you have to expand readership.
If one of the insurance agents advertising on my site pushes whole life insurance on you, I want to know about it. They won’t be here long. I have had very few realtor advertisers over the years, so I’m not sure what you’re really seeing there. I’ve still got a weary eye for both professions but also have thousands of readers asking for referrals to “the good guys” in the industry, so much so that I have adopted connecting the good guys with docs looking for them as a third mission on the site.
What kind of “new stuff” that you’re ready for would you like to see? I’ve been writing a bit lately about my real estate and other private investments from time to time. Do you want to see more of that kind of stuff?
I’m with him, PhysicianDad down below. A guest post from a dual physician or dual professional couple with good advice for managing work/life balance and efficiency would be helpful. I’m not much of a writer, but I’ll brainstorm topics and let you know.
Would be very interested in reading about your real estate and private investment pursuits. Thank you.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/real-estate-and-alternatives-in-our-portfolio/
Here’s the latest, but I’ll definitely have an update this Fall. Lots of new investments since then.
We are a two physician household. I can’t imagine it any other way. If I had to stay home my marriage would crumble. I actually went back to work a few days early from maternity leave for my sanity. And I’m a better mother for it. I don’t envy my “stay at home” mom friend’s as I listen to them bitch about how hard it is being the primary care giver and not being financially independent. And I don’t doubt it. This article really turned me off (gobs of money- super distasteful- I’ll go spend my tens of thousands that no one handed to me for being a house slave).
This comments section has become a pattern reiteration. The comments towards your supposed “friend mothers” who stay home with their children are”super distasteful”. Just because women fuss about their children doesn’t mean they are unhappy being the primary care giver just as physicians who fuss about their patients or schedule are not necessarily unhappy about their careers. Maybe we can get a post from Mrs WCI about home efficiency and satisfaction with one working spouse.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t use the phrase house slave. Is “gobs of money” an offensive phrase? That’s how I view any physician income.
I think “gobs of money” is less an insult and more a nod to the fact that doctor salaries are typically very high. Enough so to support a comfortable – and often relatively luxurious – lifestyle with one income earner. Not sure what’s distasteful about that, since it’s not even a value judgment of any kind, but rather just a statement of fact.
That was my point with the phrase.
I love learning about personal finance- is it efficient use of my time? I am in a good place with my current strategy. I think it is more efficient use of my time focusing on my work and my children. I agree with you on being a morning person. My husband also suggested having a timer- give yourself 30mins to focus on a task and don’t allow yourself to be interrupted. you will be surprised what you can accomplish in 30mins. It is inefficient use of my time reading and browsing through comments criticizing WCI and unnecessary “labeling and name calling”. If a blog post is not pertaining or useful to me, no need to spread the anger. move along.
My physician wife shared this with me–not because she was offended–but because we’re another one of those potentially inefficient dual physician families and she thought I might glean something from the piece.
I think your list is a good starting point for all. Some of your points read to me as over simplified and off the mark but I completely believe that they work wonderfully in your family unit. I think that is the beauty of this piece as a springboard for physician families. I can read this and see some aspects that feel off for us because we’re raising our children in a Christian marriage. So we adapt our plan/approach a bit to account for that. My parenting approach is also different than yours so some of your tone and assumptions hit a bit off mark in my head but again I can adapt from your springboard and go forward. I really think this is a great piece for couples to read and then talk about the assumptions and values of the author and how they resonate.
I will say that in dual physician families where the goal is not to use outside childcare it can be difficult for both parents to work medical “full time hours” in many specialties. This has been our goal so currently my wife and I work somewhere around 1.5 time combined. We have both made some career changes and concessions to get to this place and we know we will need to continue to adapt and grow as our children/family grow. In spite of the challenges I will always support a model that has both of us actively raising our kids AND actively practicing medicine because:
1.)My wife’s clinical skills are strong and she saves lives!
2.)My children of both genders need to see that physicians can be smart, ethical, kind, and female!
3.)Medicine is career that you need to be actively engaged in to maintain your skills.
4.)Financial security. Until we have amassed a net worth over 10 million I think we both feel better about us each having mid six figure earning potential in the event we needed to step it up to dual full time. [Some other dual physician couples may have dual loan burdens somewhere in the 300-800k range and the extra income may truly be needed. We know we are a bit fortunate to be in a situation where our only debt now is mortgage. This is not reality for many dual physician families.]
5.)We want our children to have strong relationships with both of us. Rather than having one parent be the primary parent we see that there are aspects of parenting where we should each take the primary role. We acknowledge that this will change as the children grow and may be different with each child. We have adapted to this (ie.my wife was/will be home more in the first year for each child to facilitate breast feeding) and will continue to do so.
6.)Although I may doubt it in a few of my most exhausted or frustrated moments I would miss the practice of medicine. My wife echoes these sentiments. I
Thanks for sharing your story!
Wow, I’m glad I didn’t read the original post. Having a spouse stay at home I agree is a wonderful time hack. And I’m not going to lie I am often jealous of those couples that are lucky enough to have that. We are a dual physician couple with three kids and it is extremely chaotic. Calling my husband from the OR to tell him I was running late only to get an operating room nurse on the other line telling me he is still scrubbed in as well was the impetus for me to go part-time. At first I was afraid to go part-time because I didn’t want to be stuck doing the lion share of the housework: child rearing, laundry and all those other unpleasant task associated with running a household. But honestly it isn’t that bad. Whereas before I was always trying to “squeeze” all those activities in, as in squeeze a load of laundry before the kids woke up, squeeze doing the dishes while the kids were eating (instead of sitting down with them and enjoying the meal listening to their day), I actually now have time as in a WHOLE six hours two times a week to get the stuff done. And if I don’t feel like putting away clothes in the morning, I know I can do it in the afternoon as opposed to next week Saturday AM when I come up for air. Seriously, if I didn’t finish the laundry by Sunday 9pm, it sat in place, either in the washer, dryer, laundry basket or somewhere in between until I could work on it again Friday night at 9pm. Having said all of this, I don’t believe dual income couples are doomed for failure as was reported in one of the comments to be said by Dr. Dahle. I can share a number of time hacks I’ve devised over the years. But certainly having a member of the household available to take care of said household is a huge time hack. And I’m glad Dr. Dahle realizes that. I often wonder sometimes if the work away from home spouse appreciates the work at home spouse based on comments I hear from time to time.
Child rearing is an “unpleasant task” but turns out to be “not that bad?” I’m glad I didn’t say that. I would have been eaten alive!
And no, I never said “dual income families are doomed for failure” despite what has been reported.
My goodness, it’s almost worse when I rewrite it as the legend of what I actually wrote grows and grows!
However, please DO share your time hacks. I’ve had many readers ask for posts about that and would love to get a guest post from you on the subject.
Late arrival to this discussion (also 1st time I think I’ve commented over years of reading your site). I missed the offending 1st draft, but thought I’d chime in as an at-home dad married to a medium-high income physician.
I take care of somewhere we’ll north of 90% of our household’s “domestic” work, and do 100% of our financial management (why I’ve been reading this site for years), 100% of our home maintenance, and anything else I can take off the plate of my very hard-working wife’s hands (sometimes help with scut work generated by her job) so that her free time can be fully chore-unencimbered family time with our children and myself (or whatever else she chooses). Occasionally I feel a bit silly for the multiple degrees/career prep I did that I’ve entirely set aside for several years, but when we had kids and we looked dispassionately at the financial math as well as what seemed the happiness balance, me staying home was an no-brainer (in our specific situation, and with our specific personalities/preferences etc – please no one read this as prescriptive). Had I been an equal earner, or if I felt unqualified/uninterested in raising the the kids at home, our financial math or decision process might have been different. As it stands, we regularly try to imagine if we’d made a different choice, and are always very glad we did. It likely killed my long term career prospects, which is a very real consideration for anyone contemplating this option, especially if that will be a large source of regret. With our goal being rocketing toward full financial independence before age 40 (which is proceeding ahead of schedule, despite med-high COL location and a salary only about 20% above national median for physicians, and a 3% SWR target) my long-term career potential is less of a concern than if we were on a long-term path to a SWR.
Financially though, in our situation, a nearly stereotypical 1950’s division of labor (with genders reversed) has been incredibly helpful for us financially (my income potential probably would have leveled off around $70-80k, for reference). We’ve been quite surprised that just the money we save annually from me being at home (no daycare for multiple children, no 2nd commute, skipping tax inefficiency of my income on top of her much larger one, etc.), plus me running everything extremely frugally, and doing all types of work etc. that we would have needed to hire people to do (domestic or maintenance) amounts to a larger sum than I likely could have earned.
All that to say, we’ve found a nearly complete division of labor to make both of our living experiences much happier, and to make our financial trajectory toward FI more rapid, separate from our belief that we’re very lucky/blessed to be able to do what we think is possibly the best thing we could do for our children. But another couple with different personalities, goals, children, or income balance between the partners might very reasonably come to the complete opposite conclusion.
Thanks for sharing your experience! We came to a similar conclusion about the merits of my partner working for pay.