The Physician_s Guide to Owning Your Time
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to the Academic Medicine Strategy Podcast. This is Stacey Ishman, and I am joined today by a very special guest. Kirsten is here. She's our chief education officer here at Academic Medicine Strategy Group, and we are here for celebration today. So Kirsten- why don't you kick it off?
Speaker 2: And when you say I'm the special guest, I think that's not true, because I'm actually gonna flip the table and look what I have. Do, do. Ooh, I even opened it- Woo ... right side facing. Okay. Yes. So my copy came today. Thank you, Amazon. And luckily, I had an advanced copy that I got to read and help edit all of that, so I'm very near and dear to my heart is this book.
Speaker 2: But I wanted to just ask you a few questions so that we could celebrate this. The number one question is, speaking of number one, how does it feel to have a number one bestseller?
Speaker: It's pretty amazing. Honestly, I just hoped that it would get some traction, that people would order it, and that I might be able to help a few people.
Speaker: But the fact that it hit number one on [00:01:00] a couple different of the indices was really exciting. And-
Speaker 2: Yeah ...
Speaker: I also was really appreciative of all the people who came out, 'cause the way Amazon works as 'cause you have a couple books, is that they really care about how many people buy it in one hour- Yeah
Speaker: not just one day or one week. So it's a goofy setup system, but it was so amazing- ... to see how much of my community came out and bought the book. And then even more exciting, they bought the e-book, and some of them bought the hardcover and the paperback, and some of them- Yeah ... are waiting for the audiobook, which is in process.
Speaker: So I'm excited.
Speaker 2: I love it. And I love how it wasn't even just medicine that it ranked well with. Like- Yeah ... just even about just careers and well- was that the third one, the career and wellness?
Speaker: It was wellness and business, and I was like- And business ... that's so amazing. Yeah, because this is- Yeah
Speaker: there is all, everything here is translatable.
Speaker 2: Yeah ...
Speaker: my sister-in-law told me yesterday at a band competition, she's like, "I watch your videos 'cause I find that they're not just for medicine." And I was like that's super nice," and also-
Speaker 2: I love it ...
Speaker: good to know that it's useful. But yeah, this is [00:02:00] all common stuff.
Speaker: I just think we have an especially huge problem in academic medicine and in medicine in general that we have not been taught to give ourselves permission- ... unlike in other areas or other fields where I think people are given more sense of agency.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And where I'm sure on some level it feels good to be number one and hit that place or whatever, what I know most about you and what I know about the book is that it's just really exciting because of how Amazon treats it in the algorithm that it expands the ripple effect of how many people are gonna be able to see this book and be impacted by the book, and maybe claim a little bit more power and have a little bit more agency over their lives and their schedules and their calendars and just feel like that they actually get to be a part of their lives, which for many of us is an urban legend.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about why you wrote the book first.
Speaker: Really this is the same stuff I talk about all the time in the podcast and on the strategy group, is that I just think that we haven't been taught the skills in medicine. We don't have the infrastructure developed in our medical schools, in [00:03:00] our residency training programs to teach us how we can manage our time in a way that aligns with our values.
Speaker: Yes. And I see so many people who are frustrated by their careers, and I wanted to give them some tools in order to think about how to do it. And I Kirsten helped me edit this book, and one of the key things that I say is you don't have to do everything in the book. If you do one thing in the book and then you go back when you're ready to for something else if that's not enough or if you're like, "Hey, I wanna do three things in this book"-
Speaker: That would all be amazing. So I wrote it to give people some tools, but also to really emphasize the fact that we all deserve that agency and that permission to make sure our time aligns with our values.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that's so important because so many physicians that we work with are just taught to be at 100% all day long, and so the idea of picking one thing can feel like you're failing instead of being a wonderful way to succeed, and it's the same when you go to a conference. I know so many people who will take pages and pages of notes, [00:04:00] and then they'll get home and they won't implement any of it 'cause they don't even know where to begin. And, I love the same concept. What if you went to a conference and you just picked what's the one thing you're gonna change about your practice or about your approach?
Speaker 2: And I feel like all of that is folded into the story of this book. And I love that you give so many of your own real-world examples that make it so relatable to people, and just make it fun to read because it is, it's not quite a narrative book, it's not quite a, like, instructional book, but it's a wonderful blend of reality, and you get to see the why and you get to see impact of just these small little shifts.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: I will tell you, my mom, who was on our launch party- ...
Speaker: talked to me yesterday, and she's already read the whole book, and she was like, "This is great. It's just like talking to you." And I'm like, "Well- ... that makes sense 'cause I literally talked the book, which is how I wrote it." Yes. But it was very sweet, and I hope people feel like it's relatable- Yeah
Speaker: because so many of the stories are how I didn't do it as well as I could have, and I'm hoping to give people sort of the cheat sheet on how to get there way quicker than I did.
Speaker 2: [00:05:00] And you did target, in the launch party, you did talk about the book, and how that really folded into the whole physician way of life too.
Speaker 2: Can you- Yeah ... tell us a little bit about that here now too?
Speaker: Absolutely. So t- two things. One, it's not my idea. Jorie O'Neill is an author who wrote a book called, I can't remember. I wanna make sure I get the name right.
Speaker 2: Talk Your Book?
Speaker: It is Talk Your Book, but it's, there's more to that. But- Oh, okay ... if you look her up, her name, we can throw it in the show notes.
Speaker 2: I'll look it up. Yeah.
Speaker: But she had this technique where you can talk through a number of prompts, and I just, that one concept from her book was all I needed to say "Let's do this." So-
...
Speaker: I was getting frustrated on my drives. I think I was talking to you about it, that I felt like I was... I do a lot of driving between locations, and I was feeling I was wasting hours, and I was-
Speaker: I could've done anything with that time. It's not wasted hours. You can learn, you can think, you can do all the things. But I wanted to harness that time, and I was like, "I wanna write this book." And so what I did was I created a whole bunch of prompts And then I had AI read them to me and then just transcribe what I said- so that I could use that as a starting point. And I [00:06:00] know not everybody wants to use AI. You can use anything you want. You can use a voice memo recorder. Yeah. Kirsten and I just started using Pocket, which can record ambient in a room, so that p- is pretty cool. But I will tell you, it, for me, was a way for it to prompt me to the next one so I didn't have to remember them.
Speaker: That I could just tell my stories and do my thing. Yeah. And then at the end, I looked at all those and I tried to weave them together and, some apparently I felt very excited about and talked for 10 minutes, and some I talked for two minutes. And so I could go back and be like, "I need more here and more there."
Speaker: But it was a really cool way for me to feel like I could talk through what I wanted to talk through, use my time really effectively. And I could do one at a time. I could do it for an hour and do six prompts. Like- ... it really just... I found myself walking around the house, I was like, "I have 10 minutes," and I would do one more prompt.
Speaker: It felt so attainable 'cause I broke it down to all these little steps. I thought about the big picture, and then I took the little part. And I d- I gave the same technique to somebody this week to write a research paper, 'cause I'm like, "You don't need the whole paper. What do you want in the intro section?
Speaker: What are the three- ... points [00:07:00] you wanna make? And then just work on one of them, and teach your business- Yeah ... and medical students to do the same." So I loved the technique. Jorie is the one who gave it to me. It was super effective and allowed me to use my time wisely.
Speaker 2: And I loved all the people in your community who stepped up and came to the launch party and- Yeah
Speaker 2: bought all the different versions of it. But they are saying yes to you, but they're also saying yes to what?
Speaker: I hope what they're saying yes to is reclaiming some of their time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: You and I went back and forth on the title for a book a whole bunch of times, and the fundamental concept was really to take back control of where you put your time and your energy.
Speaker: And that's not- Yeah ... what we ended up calling the book, but it is really an underlying concept that I hope people f- feel that there's a permission there. That was part of it. And so Joe Kirshner, who used to be the dean at the Medical College of Wisconsin, was so kind to write me the forward, and that was one of the concepts and con- things he talked about in his forward, was how it's not just a book about time management, but it's also a book about [00:08:00] giving yourself permission and really the mindset around that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So important. So what do you hope people do with the book? What do you hope now that it is out there? What do you hope that it will let somebody else rethink about their own world and their own identity?
Speaker: I hope it allows somebody to look at their time and hopefully in their ideal world, it's matched.
Speaker: "Great, I'm doing the right thing." I would love some affirmation for people. Yeah. But there's probably some people, myself included, who are gonna look at their time and say, "I don't like this time," or, "I don't wanna do this," or, "I dread that."
Speaker: Some of it's reframing. "Oh, I just need to think of this differently, and I'll actually enjoy it more."
Speaker: And some of it is saying, "I don't have to do that thing just 'cause somebody asked me," or, "I can more effectively s- plan my time so I can use it. I can delegate, I can delete." All the, there's a lot of different concepts in there.
Speaker 2: I hope- But talk about the values piece.
Speaker: So
Speaker 2: that's- Because I think that, that's something that people don't necessarily think of when they think of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I thought that, to me, was the big oh. That was the biggest aha for me, was how time and values are [00:09:00] actually, like, in sync. And I've heard lots of self-help people tell you, "Okay your calendar is a reflection of your values." Okay, I just smiled and nodded and just went on without my day but it clicked on a different level, and I loved how you provided so many examples and I'm like, "Oh, those are my values.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't care about those." So can you talk a little bit about why that was such a pivotal part of the book for you?
Speaker: Yeah, I can talk about my own experience and I really at one point in my life for sure was sure that my family was not my number one value. I think many people think their family or their personal life or th- themselves is their number one value.
Speaker: But if you look at my calendar, I wasn't making it to the kids' events. I wasn't- ... showing up for all the things I wanna show up for. I wasn't doing self-care, which is absolutely valuing myself and health. Things that seem so obvious to us, right? But how many times do we say, "I didn't have the time to do that," or, "My kids, now I have to miss this."
Speaker: I didn't wanna miss it anymore. And so- Yeah ... I was able to say "How do I rejigger this?" And on the alternative side, I was that person at the beginning of my career. I was driven. [00:10:00] I was gonna become this- ... assistant professor. I was gonna have it all, and I wanted to be at work doing data analysis and writing a paper.
Speaker: I really loved it. And so my value was that was something I wanted to do. It was time I was willing to balance or try to balance. It wasn't balanced, but I was willing to give that time because it really was something I valued. And over time it changed. But
Speaker 2: that's very different than making sure that the break room has donuts
Speaker: I have been the person who ate them- ... and I kept cutting, thinking I was only gonna have half a donut, and then I went back and I ate the rest, and separate problem. That's the invisible work stuff, right? Like we- I
Speaker 2: love it. Yeah ...
Speaker: w- we may all be the person. I actually did mentor almost every medical student, and that was not necessarily something that's gonna show up on my CV, but it was something that gave me value- so it was worth doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Congratulations on an amazing success, and I am so proud to be able to celebrate this book with you. And is there anything else you wanna say to people who have read the book, or haven't read the book, or are thinking about buying the [00:11:00] book before we wrap up here?
Speaker: Two things.
Speaker: One is thank you for everybody who has talked to me about the book, who helped look at cover titles. We were like crowdsourcing the cover, the title, the, all the things. So thank you for everybody.
Speaker 2: It was definitely a village.
Speaker: Yeah. And then for those of you who have had an opportunity to think about these things, if you haven't bought the book, I would love if you did.
Speaker: The e-book is pretty cheap. It's under $5. In fact, right now it's 99 cents, but it will remain under $5. And then if you're interested in an audiobook, it's coming. But more importantly, if this is resonating with you and you're having a hard time figuring out what to do with it, talk to your colleagues, talk to your mentors, find a coach, talk to us if you need help, like we would be more than happy.
Speaker: And then for the leaders out there, this is infrastructure you can build for your institutions, and it is something we don't teach very well. I did not learn this at work. And I think we should be learning this at work. And if we give those skills to our trainees, and our faculty, and our [00:12:00] staff, they're more likely to love their jobs, enjoy their time, want to stay, and have better job satisfaction.
Speaker: There's actually great information in that regard. So if you can institute that in your institution, I highly recommend it. If you're not the leader, but you wanna talk to your leader about it, I also recommend that. And if you need help, reach out. We're happy to help.
Speaker 2: And if your department does book clubs or if you're a private practice that is looking for alternative ways, we are also rolling this out as part of our CME By the Book program.
Speaker 2: So people can actually read Stacey's book and then reflect on it and how it can improve their practice and earn CME for that. So check that out under our CME By the Book program so that it can be a one-stop shop for just making your world a better place.
Speaker: And again, all that'll be in the show notes. So thank you all very much for joining us.
Speaker: We hope that you enjoyed this, and if you did, please share it with a friend or a colleague. We really appreciate if you subscribe. It helps us get the message out to more people in whatever format you're watching or listening to this. And we look [00:13:00] forward to talking to you next week. Thank you.
