Love Your Job Again Ep 340

how to love your job again. We can all go through little slumps in our careers, even if we're generally in jobs we like, and so you know, as we're thinking about Valentine's Day this month, it helps to think about how we might love all the things in our lives. And sort of similar to any long term relationship, a job can benefit from putting a little extra into to it as long as you genuinely believe it is the

right job for you to be in. So just if you notice my voice sounds a little different, I have a confession to make here, Sarah, perhaps you could describe this wretched scene you're seeing on the video.

I feel so bad for her. I did suggest we move this recording, but in typical Laura fashion, she felt like she wanted to see how we did today, and so far I think, so good. But I hope that by the time everyone is hearing this episode this is a distant memory. We can all laugh about it, and that your back and twisting in every witch direction, pain free moving forward.

on disability when they are in back pain. But speaking of jobs, Sarah, what were your early jobs that you did, like as a teenager.

got paid like nothing. I believe the summer salary for five weeks of full time work because it was from like eight to four or something like that was three hundred dollars for the summer, and then the second summer I got a huge raise to four hundred dollars for the summer. But it was really fun and I feel like I did learn a lot about like just being responsible and working as a team, taking care of kids.

What I liked and didn't like and I always requested the five and six year olds because I felt like they were old enough not to be babies, but young enough that they were listening to me. So I really liked it. And then I also worked at a video store, which we don't even have those anymore, so it was a relic of the past. And I did a lot of babysitting as well. I remember rates of like two dollars an hour at certain people's houses, and I actually I didn't mind babysitting.

customize their fast food orders. Anyway. I worked at Osco drugstore for a summer, worked in did a paper delivery job for a while, plus a lot of babysitting. My kids have not, so I guess my older kids would have been old enough to have summer jobs. Certainly, I guess Jasper could have had a job last summer. He didn't wind up doing that. He wound up doing some other things. I don't know. They probably, I mean they babysit for me when I need it for Henry and Alex.

Sometimes that is unpaid as part of your household duties, and sometimes it is paid because it's something I would have had to hire, you know, an adult sitter to do. If I'm doing something for work, for instance, I will usually pay them for doing it. But yeah, so anyway, this main set, I mean, are your kids gonna work? What do you think? So?

be fine with it. But if there's not something else that they want to do. I think working is a great thing for them to do. I actually think camp counselor is something I would encourage all of my kids to at least consider because it's social and there's a fun camp atmosphere, but you also get that kind of responsibility piece, So it's a way to experience camp on a different level, but also probably gain some skills from it as well.

The work doesn't interest you, maybe it's not even paying as much as you're probably worth. But you're like, how will I ever find another boss who lets me do X, Y and Z whenever I want? Well, let's hear about it. The labor market is just so much less flexible than, so much less efficient than the capital markets. Like money tends to go wherever because a dollar is worth the same in anything, So if something's getting much better returns over time, more people are going to go there, like

pretty quickly. But the labor market, the job you have is one that was available when you were looking and that you knew about, right, And so if you think about all those constraints on what you would have found, there is absolutely no guarantee that you would have optimized on any dimension. So if you haven't optimized on any dimension. That means it's actually possible to improve on multiple dimensions

at the same time. So it is entirely possible that you will find a job that you like more, that is more flexible, and that pays you more, Like you just don't know until you look, So why not work your network see what's out there. This is a good exercise at any point. I mean, if for no other reason then you can see what other people are maybe earning and work your way into a raise. That's all worth trying. But a generally good job is also like

I would guess, a generally good marriage. If we're going to use this metaphor here, Everything goes through ups and downs, and what you get out of it is going to be a function of what you're putting into it. So you can look for a new job, but there's also no guarantee that will be perfect. And if any of the issues in your current job in any way stem from you, like, those are absolutely going to be repeated

in a new situation. So if you you know, have this in your mind, like, oh, it's impossible to hire good people like, you may find it's also a hospital to hire new people in your new job, Like it's maybe that you aren't you looking for the right things in people. If you're like, oh, people you know never respect boundaries, and then you get to a new job and you're like, wow, people don't respect boundaries here too. It's like, well, maybe we need to be a little bit more firm

in those boundaries. So anyway, just something to keep in mind there.

I don't like this, this works, this doesn't work. And so I have gone from entirely clinical to being in kind of clinical slash hybrid leadership role, to having the leadership role be a major part of my job with numerous kind of leadership tracks things going on, to then deciding that I preferred to focus more on my creative pursuits because I found myself wanting to do that more and more anyway and didn't feel like I could give my all to both realms, And then dialing back to

my current iteration, which is sixty percent clinical, forty percent working for myself. So a lot of that has just taken you know, reflective time conversations with my husband, thinking about what I like to do during the week and what I don't, thinking about what stresses me out and takes away from the rest of my life and what doesn't, and even like down to the minutia level, like we talk about like how your time is spent. I think one thing that helped me kind of I guess optimize.

The parts that I still have are to think about, like what needs to be me doing it and what am I good at and enjoy and what could more easily be either eliminated or outsourced. My example here being I want to spend face to face time with patients, being able able to sit there and answer their questions without seeming rushed. And I don't want to be playing with the fax machine because one of those requires me and really benefits from my training and just generally me

being present as a human and one of them. Someone else can can make the facts machine probably work better than I can, because I'm really not good at faxing things.

all that helpful. So actually try, as a first step to loving your job again, try tracking your time at work. I always think people should track all their time, all one hundred and sixty eight hours of the week. So you might want to do that partly because sometimes work slips into other crevices of the week, right, you know, it's quite possible that you do some work at night, or maybe you sometimes do work on the weekends or something like that, and it's helpful to know exactly what

the shape of that is. But then also what you're doing during standard working hours, Like you know, how much of your time is spent on the things that you like, how much time is spent on the things that you don't like. Are the stories you are telling yourself accurate? I know, we just did our time tracking challenge a couple of weeks ago on my blog and in my newsletters, and one of the things I pointed out to people is I clocked thirty eight hours of work for the week,

which is pretty typical for me. I'm almost always somewhere between thirty five and forty hours. But I worked at least three week nights after six pm. I worked on both weekend days in order for it to hit that thirty eight hours. And so if I was telling myself a story of like, look how overworked I am because I'm working at night and on the weekends. I'm not sure that would be entirely accurate, given that I'm only

clocking thirty eight hours a week. Right, what's actually going on is that I am, through choice and through happenstance, often doing things that are not work during working hours, and in order to actually get all the work I have to do done, I need to use those night

and weekend hours. So it's a different story that's more stort of, like, well, maybe if I don't like working at nights and weekends, I need to change up my work days to be a little bit more focused or you know, not do stuff with the kids after school. But if I decide that, like, actually I'm okay with stopping work at four o'clock to deal with kids, then the nights and weekends are just going to be part

of it. So, you know, you want to make sure you're telling yourself a story and also what you're doing during those working hours. So let's take a quick ad break and then we will be back with more on making work work for you. Well, we are back talking how to love your job again. It is February, we are coming into Valentine's Day, and you know we want to think about all the things we love in our lives,

and hopefully we love our work too. And if we're not truly in love with our work, there are maybe ways that we can become a little bit more enamored with our current jobs. We just talked about tracking our time, and now we're going to look at the four dimensions of passion people, productivity, and pleasure and passion first might be slightly tricky. We don't all have to be what we wanted to be when we grow up. You know,

we wanted to be a ballerina or an astronaut. Maybe we have some ballerinas and astronauts listening to this show, But probably most people wound up in other things. And I'm not sure that everyone dreamed of being, say, an insurance executive when you grew up. But on the other hand, there are probably things within that that you are very passionate about, whether that is mentoring your colleagues, whether that

is designing better products, whatever it happens to be. So as you look at your time log, you might want to say, well, what are the favorite parts of my job in terms of how I am spending my hours, and then set yourself a goal could you spend at least one more hour beyond what you are currently spending over the next week, and the parts of your job that you love. So, Sarah, what are your favorite parts of your job?

interesting conflicting ideas about this. But I think we are getting to an interesting middle ground here, which is like, Okay, you're not necessarily going to be that football player that you were dreaming about in second grade, but can you find some piece of what you're doing to be passionate about and maybe try to grow at that piece. So that's kind of where we fall on the spectrum of following your passion. I really enjoy writing, I like connecting

with others. I love talking about planning and organizing and activity, and I do enjoy speaking. The more I do it, the more I'm just happy that I'm comfortable doing it.

And it becomes really fun. And so I am really happy that I've been able to kind of expand those pieces of my non clinical work, not teaching courses, you know, doing presentations and that kind of a thing, as well as I've always enjoyed writing, and there's a lot of writing that goes in even though I'm not an author or like writer like that, I'm churning out a lot of scripts and a lot of content, and so I feel like I get to connect with that part of what I enjoy on a regular basis.

What are your least favorite parts of your job as you look at how you are spending hours, and the goal is could you spend one hour less on those things over the course of the week. So, Sarah, I know you recently worked on your patient checkout template, right as a way to spend less time on things that were related to like printing in fax machines, and more time with the actual patient interaction.

next appointment? Like will they actually get the instructions that I write out for them, because there's something called an after visit summary and we can actually type that up in the room for them to see it, but for them to actually get a physical copy of that, which some people still really like having it physically, I would wonder about it, And so I spent a lot of time running around printing it out myself, printing out the labs myself, handing them to the patient, and then like

kind of walking them to the front desk. And then I went to an ORTHO appointment when I had hurt my knee, and I saw that he had given me a checkout sheet that basically had checkboxes of what types of orders were needed when the appointment needed to be happened and then it like checked off that, like the person at the front needed to give my instructions and he just did that with a pen. So it's super quick, like at the very end of the visit. And I'm like,

he works with the same organization I do. I'm like, I can do that too. So I made my own checkout sheet, and you know what, it has been awesome.

to take as much time as it's taking. Maybe it's a meeting that you've been doing in person that actually could be done by zoom and so you could minimize the travel time. I mean, even if people are in the same complex but you're on opposite sides of it. I mean, you can save ten minutes of walking back

and forth. If if it's something that's you know, an already established relationship and it's more of a check in as opposed to building a new relationship, it could be that you spend a little bit less time on email. I know that's a productivity drain for a lot of people to feel like they are always in their inbox. And so the question is do you actually need to be always in your inbox? Are you doing that to yourself?

I'm not saying only check it once a day or anything like that, but you might be able to check I don't know four times a day or five or six times a day, but five or six times a day is very different from like in and out every ten minutes. Over the course of an eight hour day, which is what a lot of people, or.

the first time. Maybe they won't do it as well as you the first ten times, but you know, by eleventh time on, it's it's going to be a pretty good substitute for what you are doing, and so that can buy yourself an extra hour as well. So speaking of other people, we work with, colleagues and stuff like that, that is the second dimension because many times there's been

some fascinating research on this. And you know, Gallup asks a question about whether you have a best work friend, and it's one of the answers that is most highly correlated with how engaged and satisfied people are with their jobs, because the truth is, if you're spending time with somebody Monday, through Friday that you would be willing to spend time with after work, and on the weekends too, you get a little bit of that like happiness that you would

have had from the weekend in your weekday right that you are actually enjoying the time you are spending at work because you are enjoying this other person's company. Now, I honest say, I don't know that you have to have like a best friend, but having a group of people that you truly enjoy hanging out with at work can like massively increase your satisfaction. And this is not

just random. I mean sometimes like you meet someone wonderful who just comes up and decides that they are going to be your best friend, and it's great, But it usually doesn't work like that. It's usually that you have people that you genuinely like and then you try to move them a little bit up the friendship ladder by getting to know them, by arranging opportunities to see them

and things like that. So, Sarah, I know, I mean, you obviously see your clinical colleagues just by virtue of being in the office a lot, but how have you nurtured those relationships over time?

in person conferences and stuff. But one thing I've done that's been very like intentional and Amy, if you're listening to this because you listened last time, Yes, I'm going to break she said, Oh I heard you talk about us on the podcast, so I'm going to do it again on purpose. So we do Friday lunches and I'm usually the one that sends a text that's like lunch everyone that it goes out to, like several endocrinologists, some

in the adult world, some in the pediatric world. I think we're going to add like an adult endosurgeon to that list too. You have to have some endochronology angle.

can make really stressful times so much better. I feel very lucky to work with the people that I work with, and we do a few social things outside of work, but we also always are there to support each other when we need help, like how do I help treat this patient or whatever. To be able to go to someone that you really respect and also like it just makes the whole.

work from home day. So maybe it's third, right, that's a good way that you kind of cap off the week by meeting your work besties in person on Thursday. You know, it might be just that you try to grab coffee with the same group of people when you're in the office in mid afternoon, or go for a

walk together. That's something that you could arrange. And obviously doing a work project together is a good way to guarantee that you will see that person a lot, you know, and you can't always control this, like sometimes we get staffed on things that are just because you are an expert in this and your good friends are in something totally different, so you're not going to wind up on

the same project. But if you ever can arrange it so that you are working on something to gather, then that will be a lot of time built into the day, just as reality. So the next p progress we had to make this all work together. Work is more satisfying when it feels productive and you are looking forward to the future. Right, So, two goals that we can do in the next week or so. One is, could you

cross everything off your priority list for the week? And second, do you have something coming up that you are genuinely looking forward to? And I think both of those can

be helped by a good planning ritual. You know, longtime listeners know, I try to plan my weeks on Fridays or Thursdays, but toward the end of the working week, looking forward to the next week, saying what is most important for me to do, and then the goal is to have all those things crossed off by the end of next Friday, unless you know, I know I'm going to do it on a Saturday or Sunday, in which case that's fine, I can put it then, But to end the week with all of those things crossed off,

because then that feels incredibly satisfying. Now, obviously, life happens. I'm sitting here debilitated in my bed. Not everything that was supposed to happen this week has happened. But I find though that if you know what is absolutely most important, you can still get to those things even if you don't get to everything, so that exercise of identifying what would be absolutely most important, then you can still make sure that you focus on those and whatever limited work

time you have. So even if your kids are homesick from school or you've got snow days or whatever else, you may have only done the three most important things, but you've done them and so you still feel this incredible sense of progress. So Sarah, you do that. I know you have your planning rituals all carved out.

this kind of thing. And then sometimes I think when you are in one of those phases of life, you can actually look for almost like metaprogress. Like so for example, if you're like, I don't want to tackle anything, but I have a newborn baby, and like my goal is to just earn my paycheck for the next ever moerever many months, or just like earn these paid time off days that I'm going to use in a fun way

in the future. Like again, like that's not really what we're getting at, but there are phases of life fore sometimes you just kind of have to be really really basic in what you're progressing to. And then even on a micro level, I have always felt a weird comfort in creating little checkboxes for every patient I see and

then checking them off throughout the day. I have no idea like why this helps me, but I think it's because I get to do something that like acknowledges my sense of progress, and then I get to at the end of the day, I see that like I did all that I set out to do during that clinical day. So yeah, I think noticing your progress, acknowledging your progress, and looking forward in different levels depending on where you are in life can be appropriate.

this is to take real, intentional breaks. Right, So, even if the substance of your job isn't magical ballerina and astronaut related actors, although both of those groups still have to do all kinds of hard stuff and tedious stuff in the course of their lives. Like don't get me wrong, it may sound magical, but I'm sure they are also in meetings and doing administrative stuff and hours of training for whatever. But you know, just that you have little breaks in the course of the day where you do

something that you truly love. So your goal for the week is to create a break portfolio for each day. So look at your schedule, think roughly, where could I schedule in two tiny breaks and one lunch. What would this ideally look like, what would the rhythm be, and what would you do on those breaks that would be enjoyable to you? So, Sarah, you you know you've tried to be pretty good about your lunch breaks over the years.

to go for a walk around my yard. We've got some nice tree areas that I can get into from my yard, and so I definitely like to go through that and sort of observe the changing seasons. It's all snowy now, but in the summer it'll be all green, so it's very different to see the same nature. And going for a walk is always a mood booster. Try and have lunch with If my husband is working from home, we'll try to take lunch at the same time so we can hang out and that's always a nice thing

to do. But obviously if you are in an office, you know, having lunch with a friend, going for a walk, you know, listening to music or reading something inspiring. Those are all ways that you can put little doses of pleasure into your day. So really put some thought into this into your break portfolio over the week, and I think you'll find yourself liking your job a lot more so for dimensions, remember passion, trying to spend an hour more on the stuff you like and an hour less

on the stuff you don't like. People, making sure that you see the people you like at your job and trying to move them a little bit up the friendship ladder through learning more about them and spending more time together. Progress setting your priority list for the week and getting through ever it, all of it, and making sure you have something that you are looking forward to in your working life. And then pleasure in terms of taking your

break portfolio over the course of the day. So I think all of that might help you like your job a little bit more.

wanted our kids to experience. You know. Kids, of course always love the idea of having a dog, like that's just it's often kids lobbying for it, but there's sort of the trope of the kid's lobby for it, and then they don't do the work of taking care of the dog. And I think in many families what winds up happening is because mom is more flexible, or is home more or whatever else, or is just more responsible, she winds up doing the vast majority of the work.

Whoever wanted the dog, now I can say in my family that has not happened because I was very very clear at the outset, this is my husband's dog. I mean, I'm here like so, yes, I guess I'm a dog mom too, but he is primarily responsible for it, so he walks the dog or he has our children do it now if he is gone for the day, right, because obviously he has a job, and as do I, but you know, I'm more off and here at the house. If he's working from home, he is the one who

takes the dog out. If he is not working from home, he often either leaves a little bit later so the dog can go and tell our kids are home from school, and then our fourteen year old is responsible for the dog. If my husband is not here, he has gone to doggy daycare. So if my husband is working in the office two days a week, sometimes he'll just bring the dog to doggy daycare two times a week, which, by

the way, Max loves doggy daycare. So you know, I know some people would feel guilt about putting their kids in daycare. People feel guilt about putting their dogs in daycare. Let me just say that he is the times I've brought him, he is racing out of the car to try to get into this place. He's so excited, So

there's really no guilt with this. And then if my husband is traveling for multiple days, we will also actually sometimes send the dog over to his favorite dog sitter, which again one might feel guilt about this, but the dog sitter is often caring for two or three dogs at a time, and so Max is like it's a party. He is so excited he is bounding out of the car to get to her house and playing with his friends there. So what this means is that while I do wind up taking care of Max, sometimes it is

not really always my responsibility. And so if you are not the one who wants the dog, I think you need to be very clear about your boundaries with how the care will happen for it. Now, in the case of this listener, it turns out that she is the one who really wants the dog and her husband is way way more mixed on this concept. And in similar fashion to us, her husband is the one who works

from home. So I said, you know, you need to have a conversation with him about this, like what he is willing to do, because by default it would be his job unless you specifically figure out something else. And so I think they're going to work out a system as well where the dog goes to doggy daycarea of few times a week and then the dog is home when she is home because she can work from home at least once or twice a week as well, and

so kids can help too. Just keep in mind that kids are at school from like eight to four each day and general, and a dog is going to need to be walked at least once in there, I mean, just for exercise and for sanitation. So you're gonna either have to hire someone to do it, the person who works from home is gonna have to do it, or're gonna have to figure out something else. To just be very clear on this and then so everyone is on board with it.

to work for us. Now. I could totally see the benefits of a dog, like when my kids have grown up, and like we have much more flexible schedules together because I think for certain people, like it gets them outside, it gets them active, it might get them social and ways they wouldn't otherwise. So I'm not ruling out a dog in my lifetime, but not in this season. Just in case anyone was curious, But your dog is awesome, don't worry.

is primarily responsible. And if the adult who would be more flexible is not the one who is excited about the dog, you need to make sure that you reach a situation where that person is not going to be resentful of what's going on, because obviously, once the dog is part of the family, they're there and they're to be there for many years. So you know, you want everyone to be happy with the setup. So Love of

the Week. I'm not currently experiencing this right now as I'm sitting in my bed, but in my home office when I can make it down there, I have a gas fireplace. It's this old library. It was this you know, we renovated this historic house a couple of years ago, and so it's the old library space that I've turned

into my home office. And so it's so wonderful just to be able to click on a remote and have a fire in my office and it's very cozy if I'm like reading or doing some sort of deep writing work and like, ah, I feel like I'm inspired just by the flames going.