Work-life balance in telemedicine is amazing – we’re living the dream, right? We can work from home, and we get to work whenever we want, from wherever we want. Who could top that?
Well, that’s mostly true.
In this post, let’s look at some of the benefits of telemedicine, and also how to optimize the balance between your work and life – to avoid the most common pitfalls of working remote.
Here’s 7 tips I’ve learned for optimizing your work and life in telemedicine:
#1 Plan Your Schedule
Tip number one is to set your schedule in advance and be very strict about this. So this means talk with your group well in advance. Or if you’re working as a 1099 independent contractor with several contracts, make sure you talk with them at least several months in advance to coordinate your hours.
To succeed in telemedicine, you have to know when you’re going to work, and when you definitely don’t want to work. You don’t want to run around at the last minute adding or subtracting work from your schedule the day before. Instead, having a clearly-defined schedule is the most important factor for success.
When you plan your schedule in advance, you never have to worry about when you’re working and when you’re taking time off, whether for a vacation or to spend time locally with family.
#2 Plan with Your Family
Tip number two is to plan with your spouse and other family members.
If you’re married, it goes without saying that you should communicate with your husband or wife and set clearly defined plans of who’s working when. And if you have kids, how are the kids going to be taken care of? Are they at home? Are they at school? Are they at a camp?
Planing out all those things in advance becomes critical during a busy medical career, because if you’re not doing that, it’s going to add a lot of stress in your life. So tip number two really boils down to good communication skills.
#3 Have a Separate Home Office
Tip number three is working in a physically separate room or office at your home. Obviously it would be easy to just sit at your desk without planning any design for an office in the middle of the house – and you could probably be successful. But I think it’s really important to have a physically separate location if you want to thrive in telemedicine.
That way your brain and your body can be physically in a separate spot for those work hours. You tell yourself, “When I’m here in this room I’m working, and when I’m outside, I’m not working.” It might sound simple but it really does seem to help in my experience. You end up subconsciously separating your workspace from your relaxation, so you don’t feel like you’re always at work.
So, I would strongly recommend having a separate desk and a separate office: Some kind of distinct physical location where you do your work.
Incidentally, having a separate defined office location also makes it easier to do your taxes as an independent contractor. The IRS makes it much easier to take a tax deduction on your home office when it’s a separate individual room.
#4 Set a Routine for Ending work
Just like you might have a morning routine when you wake up, or an evening routine before you go to bed, you should have a set routine for finishing your work when you work from home.
It’s something we never think about when we work in person in the hospital or clinic. However, you always have an ending routine there. It usually involves packing up your things and driving home from work. So what will you do for your “end-of-work-routine” in telemedicine?
For starters, have a set of things that you do every single time you finish your telemedicine work and you start to transition to your off-hours. For some people, this might be logging out of your computer, turning off the lights, walking out of your office room, and making a glass of tea. For others, it might be throwing on your shoes and taking a quick walk outside.
Whatever it is, just be sure to have a set routine so that when you’re done, you’re done. And once you do that routine, you’ve effectively transitioned into your off-hours.
This is another one of those factors that sounds so simple, but is actually quite challenging to do regularly. Especially since working from home feels so different from a normal work day. One of the funny tricks that I use is slowly closing and opening my eyes and saying out loud “I’m done” at the end of my shift. It sounds simplistic, but it really does work well.
#5 Email Auto-Replies
Tip number five is to set email auto replies. This may be a bit controversial, but I think it’s really important, and something that as physicians we don’t do enough.
We might feel guilty, telling ourselves, “Oh, I need to be there just in case they need me for something.” And that can be true, to an extent. But what’s even more important is the longevity of your career.
You’re not going to help anyone if you get burned out and then you quit after a couple years. Your career and society will be better off if you can practice for 10 or 20 or 30+ years working in medicine.
I recognize that not everyone’s practice will allow for completely disconnecting at all times. but, to the extent that it’s possible, I really recommend disconnecting electronically and setting auto reply messages for your practice. For most larger practices, there’s always a physician on call, allowing other physicians to disconnect. If you’re not on call, and there is a true emergency where they absolutely have to reach you, your colleagues can always contact you on your cell phone. For most practice settings, you probably don’t need to be checking your emails all the time.
In my opinion, always expecting your colleagues to respond immediately when they’re not on call is a sure-fire recipe for burnout.
#6 Maintain Good Sleep Hygiene
Tip number six is getting consistent sleep, and I’ll go into some specific recommendations for this:
Obviously, as doctors, we know that sleep is critical for our health. But I think with being on call and working overnight, we often don’t follow our own recommendations – especially during residency training.
So, one of the specific tips I recommend is making sure you’re sleeping consistently at the same time every day.
Another factor that most physicians miss is adding sleep aids like a white noise machine and earplugs. Those have been helpful for me to avoid waking up during the middle of the night.
And we all know that the blue light from screens makes it harder to fall asleep in the evening. So, invest in either blue light blocking glasses for the evening, or, better yet, use a free software program on your computer or phone.
I use the free software called “flux,” which gets rid of the blue light and changes your computer screen to be red, orange, and yellow colors late in the evening: kind of like sitting around a campfire at night.
#7 Schedule a Vacation!
Yes. You really do need to schedule a vacation for yourself. During our training, we get so focused on working hard all the time that it’s easy to forget to take time out for ourselves.
But as a physician, the time you spend on going on vacation is not only just for fun (although it certainly is enjoyable) – it actually helps you prolong and sustain your career.
So think of it as a necessary investment in your career and think of it as guilt-free time and money that you can use to go on vacation. I like to schedule vacations well in advance to have an event to look forward to during an especially-busy set of work shifts.
So let me know if you have any other recommendations for optimizing your work-life balance in telemedicine. And thanks for reading!