Knowing When to Say When with Work
“Know When to Say When.” Anheuser-Busch advertising campaign, celebrating its 40th year in 2020
Do you have a professional “Off Button”? Over the past two decades, as I have had the opportunity to talk with many colleagues around the country in my work to help advance clinician and care team well-being, I’ve noted some recurrent themes that have emerged around the notion of our being indispensable in our work. Colleagues have shared sentiments such as “My patients need me,” “No one else knows them like I do,” “Who else is going to do it? They’re all busy too,” or “There is no one else.” That posture has often resulted in some doing work 7 days a week and taking minimal, if any, vacation – and, of course, often working during that time as well (the gift of the EHR).
While certainly dedication and selflessness are worthy qualities, I do know that it is neither admirable nor healthy for a busy clinician to work weeks on end without a significant break. The fact that such dedication to work is often held up as a standard both within and outside of medicine makes it even harder to break out of the superhuman myth that has been drilled into us in our training, reinforced and even rewarded in our work (“be a team player”), and that the public so badly wants to believe. I certainly have a heavy dose of that programming running in my “professional operating system”.
But where in our professional upbringing did we learn how to determine when we had worked “enough” – when we had done “enough?” Who taught us to “know when to say when” when it comes to our work?! As I reflect on this, my personal answer is “nowhere and no one.”
A few years ago, I was introduced to the term “productivity shame.” Productivity shame is the feeling that you’ve never done enough, and the sense of guilt and shame experienced when you try to relax, because that would be “unproductive.” That may sound familiar. It results from having no clear standards as to what “enough” might look like.
So back to the original question: Do you have a professional “Off Button”? Do you have an internal gauge that can help determine when you’ve done “enough?” If your answer to either or both of these questions is “no,” perhaps you should take some time to gain clarity around what professional “success” AND personal success really look like for you and how you might set reasonable work standards and goals that are in line with that. Acting on the answers will require you to create and protect explicit boundaries. And perhaps most importantly, you will need to share your intentions with others in your professional orbit and invite them to help hold you accountable. For you, one of those persons could be your PeerRxMed partner.
Over the coming weeks, consider explicitly scheduling some non-working time to determine whether you might be caught in the spell of “productivity shame” and be sure to check in with your PeerRx buddy (and colleagues) and encourage them to do the same. Then talk about it together. After all, to quote another famous advertising campaign, “Friends don’t let friends drive …” themselves to exhaustion and distress. Let’s make sure we heed that wise council ourselves.