There is No Such Thing as an “Efficient” Relationship

“Not valuing time with other physicians or allowing for informal conversations leads to a soulless efficiency and professional isolation.”   John Frey, MD

This past week I had the wonderful opportunity to have a video Buddy Check with one of my PeerRx partners who lives in Minnesota.  In the course of our conversation, we both observed that our driven, overachieving personalities makes us particularly susceptible to emphasize efficiency for the sake getting more things done and agreed that this not how we desire to be perceived.

For many working in healthcare, our education process and clinical practice has programmed into us a “necessary efficiency” as we try to get through our overstuffed “survival mode” days.  In doing so, we often find ourselves treating our professional relationships (and even our patient care) as yet one more functional transaction that we have to navigate through as we sprint to get to the “end of the day.”  Indeed, some of us “drive ourselves” as if we had only one gear, leaving us no ability to “downshift” when we’re within or outside of our clinical and/or leadership roles.  But not connecting regularly with our colleagues and teams in a meaningful manner has a cost. 

In fact, I recently received feedback from one of our resident physicians that in the midst of one my teaching sessions with them in our ambulatory clinic, I seemed distracted “by non-clinical work” and that they withheld some patient care questions and even a personal concern so as to not bother me.  I immediately felt “caught” practicing the “soulless efficiency” referenced above, and expressed my gratitude that they had taken the time and risk to provide me such feedback.  It led to a wonderful and uplifting conversation for both of us.     

None of us wants to go through our professional days in such a state of disconnection to each other.  What gets in the way?  “Reality!” you might exclaim.  We all know the litany of reasons, and have likely recited them in our thoughts many times.  But as John Frey points out above, there is a cost, and that cost is our humanity and, in the process, our own well-being!  That is a tragic and unnecessary cost.  As psychiatrist Dan Seigel writes, “Relationships are the most important part of our having well-being in being human.  It’s that simple.  And it’s that important.”

The purpose of PeerRx is to make it easy (not efficient) to connect with colleagues, and to put to rest the myth we tell ourselves that we don’t have time.  If you’re reading this, you have likely already made the conscious decision to make collegial connection a priority and if the premise behind PeerRx is correct, you have benefited from it.  But there are too many around us who are still “efficiency-ing” their way through their days, and telling themselves it has to be this way.  We need to help them.   So this week, reach out to a few of them, remembering that doing so doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but it will help to break them and you out of the drone of efficiency, and in the bigger picture, that will always be time well-invested.