Getting Unstuck: How a Simple Mind Shift Can Move Your Life Forward

An earlier version of this article appeared on this website in April, 2024

If you’re a physician, you’re probably juggling patient care, administrative tasks, and personal responsibilities like a boss. But when you feel the need for something beyond the daily routine, whether that’s professional growth, personal renewal, or a new path, it can feel daunting.

Maybe you’re wanting to learning a new procedure, launch a research project, carve out space for self-care, or perhaps you’re even considering a major career move. These big leaps can seem daunting. So despite your motivation to move forward, it’s common to feel caught in a loop—busy but stuck in place, like a hamster on a treadmill.

As a physician coach, I see this often. From the inside, the obstacles can feel huge. But there’s always a way through, and it starts with understanding what’s holding you back.

In this article, I’ll explore common reasons that physicians feel immobilized, and I’ll offer you some strategies that will get you moving forward with purpose.

Break the Cycle of Habit Loops

The issue may not be a lack of action. Instead, you may find yourself defaulting to actions that feel safe and predictable in the moment, but don’t truly move you forward. It’s a common trap. Whether it’s procrastinating on notes, sidestepping difficult conversations, or saying yes too often, these autopilot habits can hold you back from the progress you want.

➡️Strategy: Notice your default loops and interrupt them. Swap one unhelpful behavior for something small but different. That could be finishing one note before checking email, setting a five-minute timer to reflect before agreeing to a request, or committing to learning something new each week. Even tiny pattern shifts break the cycle and let in some light.

Stop Overthinking and Start Moving

Other times, the problem isn’t repetition, it’s hesitation. You know that you need to make a change, but fear of making the wrong choice or endless analysis of your options keeps you frozen. You tell yourself you’re “waiting for the right time,” but in reality, you’re letting opportunities slip by while the decision sits untouched.

➡️Strategy: Embrace the concept of “progress, not perfection.” Understand that inaction is also a decision, and sometimes the most costly one. But creating your future doesn’t have to mean leaping into the great unknown. Choose a single, manageable step aligned with your goals. Build momentum gradually, and your confidence will rise with each action you take.

Handle Challenges Before They Grow

Unresolved problems don’t vanish. They tend to grow tentacles and multiply. Whether patient-related, administrative, or personal, ignoring nagging issues drains your energy and makes forward motion harder.

➡️Strategy: Be proactive. That doesn’t mean you solve everything on the fly. Instead, put each issue in its place: delegate it, schedule time to address it, or even decide to say no. Building this habit can turn obstacles into action points instead of lingering stressors.

The Weight of Incomplete Tasks

Unfinished notes and half-done tasks are a huge mental burden. For physicians, this irritating backlog is not only stressful but can compromise patient care. It’s a constant source of attention residue that saps your brainpower and makes you less efficient.

➡️Strategy: Get that stuff done. Use templates, smart phrases, and to-the-point documentation practices to streamline charting. Tackle your inbox with a “touch it once” mindset: respond, delegate, or delete. Time-management tools like time-blocking or the Pomodoro Technique can keep you on track and reduce overwhelm. You might even schedule a “chart date” with a friend, making a pact to get your unfinished work done together.

Reclaim Your Value

You know your work matters. Your patients count on you, and you make a difference in their lives. Yet it’s common for physicians to undervalue themselves. When that happens, you may find yourself stuck in toxic environments, missing out on opportunities, or saying yes to projects that drain your energy and don’t serve your best interests.

➡️Strategy: Practice self-reflection and affirmation to strengthen your sense of worth. Journaling can be a very useful exercise. So can revisiting a folder or a box with notes of appreciation from patients and colleagues. When needed, work with a coach to clarify your values and goals, and build confidence. If the burden feels especially heavy, consider scheduling time with a therapist.

Stop Living by Other People’s Expectations

From family expectations to workplace culture, many physicians find themselves following someone else’s script. Over time, this can leave you in roles that don’t align with your values.

➡️Strategy: Define success on your own terms. Take time to reflect on what success means to you, both personally and professionally. Living authentically creates momentum and fulfillment that external definitions of success never will.

Moving Forward

Feeling stuck doesn’t have to be a way of life. When you begin to recognize what’s keeping you in place and apply intentional strategies, you can shift from stagnation to forward motion.

Anchor yourself in your values, trust your resilience, and let small actions become stepping-stones toward change. As you shift your mindset from simply accepting the status quo to creating space for growth, you’ll begin to notice opportunities opening where you once only saw obstacles.

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If you’ve enjoyed this article and would like to stay in the loop for more insights on creating a sustainable, fulfilling, and happy life as a physician, sign up for my newsletter or reach out on my website. I’d love to hear from you.

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Bike Shedding for Physicians: Avoiding Trivial Time Wasters

An earlier version of this article appeared on this website in August, 2023

Your time is a precious commodity, but if you’re like many physicians, you give it away freely. In all likelihood, you're juggling multiple priorities at any given time, trying to get it all done while striving to stay on schedule and keep your patient satisfaction scores high.

Sometimes it’s the most trivial issues that seem to claim the most attention. But as a physician, the work you do has value, and your best work often takes time. Protecting your attention is critical. That’s why it's important to be able to focus on the things that really matter, and avoid getting dragged down into the weeds.

In thinking about the way you use your time, it can be helpful to consider the phenomenon known as bike shedding. The concept isn’t new, but it may be unfamiliar if you don’t hang out with business gurus. The term was coined by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British management expert and naval historian, in the 1950s. In introducing the idea of bike shedding, he described a committee meeting that is called to discuss a specific financial agenda. On the agenda is:

• a nuclear power plant costing tens of millions of dollars

• a bike shed for the plant costing a few hundred dollars

• a coffee budget amounting to about twenty-five bucks

The nuclear power plant is way out of anyone’s comfort zone, and no one wants to look ignorant or ask too many questions. So they quickly approve the budget and proceed to focus on the more familiar topic of the bike shed. After extensive discussion, argument, and finally compromise and agreement, they complete the deliberations over the bike shed with a feeling of satisfaction. They round out the meeting with an hour-long debate over the coffee budget, a topic on which they all have a strong opinion.

How Doctors Fall Victim to Bike Shedding

In a nutshell, bike shedding is a term used to describe the tendency to spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy on relatively minor issues, while neglecting more important but complex concerns. If you’ve spent any time in hospital committee meetings, you can probably relate to this phenomenon. Issues such as EHR functionality and staff management can sometimes fall into this category.

But bike shedding can also happen in your personal life. For example, you might spend hours researching the perfect running shoes, instead of focusing on your training plan. Or you might spend days agonizing over the color scheme of your living room, while putting aside more important but complicated family issues at home.

It’s natural to want to escape from stressful decisions by focusing on things that don’t really matter. And the importance of taking time to step away from the chaos of the day cannot be overstated. But spending that precious time perseverating over things that are not meaningful can be counterproductive.

The bigger problems are still looming. What’s worse, these are the issues that tend to build up steam the longer they are ignored. Eventually you may find that you are pushed or dragged into action, whether you feel ready or not.

From Spinning Wheels to Forward Motion

So how to shift gears and get back on the road? Here are some tips to help you identify and avoid bike shedding, whether at work or at home:

Identify your priorities

🚳What's most important to you? Once you know your priorities, you can make decisions more easily and avoid getting bogged down in trivial matters and unnecessary conflicts.

Delegate

🚳If you can delegate tasks, do it. Delegation is important both at home and at work. This will free up your time so you can focus on the things that matter most

Remember the big picture

🚳When you're feeling overwhelmed, take a step back. What are your long-term professional goals? What do you want to achieve in your personal life? How can you break that down into achievable steps? Keeping your goals in mind will help you to stay focused on the important things.

Set boundaries

🚳It's important to set boundaries so that you spend your time purposefully. This could mean saying no to extra work commitments with little upside so that you can make time for yourself and your loved ones. Or it could mean giving up your spot on the neighborhood committee that causes you stress and lost sleep, when you’d really rather be gardening.

It’s natural to default to bike shedding. It’s a way of avoiding stress and putting off difficult questions. But it's something that you can learn to recognize, navigate, and redirect.

If you find yourself getting caught up in bike shedding, tap the brakes and ask yourself if it's really worth your time and energy. If not, let it go and move on.

If you’ve enjoyed this article and would like to stay in the loop for more insights on creating a sustainable, fulfilling, and happy life as a physician, sign up for my newsletter or reach out on my website. I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’d like to schedule a complimentary coaching discovery session, click the button below.

How to Manage Interruptions and Limit Attention Residue: A Guide for Physicians

It’s not just your imagination. It’s more challenging than ever to maintain your mental focus at work.

💉 EHR alerts

💉 Phone notifications

💉 Interruptions from staff

💉 Attention sapping apps

💉 Email

All of these and more conspire to make focus more difficult than ever before.

These constant interruptions and the lingering effects of shifting attention, known as attention residue, can severely hamper not only your effectiveness and productivity, but also your own well-being.

Resolving the current state of disorder in healthcare will require systemic change, including a fundamental shift in the functionality of many EHRs.

But protecting your headspace is a critical skill that can help you stay above the fray.

In this article, we’ll explore strategies that you can use to retake control of your mental focus, manage interruptions, and minimize attention residue in your daily life and practice.

Understanding Attention Residue

Attention residue happens when you switch tasks, but a part of your mind remains stuck on the previous task.

The little breadcrumbs that remain can jumble up your thoughts and make it harder to focus. And once you’re interrupted, no matter whether the issue was urgent or trivial, it’s easy to switch over into another unrelated brain drain, such as checking your email or social media, rather than returning to the task at hand.

Realistically, interruptions are a part of life in most medical settings. Apart from a few innovative healthcare systems, the current state of affairs creates the perfect setup for attention residue.

Each interruption requires a mental reset, which can take a considerable amount of time and effort. Ultimately this leads not only to decreased productivity and lost focus, but also to increased stress.

This isn’t just theoretical. Research looking at Emergency Department physicians and nurses has found that interruptions from a broad range of sources can seriously degrade the ability to remain focused and aware. What’s more, the disruptions in this study occurred on average about 11 times every hour.

Strategies to Regain Mental Focus

Ideally, our healthcare system leaders will realize the importance of creating pathways that will minimize interruptions. This process is underway in a number of medical systems. But even under the best of circumstances, interruptions are going to happen. Here are a few ways that you can limit the mental drain.

Prioritize and Plan

This can be a difficult step for physicians, since we don’t always have control over the way the day might go. But simply outlining your top priorities can help by giving you a focus and a “north star” for the day,

Start your day by outlining your top priorities. Whenever possible, highlight high-impact tasks when your mental energy is at its peak. For many people, that is the first thing in the morning.

Use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix (also known as the Time-Priority Matrix) to distinguish between urgent and important tasks, and mitigate those less important time-wasters.

Time Blocking

Whenever possible, consider setting aside specific time blocks for different types of tasks. For example, set aside uninterrupted time to study for your boards, or for administrative work. If you have some control over your schedule at work, scheduling similar patient visits may be helpful, so that your mental flow is less likely to be interrupted.

Communicate your schedule and your plan to create these focused blocks of time to your team (or your family) to minimize unnecessary interruptions. Getting buy-in from your schedulers and administrative staff can help to make time blocking work for you.

Mindfulness and Meditation

Consider incorporating mindfulness practices into your daily routine. Techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, or yoga can help improve focus and reduce stress.

Meditation in particular has been found to be helpful in improving attention, focus, and memory and reducing stress. Just like medication or physical therapy, it’s important to be consistent. In one study, it took 8 weeks of regular practice before the impact of meditation was clear.

Taking a mindful pause before and after each patient, study, or procedure is a great way to mentally reset. In many cases, even this very  brief break can improve your efficiency.

Meditation might sound intimidating, but it’s really quite simple. This article shows you how you can easily get started. Don’t just think of meditation as something that you can investigate when you have the time. There is good evidence that engaging in a regular meditation practice can enhance your attention and mental efficiency.

Limit Multitasking

Multitasking used to be considered a superpower. But now we know that when people multitask, they often make more mistakes. And because of inefficiency, it may actually take longer to get tasks done than if each one was done separately. That’s especially likely if both tasks require mental energy, rather than rote memory.  

By focusing on one task at a time, you may improve the quality of your work, reduce the cognitive load, and actually save time.

If you have tasks that are time-consuming and not realistically amenable to completion in one sitting, break them down into smaller, more manageable steps. That way you can think of each step as a separate and achievable task. It can be helpful to write each of these sub-tasks out and check it off the list when it’s completed.

As you knock out these smaller to-dos, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment. That can reduce the attention residue that builds up when you stress about unfinished work.

Set Boundaries

It’s not surprising that research has found that interruptions increase the likelihood of errors, which may put your patients at risk.

What’s more, these unwanted intrusions also impact your own mental well-being, provoking measurably high levels of anxiety and annoyance.

Ideally, set clear boundaries with colleagues, staff, and patients regarding when you are available for interruptions.

When practical, limit social and nonessential chatter when you’re focused on something that requires deep thought or careful consideration. Reading studies, creating notes, reviewing charts, and developing treatment plans all fall into this category.

Use simple visual cues, like a closed door or a "Do Not Disturb Unless Urgent" sign. Distractions can’t all be eliminated, but taking these and other attention-preserving actions will likely build awareness and respect for your focused time.

It can also be helpful to set expectations with patients and staff that non-urgent in-box messages will only be addressed during or after certain hours of the day.

Conclusion

Maintaining mental focus requires practical, intentional strategies and consistent effort. By experimenting with some or all of the steps I’ve listed above, you will enhance your ability to concentrate, manage interruptions, and reduce attention residue.

Developing these practices will not only improve your productivity but also contribute to better patient care and support your own vital well-being.

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If you’ve enjoyed this article and would like to stay in the loop for more insights on creating a sustainable, fulfilling, and happy life as a physician, sign up for my newsletter or reach out on my website. I’d love to hear from you.

If you’d like to learn more about my coaching practice, you can schedule a complimentary introductory meeting by clicking the link below.