Freedom isn't given, it's designed

Don’t let your 9-5 clinic hours or on call days take away the planning you need to create the freedom that works for you.

Take an inventory of your day

Through out your day take note of the things that breath life into you and the things that suck away your energy. Its impossible to structure a day with ONLY the things you enjoy. However, what we can attempt to do is to try and increase the tasks that we find meaningful. This allows us to continue to give our 100% to the task at hand without feeling the burnout that can come with a job that requires a high degree of emotional and intellectual intelligence. We can also start to build out a foundation of what we would want our free life to look like. It doesn’t require days on the beach but can also involve being engrossed in meaningful tasks.

Carve out a definition of freedom

What you see as freedom may not be the same as what one of your colleagues or coworkers sees. You may want to build a life where you prioritize remote work, or you may want to relocate every few months to explore new places and experience different healthcare systems. That is the beauty of creating your free life. YOU get to decide what it looks like. But you will never know what you want until you actively think about what your free life needs to look like. Personally, for me, I want to build a life with time freedom at the forefront. This would mean I would need to leverage my skills to create income without needing to actively take part in those activities. When you can start to visualize what freedom means to you, you can begin working towards achieving that goal.

You can have your cake and eat it too

When trying to tailor your free life, you can create it the way you want to. Many of us went into medicine because we actually enjoy it. It’s usually everything else that comes with medicine that can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and unfulfillment in your life. Remember the reasons why you went into this and try to create more time dedicated to those things. This may involve hiring our scribes, personal assistants or leveraging AI to get things done faster. Creating your freedom will also lead to further longevity in your career because you will be enjoying what you do.

In conclusion,

Freedom won’t just come to you. You must create it to fit how you want to live your life. It’s an active process. Without considering it, you will wake up one day and question where your time went.

A.K, MD