What Do You Want Your Tuesday to Look Like?

A lot of physicians fantasize about leaving medicine. I hear it constantly. And when we drill into it, most of them don't want to leave medicine at all. They want to leave what is happening to them right now.

Those two things feel identical from the inside. When you are exhausted and overwhelmed and pouring yourself into work that gives you very little back, your brain does not generate nuanced options. It generates one: get out. Quit. Become a barista. Move to an island.

I'm not going to talk you out of the island. But I want to point out what that fantasy is not doing for you. It tells you what you're running from. It tells you absolutely nothing about what you're running toward. And you cannot build a life out of an absence.

So instead of asking how badly you want to leave, I want to ask you something much smaller and, honestly, much more boring.

What do you want your Tuesday to look like?

Why Tuesday

Monday has its own drama. Friday has its own drama. The weekend is not a fair test, because almost everyone's fantasy weekend looks roughly the same and none of it involves work.

Tuesday is the middle. It is a plain workday, the kind you have forty or fifty times a year, the kind that quietly makes up most of your actual life. If your literal Tuesday is your one OR day or your switch day as a hospitalist, fine. Substitute your functional Tuesday. The point is an ordinary day, not a special one.

Build the day, in detail

This only works if you go granular, so go granular.

What time do you wake up? Are you rested when you do? Who do you see before you leave the house? What are you doing at ten in the morning, and at two in the afternoon? Does your day start late because you did something else first? Does it end early because you're picking someone up? Is it a full clinic day, but one where you get through the morning, get an actual break, get through the afternoon, and leave on time?

What happens after work? Who's there? What do you do with the evening? How do you get yourself to bed?

Write it down. Not in your head. In your head it stays vague, and vague is where this exercise goes to die.

You are allowed to enjoy this part. You are playing, and the playing is the point, because what you put in that day tells you what you value more reliably than any exercise where someone hands you a list of words to circle.

Then look at the gap

Now put that day next to the Tuesday you actually had this week.

Maybe you rolled out of bed already tired, got out the door on fumes, maybe grabbed coffee in a drive-through, and ran the whole day at a dead sprint. Maybe that describes every midweek day you have.

Okay. That is the gap.

This part is uncomfortable, and I want to be clear about why we're doing it. Not to measure how far away you are from what you want. To answer a specific question: what would it actually take to get from this day to that day?

The cynical voice will answer immediately. I'd just have to leave. And sometimes that is true. Sometimes leaving is genuinely the answer, and sometimes the leaving means building something of your own or joining something else entirely.

But sometimes the honest answer is smaller and more annoying. Fewer patients on the schedule. Fewer inbox messages. An FTE change. A creative schedule you have never asked for because you assumed the answer was no. Actually eating during the day. A different approach to your notes, which is going to be genuinely uncomfortable if you are a detail-oriented perfectionist, which, statistically, you are.

If you have tried things before to make your work faster or lighter and they didn't work, you may be carrying a belief that nothing will work. I understand where that came from. I don't think it's true. I think it means the thing that works has not been tried yet, and finding it is going to be uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with whether it's possible.

What you're really uncovering

Every element in your ideal Tuesday is a value in ordinary clothes.

If what you want is more time on a regular day with people you love, then something has to give on the work side, and now you know what you're negotiating for. If what you want is to practice medicine the way you believe it should be practiced, with time to actually counsel someone, then the question becomes how, and how might have more answers than the one you assumed. Maybe not more minutes in the visit. Maybe reaching people one to many instead of one to one, in a way you'd actually enjoy building.

You will not find any of those answers while you're staring at the island. Not because the island is a bad dream, but because it keeps your attention entirely on what you're leaving.

Change from where you are to where you want to be is a real metamorphosis. It asks you to give up things that feel fundamental right now. Nobody who has built the life they wanted did it without wading through that discomfort. Not one person.

But you have to know what you're walking toward first.

So start with Tuesday.

If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let's talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call