I Don't Have Work Life Balance

foreign Ollie here welcome back to the channel I'm a doctor living and working in England as part of the NHS but I've had a few conversations with friends family and colleagues about this concept of work life balance that I'm sure you will all be aware of it's often touted as being very important especially for doctors and in this video I just want to talk a little bit about what it means what it potentially doesn't mean and perhaps most centrally what it means to me basically we'll start by exploring the concept in a vacuum and then I'll talk about it in terms of my experiences as a doctor early on in my career and how it might apply to you if you're perhaps a medical student coming up to being a doctor or thinking about applying for medicine at all so we'll start by discussing the concept of work-life balance and the use of the word balance is actually something that I take issue with because to me the word balance specifically gives the idea of this equilibrium right with two opposing forces pushing and pulling on each other one gives and takes from the other in a system that is ultimately a zero-sum game you can't have maximum both and because we only have a finite amount of time to work with I think it might be more helpful to think about these things as coexisting rather than being in balance and I think there are different words that you could use to describe this like a Harmony a duality some sort of productive synergistic relationship whatever you like the two things essentially have to exist together in some way and while I do think it is possible for some people to completely separate their work life from their personal life I think it's probably very rare and I know very very very few people who have actually achieved that and the ones that I do know that have achieved that are much more experienced they're all Consultants who have much more control over how they spend their lives that ability to completely disengage and switch off from different parts of their lives and their identities as they need to and so for the rest of us it leaves us in this constant struggle between these two parts of our lives on the one hand we can recognize the need obviously to be very socially engaged to give our friends family Etc the time that they need and also to give our roles as clinicians as doctors the time care and attention that you need to put into that in order to make sure that you're good at what you do and semi-compassionate at least while you're doing it if we don't give either aspect the proper nurturing care that each needs you will obviously inevitably become worse at whichever side is neglected and this video does have the potential to be extremely long but that wouldn't be very interesting so I'm going to try and keep this fairly short and sweet and talk about my personal experiences with how these terms apply to me and perhaps most fundamentally how I've not managed it very well or virtually any stage of my career my academic life thus far I've always been someone that likes to be kept busy you can ask any of my family or any of my friends about that and while my priorities haven't always been in the right place open-handedly I have always been busy I was working on something working towards the next project trying to do something to keep myself up occupied and when I went to medical school they got substantially harder as because I still had this desire to be busy and doing something all the time but the demands were at the same time much higher you cannot Coast Medical School that's just not a thing you've not only got to put the graft into what is a very difficult and demanding course over a long period of time you've also got a massive amount of opportunities that come open to you at the same time there's research there's education all of these amazing things and I obviously had YouTube and blogging and vlogging and everything on top of all of that and I also decided about halfway through medical school that I wanted to be a surgeon specifically a neurosurgeon which again adds additional layers of complexity and difficulty on top of that and that's important for the next part of this story because virtually all Medical Careers now are competitive in fact I'm pretty sure that all of them are if you want to remain working as a doctor surgery particularly so neurosurgery particularly particularly so there are often single digit training numbers for the entire UK so in the application cycle you need to be the best of the best of the best of the best and what that is going to mean for anyone who is serious about wanting to become a neurosurgeon that you are always going to be embroiled in some sort of project whether that's research leadership exams CV building of some kind basically consumes your entire existence and this is a reality that many Junior doctors feel and it's one that is getting worse everything is becoming more competitive year on year on year as training posts are choked out as the government seems to want less Consultants than ever that means the fight for the limited number of training places is getting harder and harder ultimately to some degree if you're not working at this stuff you risk being left behind so then you've got to work very hard to catch up to your peers who are doing that stuff if you want to do something very competitive you can end up very quickly jaded in a system that is not supportive of trying to achieve what you want to achieve and many people justifiably get very sick and tired of this Rat Race that doesn't really need to exist for any reason and give up and leave medicine or do something that doesn't satisfy them and I find myself in a position now where I've been on this treadmill for quite a few years now this is continuing on top of a 48-hour average working week as a doctor with more roles and responsibility than ever trying to manage and balance all of this stuff alongside YouTube alongside working with sponsors alongside continuing research etc etc etc like even now I'm doing something I'm filming this video in my Airbnb staying in Chicago or I'm visiting a conference here with my partner she was up at five o'clock in the morning yesterday preparing slides for an important presentation I was up eight o'clock on Sunday morning for a research group meeting with a group back in the UK she is similarly had to dial into another research meeting this afternoon when we were out trying to enjoy ourselves at the the aquarium here in Chicago this stuff never stops and the thing is is that right now I actually don't mind as weird as it sounds I actually do enjoy it for all I whinge about it sometimes and this state of being constantly frantically busy thinking about the next thing is something that I've adopted and I'm very lucky to have a very supportive partner who not only gets it but often behaves much the same way which is why we work so well she's doing exactly the same things as I'm doing with her own career pathway but she's actually going well above and beyond the stuff that I'm doing she's got to work even harder than I have and that works for us and we're actually working opposite ends of the country as doctors so we do have that space to get on with our own stuff but make the most of the time we have together when we can and to start to bring this video to a close to bring things back to this idea of Harmony and balance or whatever I don't think I have that right my work as a doctor and my identity as a doctor and my profession of medicine basically rules everything I do or 99 of everything that I'm doing is completely consumed by that virtually almost every hour of every day and I'm okay with that for the moment I've got my job in clinical medicine I'm doing a university qualification as a postgraduate student alongside that I've got my BMA role which is very important at the moment I've got YouTube and working with sponsors and other organizations research work all of this stuff going on at one and so I don't think I have a good work-life balance at all by most reasonable measures but maybe at the moment and for the moment my work is my life and I do find it immensely satisfying I'm tired virtually all the time certainly fatigued and I know that I won't be able to keep this up forever and that my priorities will change if I was maybe even a few years older if I was the other side of 30 I might feel differently but equally knowing myself and who I am I don't think I'm going to be comfortably able to slow down until I'm in training and I've got that security of a light at the other end of the tunnel admittedly maybe in neurosurgery not such a positive light at the end of the tunnel but we have to work towards something but I do want to have a cemented place to be I want to have a family I want to have kids I want to get married I want to do all of these important things that lots of people want to do but I certainly wouldn't feel secure in starting a family until I've got that training number and some cemented reality of things to come and essentially I don't feel able to slow down until I have those things that's the reality of my situation sorry this was a bit of a long and probably quite uninteresting video but it's a reflection that I wanted to get out there and I'd love to know what you guys are feeling and whether this is affecting you do you have that ability to disengage I'd be really interested to know about your strategies for keeping work things at work and home things at home if of course you want to keep them separate at all which not everybody does this idea gets discussed a lot and I think we should celebrate those who feel that they have that balance that Duality that synergistic productive relationship but understand that priorities look different to different people and everyone has a different set of circumstances and for those of you that are thinking about applying to medicine it's maybe just having a bit of awareness that it's not always so easy to make things work things are complicated things are hard and demands are high at virtually all times and it's something that's really important to understand before you commit to the career thanks very much for watching guys take care and I will see you next time bye

Channel: Dr Ollie Burton

Views: 3,153

Keywords: warwick medical school, postgradmedic, medicine, medical school, med school, education, graduate medicine, grad medicine, grad entry medicine

Id: 7uVgyOi6SD8

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023