A balanced life
Two of my core beliefs are currently having a knock-down drag-out war with each other. One belief is that if you correctly choose a career that is fun, stimulating, enjoyable and spiritually rewarding, then you will never really “work” a day in your life. I still hold this to be true. The other belief is often known as the law of diminishing returns. This law states that each additional unit of something valuable or desired is valued or desired a little bit less than the previous unit. If you give a boy who loves chocolate a large slice of cake, he’ll be happy. A second slice will still make him happy, but not as enthusiastically as the first one did, and so on. Giving him that 37th slice won’t make him much happier than receiving that 36th slice. You get the point. This is a fundamental law of life, so to say that this is one of my beliefs, is like saying I believe in the law of gravity or in the law of 3+6 = 9.
So why do I bring this up? Well, I love my work. I love solving mysteries as to why a certain couple is not getting pregnant. I love coming up with what I believe to be the best strategy to help them conceive. I enjoy reading and learning new developments because I know that my time spent studying can potentially make the difference between success or failure for one of my patients. I especially love sharing in the excitement of finding out a positive result!
However, as much as I love all this, there reaches a point where each additional consecutive hour doing it begins to bring a little less joy and satisfaction than the previous hour, especially as much as it robs from my opportunity to do something else. This past month, many more new patients came to the practice than would be expected given our usual monthly average. Now I was pretty sure that the reason for this was that it was January, when there is almost always a large rebound in activity after the holiday season lull. Plus, we also had some other unusual things to take care of, as I have mentioned in previous posts. This greatly added to the illusion of feeling like things were even busier. However, the pace seems to have let up only slightly in February. So yesterday, on President’s Day, when most of my friends are at home doing nothing, my staff and I saw about 30 patients. The sense of accomplishment we got after taking care of the #30 didn’t really feel as rewarding as it did for #20. No surprise.
So what’s the solution to this dilemma? I’ve been trying as much as feasible to take a long break during lunch to either nap, go to the gym or go home and play piano (I live less than 5 minutes from my office). Each of my staff also get a staggered 90 minute lunch break, although most times they don’t take it, preferring the option of working straight through. That doesn’t work well for me, though as the times that I’m forced to work straight through, I find my productivity slowing greatly by late afternoon.
There is a cost associated with taking a long lunch break. At least one night out of each week (like now) and a few hours each weekend, I have to come back to the office after hours to catch up things. This is when I will review the old medical records from patients who failed at other practices. This is when I will catch up on journal articles. This is when I blog. However, I can come and work for an hour, go have dinner with a friend, and come back and do another hour of work. For me at least, it’s definitely more painless breaking it up into chunks like this.
I often share a reminder about the law of diminishing returns with my patients by discussing the difference between the freedom of childlessness and the joy of parenthood. When a couple first gets married, they cherish the freedom of not having any children to burden them. However, each successive year of childlessness has decreasing appeal, until the couple begins to essentially wish for the chance to give up their freedom. Then the baby (or babies) come into the picture and life is completely different, because it seems every waking moment now belongs to your child. From time to time, you will find yourself longing for a brief taste of your past lifestyle. Trust me. Again, I’ve heard this time and time again from patients after their treatments succeed and their child-free years are a thing of the past, forever.
Here are some tips to consider:
- During this time while you are focusing on trying to conceive, make the most of your freedom. Have a date night. Enjoy your reading time. After your baby is here, you will look back and miss these chances.
- Make a conscious effort, even AFTER the baby arrives, to dedicate some time to yourself on a regular basis. This could take the form of one spouse taking the kids for half a day while the other gets his/her free time. Better yet, at least once every two weeks, leave the kids with someone you trust and rekindle the habit of having date night for just the two of you. I know babysitters are costly, but you’ll find it’s worth it.
- One interesting tip I hear over and over again from couples who have done repeated treatments and now have several children (including some twins maybe) is to arrange regular one-on-one “dates” with each child. So one weekend, dad takes the 6-year old boy to the baseball game and the other three kids stay with mom. The next weekend, mom takes one, and just one, of the 4-year-old twins to the zoo. There will be unique value gained from these experiences, so as to make it worth the added effort.
A few hours of a novel experience have much greater value than several hours of the same routine over and over. So, now all of you who find yourselves in a rut of diminishing returns, please go out there and do something different from whatever you’ve been doing over and over these past months.
Tags: Best
