Navigating Work-Life Balance in Veterinary Medicine

All right, so I have to say that I love this topic of work-life balance. This is a topic that I have done a lot of thinking about over the last few years. It's definitely a topic that I have spoken about at conferences and certainly in my coaching sessions. And I, you know, I want to be clear that this is definitely a concept that has shifted in my mind over the last several years. I think back to when I was a resident at NC State University and I certainly had no concept whatsoever of balance. Balance for me was having a couple of days off that I could get more than four to six hours of sleep and go to the gym and, you know, balancing that with a pretty grueling clinic schedule. And, you know, when I became a faculty member at the Ontario Vet College after my residency was done, I really thought, you know, okay, this is where life begins. This is where I will be able to achieve this notion of feeling super balanced, this amazing life mirroring or opposite of this amazing work that I do. And it was challenging. It was hard to let go of work. It was hard to not be at the university on my days off, especially when I was on call. And it was hard to separate myself from the work that I was doing. And, of course, since leaving that job 10 years ago now, more than 10 years ago, I've definitely invested a lot more time and energy thinking about this. And it's funny because I feel like I've left my nine to five, so to speak, employed faculty position to move into a 24-7 entrepreneurial position. Not that emergency and critical care is ever nine to five, but you know what I mean. Moving from an employed role into a self-employed role creates all sorts of additional challenges for maintaining that work life balance. So I'm really excited to talk about this content with all of you today. And I think the really logical place to start is to define what work-life balance is. So according to the dictionary, work-life balance is the amount of time you spend doing your job compared to the amount of time you spend with your family and doing things that you enjoy. I think this has always been the traditionally regarded way of looking at work-life balance. And I do think that this definition is a little bit challenging and is a little bit unrealistic, if I'm being totally honest. And I say that because I don't believe that we ever have established this so called perfect balance. We imagine this as being equal home life with family and loved ones and equal work. And it's just very rarely that way. I think there's times in our lives where we're really enjoying our work. And there's times in our lives where we're really enjoying our family or focused on our family. And that's going to vary depending on the season of our lives and the season of our careers. So I think what I would urge you to consider is more importantly, what does imbalance look like? Don't get so set on this feeling of total balance, but more so just when are things not working for me from a work-life perspective? And I think most of us can agree that imbalance is when we feel exhausted or depleted. It's when we feel pulled in too many directions, or it's when we wish that we are doing other things. So for example, you know, maybe we're really excited about a particular work project or we have a work deadline looming and we're, you know, stuck at home with our kids or having to go out to medical appointments or something. And we're having problems juggling that with our work priorities or the flipside can happen. We're at work and it's two hours past the end of our shift. And all we're thinking is I want to get home. I want to be with my family. I'm done with work. Any of those situations can paint a picture of imbalance. And those are the situations that you want to tune into if you feel that they are happening quite frequently for you. Now, I do think when we think about work-life balance in general, it is interesting to note that there are some generational differences here. I don't want to stereotype or paint anybody, you know, into a particular label, but certainly in the traditional sense, when we think of our baby boomers, we think of our veterinary professionals who worked very long days. They worked multiple days a week, sometimes six or seven days a week. And work was really prioritized over family. You know, I was the child of baby boomer parents and the child of baby boomer parents. And, you know, we were kind of left to our own devices. It was kind of a free-for-all in the afterschool until our parents, you know, got home from work. And it really was a priority for them to focus on their work and their careers. And many baby boomers built up, you know, really successful businesses out of nothing. You know, then come the Gen Xers. So this is my generation. And I think we grew up looking at our parents who were baby boomers and thinking, oh my gosh, this looks terrible. That's not what I want. I want a little bit more time with family. And so the tide started to shift towards more desire for spending time doing other activities aside from work. You know, and then we move into our millennial generation, which is between approximately those born in the year 2000 to 1982. And this particular generation really has a desire to work to live, but not live to work. And so I have definitely witnessed over the years a change in this, you know, perception of work-life balance and certainly a change in priorities. But I'm going to offer you a different definition of work-life balance. And this one is the methods that an individual uses to juggle all their work-life demands. So thinking of work-life balance not as a perfect balanced scale, but just all the ways that you're keeping your balls in the air. And if you can visualize literally juggling balls, some of them might be rubber balls, you drop them, they're going to bounce, it's no big deal. Some of them being glass balls that you really need to make sure that you're keeping up in the air. How do you do that? How do you manage it? Because at some point the balls are going to come down and you're going to have to do something to catch them and then throw them back up again. So there's different ways that we can look at our work-life balance. And again, I can't stress this enough. Different strategies are going to work for different people and different approaches are going to work for different people. So there is a approach called work-life integration. This has become a lot easier now that we are in a digital world, that we have Zoom, that we have telehealth and all of these different things. Work-life integration is really bringing together our work and our home lives. So an example of this might be leaving work during the day to run errands and then catching up on work at home or leaving work early to attend your child's hockey game and then doing work while you're there, whether it's responding to emails, calling clients between periods, whatever it might be. It might even be working from home consistently and having your children at home or doing household tasks during the day. This can look different for everybody, but the key thing is that you are bringing your work and home lives together. Now, for many of us, myself included, when I try to do work-life integration, it just feels to me like work and life are constantly bleeding together. And what I mean by that is there's just no clear delineation or separation. And I feel particularly challenged with that because I am a person who really likes to compartmentalize so that I can focus on one thing at a time. I pride myself on being very productive, and I think part of the reason why I'm so productive is because I don't multitask a lot. I really find one thing to do and I finish it to the best that I can to completion. And so work-life integration is not going to work for you if you feel as though work is just constantly creeping into your personal life or that when you are having to do work at home or home at work, pardon the description there, hopefully you understand what I mean, that you start to feel resentful or frustrated or frazzled because you're like, ah, this is just too much happening all at once. So again, work-life integration is not so much for me. We do want to avoid this sensation of work-life bleed. And so for that reason, the general recommendation, especially for caregiving professionals, because of our risk of compassion fatigue is to engage in work-life separation. So this is really borne out in the human healthcare research, specifically looking at caregiving professionals in the palliative space whereby their risk of compassion fatigue is very high. And so it's important for them to have some time during the day or during the work week when they are completely turned off from work so that they can enjoy other non-work related activities. So how do we go about embracing work-life separation? Well, one of the things that we want to do is when we are working to be fully engaged with our work. And then at the end of that work day or that shift to be very intentional about shifting into home life. So what do you do at the end of your shift? Well, you make sure your tasks are completed. Documentation is done. If there's anything you haven't done, you deal with it. That means you complete it if it is essential or you delegate it if that's possible. If not, you write it down so that you can do it next time. Now, this is to prevent you from just keeping it tucked inside your brain and expecting yourself to remember it because that just sets you sets yourself up for having to think about it, you know, endlessly for the rest of the day. Then you want to make sure that you think about your day and what went well, maybe what you wish had gone better, focusing more on the positives and less on the negatives and trying to find something to be grateful for. And at the end of the day, really sitting in the space of acknowledging that you did the best you could with the time and resources available to you. And now it's time to let it go. So when it comes to letting it go, you want to make sure that you are doing everything you can to to facilitate this. You're closing your email, you're shutting down your computer, you're turning off your notifications, you're taking off your work clothes, your work shoes, etc., etc. You're saying goodbye to your team members in some way, shape or form. You're using some sort of ritual to indicate to you that work is done. You're no longer going to be thinking about it or engaging in it. And you're going to be embracing your work home life. Now, there are individuals who have many different rituals when it comes to ending their days. I'm definitely a person who really likes to, you know, get some time in nature, step outside, go for a walk. I know individuals who like to take a shower or a bath at the end of the day, you know, washing the day away from them. Do what works for you and find a way that you can symbolize that your work is done. Now, certainly those of you who are like me, who spent a lot of time working from home, it can be really challenging to have this work life separation. And so for you, my recommendation would be to make sure that when you work from home, you're working in a very specific location and you're not spreading your work all over your house. This is so that when your work is done, that you can shut it down, have a similar ritual, whether it's closing your office door, shutting down your computer, putting away your laptop, and then stepping away from that rather than again, feeling like you're doing work on the couch, work at the kitchen, et cetera, et cetera. And again, for those of you who spend time on call, having work life separation is really hard because you're literally waiting to be called into work. So it's really important if you do spend time on call that you set really clear expectations as to when and how you can be contacted. You know, maybe text is okay for urgent questions within waking hours, but after a certain time period or when the questions are emergent that you expect to be phoned. And this prevents you from constantly checking your text messages to make sure that you're not missing anything. And certainly for those of us who do spend time on call, making sure when you are not on call, this is where you want to have really firm and rigid boundaries around you not being available so that you are carving out as much time not for work as you possibly can. So another way that we can foster work life separation as well is to make sure that our conversations about work at home are kept to a minimum. You know, I think it's always nice to have a little debrief, especially if something was really bothering us, or maybe we've got some really exciting news, a case that went well, a win at work that we want to share. We just want to make sure that this isn't taking the majority of the bandwidth in the evening. It's not good for our partners or our roommates and it's also not good for us as well because again, it's never turning off that work life brain. So one of the other concepts that I'm really passionate about sharing with you in the context of work life balance is really this idea of thinking about how you manage your energy. And so I think at the end of the day when we are feeling out of balance, it's because we are not feeling appropriately energized. For many of us, work is very draining or we're doing work that for whatever reason is draining us at that particular time and we want to make sure that we're balancing it with other things that are rejuvenating. Now your work might be very rejuvenating for you as well, in which case maybe you're feeling zapped by some things in your personal life. I think it's important, especially at the beginning of the year when it's kind of, you know, a benchmark for taking a look at our lives, to ask yourself some really important questions. I'm going to share these questions with you now and I just want to give you an opportunity to pause the podcast after you hear these to think about it or maybe you write them down and journal on it later. But I think these questions are really, really important questions we all need to consider in the context of work-life balance. So the first question is, what brings you joy in and outside of work? Next, what zaps your energy or causes you stress? Next, what are your non-negotiables, meaning the things that you really must have on a regular basis? What are your limits? In other words, where do you draw the line? What are your priorities right now? Remember this is going to change depending on the season of our life that we're in. And what are you ready to let go of? What are some things that you are like, yeah, you know what, I think I've put enough energy into that and now it's time to move on. So when we think about our energy management, I think it's really important to think about this in the context of a little bit of a grid. You know, there are definitely certain things in general that bring us more energy and others that deplete us. You can think about this in the context of priorities. When you are spending energy on your own priorities, things that are aligned with your goals, values, or life purpose, that is going to energize you. When you are focused on other people's priorities, things that don't really matter to you, it's going to drain you over time, right? It's going to be okay, you know, short term or as a small proportion of your time, but certainly not in the long term. The other way to think about how we are energized is to think about the tasks specifically and how you feel after you do them. So energizing things are going to mean that after you complete them you feel more energetic versus those that are more depleting meaning after you do them you feel bored, tired, or drained. So if you think about this as a matrix, at the top of the matrix you've got energizing and at the bottom depleting. To the right side you've got your priorities and to the left you've got other priorities. And I will put together a little handout that just depicts this for you so that you can see that and I will attach it to the show notes. I want you to think about this in terms of four different quadrants. And we're going to begin with the quadrant that is on the left bottom corner. So this is referred to as drudgery and these are the things in your life that are depleting and not your priorities. So when we think of drudgery, these are other focused tasks that drain your energy. This can be going to a committee meeting that is just poorly run and inefficient or maybe it's working on paperwork, you know, that you don't really have to do. This is, you know, you're doing this for your medical records or whatever it is, and it just sucks the life out of you. The reality is that the more time we spend in this other focused depleting quadrant, the less balanced our lives will feel. So what helps? Well, ideally we want to spend as little time in this quadrant as possible. So if there's anything that you can do to make these things more efficient or more enjoyable, that's what you want to do. Sometimes when I, you know, I'm doing a task that feels really like drudgery to me, I'll turn on a fun movie in the background or I'll listen to a podcast or some music I really like. So that can make it helpful. If let's say you're in a poorly run meeting, can you make the suggestion to stick to an agenda or have, you know, the work to read ahead of time so that you're not spending the meeting reading through things rather than, you know, having discussions and tackling action items? Certainly I think of scribes and AI and other ways that we can get rid of some of our paperwork and make things a little bit more efficient. And then, yes, if you can offload any of these activities as well, that is going to help balance your energy too. So that is our drudgery quadrant. The next quadrant that I want to focus on is the right bottom quadrant. These are your priorities, but they're still depleting. So we ought to refer to this quadrant as our tasks. These are things we know we need to do. In fact, we actually want to do them, but oh my gosh, they suck the life out of us. So this could be, you know, getting a doctor's appointment done, seeing a counselor, getting things checked off your to-do list. It feels good to complete them, but it's not like you're having fun doing them. So at the end of the day, they're still going to be a bit depleting to you. Again, these are not going to be as depleting as the drudgery quadrant, but we still want to be as efficient as possible when we do these things. So a lot of these things are, you know, errands and stuff like that. If you can get really organized and plan ahead, you can do these much more efficiently. You can also pair them with a really fun, enjoyable activity. And so what I often do when I have to go to the doctor, it is located very close to an ice cream shop and a Starbucks. So I will pair it with, you know, treating myself to a treat and a nice, you know, maybe even meeting a friend for the coffee or ice cream so that it doesn't feel so depleting. It pairs it with something that's a little bit more energizing for me. The important thing with our tasks too is especially for those that are most important to us, we want to make sure that we prioritize these when we have a little bit more energy so that we can get them done more efficiently and maybe even enjoy them a little bit more. So the next quadrant that I want to talk about is our upper left quadrant. These are the energizing tasks, but they're not our priorities. Okay? So this is work for most of us. I mean, unless you're self-employed where it kind of has to be your priority. When you're working for somebody else, it's not necessarily going to feel like your specific priority, but hopefully if the work is rewarding, it is still going to be energizing. So again, because the focus is on meeting somebody else's needs, you know, it's not going to necessarily be super energizing as it could be if it was your need or value that was being met. So I use the example of work, but this could even be doing something for a friend or a family member, you know, maybe doing a task at work. Maybe you love the work, but this task is required, but it's not really your passion place. You know, generally there's something in it for you too. You're getting paid, you know, it's building your business or whatever it might be, but again, it's still going to be a little bit energy depleting. Not as much as the first two quadrants I talked about, but still. So what helps? Well, we want to make sure that when you're doing this kind of, when you're spending time doing these kinds of tasks, that you are well compensated. This helps to take a little bit of the burden off when it comes to our energy. You also want to look for ways to weave in your own priorities. So maybe there's things at work that you could be doing that you are really passionate about. How could you fit those in as well? And then again, at the end of the day, we want to protect our time so that when we aren't needing to be in this quadrant, that we can be prioritizing the things that we really, really want to be doing. And that's in our upper right-hand quadrant, the fun and purpose quadrant. This is the area where we are feeling energized and it's aligned with our priorities. So this is the sweet spot. This could be learning about something that interests you or spending time with people you enjoy, doing things that are important to you, doing work that is just for you. This is when you feel like you are in the flow. How do you get more of this? Well, this is where your boundaries become so important. This is where you really want to pay attention to when you are feeling out of balance and look for ways that you could let some things go, say no to certain things, limit your time spent on other things and carve out and protect that time for your fun and purposeful quadrant. So another component of our work-life balance that I think is really important to recognize is our time management. You know, how we spend our time is going to dictate whether or not we feel balanced. And remember that a lot of this is in our control. One of my favorite quotes is by Stephen Covey and he says, time management is a misnomer. The challenge is to manage ourselves. And when you think about it, our boundaries are all about how we manage ourselves. And time management is just one particular boundary. That's one way that we create boundaries in our lives is to figure out how we want to spend our time. And so a few different strategies for you. Again, this is an area of particular interest for me, and it's something I've spent some time working through and working on. I always say to people, one of the best ways to figure out how to better manage your time and how to achieve that sense of work-life balance is to look at how you're spending your time right now. So you can do this with apps that look at your screen time and track that on your phone. You can use time log software like toggle or my hours, or just open up a spreadsheet and start logging your days, you know, on a 15 minute or half an hour basis. Do this for just a couple of days or at maximum a week to just see how you spend your time. And I promise you, you will be shocked by the amount of time you spend on things that are not in your fun and purposeful quadrant. That's the time that we want to get back. And so chances are you are going to have to let something go that is not in alignment with that. Okay, so some different things to think about in terms of looking at that. You've probably heard of the Eisenhower matrix. This is another graphic that I can put onto the handout that I'll attach in the show notes. This is where we have that quadrant that demonstrates at the top urgent versus not urgent and along the side important versus not important. So anything urgent and important we want to do, we want to do it now. Not urgent but important, we have to decide to do it or schedule a time to do it. Urgent but not important, those are the things that we want to delegate. Who can do that for you? And then not urgent and not important, get rid of it. Delete it. Eliminate it. These are time sucks. This is not what you should be spending your time doing. And so, you know, some examples for me would actually, you know what, I'm going to rather than share examples for me, I'm going to do better and share an example of what I would imagine a veterinary team member to be considering. So in the urgent and important, you might have to finish your records. You might have to call an owner for an update. You want to get that done now. Not urgent but important, you want to fit in your exercise, your meal prep. When are you going to do that? You probably have to schedule it in. You have to plan ahead. For your urgent but not important tasks in terms of you having to do it, client callbacks, client emails. Who can you delegate those to? Again, not a good use of your time or energy. And then the not urgent, not important. Brace yourself here. This is scrolling on social media and this is streaming shows. Okay, I recognize this may feel fun for you, but is it purposeful? Is it, you know, bringing you joy in some way? Maybe yes, maybe no, but how much time are you spending doing that? And if there's other more urgent and important things you want to be doing, you're probably going to have to let that not urgent, not important category go. So I love the Eisenhower Matrix. I think it's really worth spending some time looking at that. And the other thing that I'll say when it comes to time management is to really focus on your productivity. Again, this is where you are the master of your time. You have the power to be more productive and more efficient. You can do this by getting rid of distractions, closing your email, getting rid of your social feeds. Can also be getting organized. I mentioned this earlier with errands. Could you plan a little bit better so that you have a trip where you manage to check multiple things off your list in one trip rather than finding yourself all over the city at different days and times. Setting time limits as well is a good way to make you more productive and more efficient because it gives a sense of urgency to what you're doing. And then of course, planning ahead, like I said, is always good for your productivity. One of the ways that I have started planning ahead is to block my week. So what this means is that on Sundays when I'm looking ahead at my week and I'm thinking, okay, these are the things that are scheduled for me. These are the things I really want to do. These are my deadlines, you know, so on and so forth. Rather than just leaving it as a to-do list, I actually go into my calendar and I look at the times I have available and I block those times off. So if I know I have to write a blog, I will block off a certain amount of time for blog post or presentation preparation or, you know, connecting with my coaching clients or whatever it might be. This time is blocked off in my calendar so that when it comes to getting to that time, I don't even have to think about what I'm going to do. It's already there. The decision is made. My priorities are clear. Yes, there's a little bit of front-end work and yes, it can feel quite rigid, especially if your child suddenly decides they want to be sick and they're home with you for the day. Sometimes the time blocking then goes out the window, but if you are looking for a way to be more efficient and more productive, I highly, highly recommend time blocking. Now, I discuss time blocking and some other strategies for time management in a blog post that I wrote not too long ago and I will also link up to that in the show notes as well. So at the end of the day, what I really want to leave you with is my own definition of work-life balance, and that is living a life filled with work, people, and activities that bring me joy and allow me to maintain my mental health and well-being. So I want you to think about what work-life balance looks for you, how does it feel, what does it mean, and that's what I want you to be striving for.