Happy Labor Day.   Time to reflect back on all the good you have done for yourself, your family and your patients.  You are awesome!

Here are some facts about Labor Day from the US Department of Labor Website:

Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Founder of Labor Day

More than 100 years after the first Labor Day observance, there is still some doubt as to who first proposed the holiday for workers.

Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”

But Peter McGuire’s place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. What is clear is that the Central Labor Union adopted a Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Question: How many hours per week should I work to be successful?

Answer: It still depends.

Maybe the best way to arrange your schedule is to block out the time on a weekly basis to work both on your practice and in your practice.  You might start by estimating the number of hours you spend with direct patient care and charting - that is in the practice work.  Then you could allocate a number of hours more per week to work on your practice – planning, organizing, marketing, reviewing  financials, talking with your banker and your CPA, applying for loans, recruiting other providers to work in your practice, developing business contacts, and so on. 

The weekly number of on the practice hours should reflect how ambitious you are.  If you are really lazy, it will be zero.  That’s OK, but outside circumstances are more likely to dictate the number of in the practice hours you spend.

Block out your time for each, as though it were a scheduled meeting and don’t deviate from your scheduled times.  Respect the boundaries of your time and don’t let people encroach on it.  On the practice time is not meant to be “play time” or “get in touch with your feelings time” or ”complain about life in general time”.  This is work time dedicated to ensuring that your practice is retaining and attracting patients and earning money efficiently and consistently. 

The real reason to spend hours working on the practice is to be able to control the hours spent in the practice.  The first goal of this exercise should be to optimize the ratio of hours spent on the practice to in the practice.

The most common mistake to make is to get excited about a new task or tactic and let that project dominate your time and impinge on the rest of your world.  Better to do fewer things well and keep building a stronger and stronger business infrastructure into your practice.  Doing fewer things will make you more strategic in the long run and therefore more successful.

David Zahaluk, MD is a practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at http://www.ultimatepracticebuilder.com/.

Question: How many hours per week should you work to be successful?

Answer: It depends.

It really depends on how you define success in the first place.  Like any other question in life, it is much easier to answer if you know yourself.  If your goal is to prove yourself to yourself or anyone else, the answer is there will be no peace and no rest for you.  Give up on sleep.  Stock up on Tums and PeptoBismol.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

If you really look at the big picture of life, most of what we need we already have and we may have had from birth.  We only need to find a good mate, a handful of worthy friends and a decent job or business.  Once we have these people and situations in our life we only have to be loyal to them and esteem them enough for them to want to stay around.  That’s it, after that you can take it easy.

http://www.bobparsons.me/index.php?ci=14968&id=-1&isc=goaf2001ab&targetGuid=6b8d214b-87e3-4cc6-9c47-9a5920831355

The only problem is I have to stop watching because I’m getting mezmerized by Leeann.  I now listen to them without looking at the video.

Anyway Tanya is thinking about starting a business.  She is great at making cakes and the people who have bought her cakes absolutely rave about them.  So she reached out to good ol’ Uncle Dave for some advice on starting a business.  We looked at her projections and I’m asking her to adjust her course – not to give up, but to proceed ahead more cautiously and strategically.  Here is the meat of the email I recently sent her.  (Hey Tanya, it’s free consulting – don’t expect the same level of confidentiality and privacy that paying clients get!)

Albert Einstein

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Jay Leno

Don’t forget Mother’s Day.  Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad’s Third Wife Day.”

Lily Tomlin

“I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”

Melanie Griffith

“There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy.  Her heart.”

Steven Wright

“A lot of people are afraid of heights.  Not me, I’m afraid of widths.”

 Woody Allen

“I’ve often said, the only thing standing between me and greatness is me”

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Goals are an underused resource in most doctor’s lives.  Why?  Because we  often set them without a lot of thought (see part III of this series), and then we feel bad when we find ourselves not progressing to that goal.  Eventually we become less and less likely to want to set other goals because the ones we have actually demotivate us.   We end up viewing those who do set goals as overcaffeinated Tony Robbins types who live in an unrealistic world of dreams and fantasies.  But isn’t the belief that goal setting doesn’t work as much a fantasy (albeit a negative one) as the belief that goal setting does indeed work?

The most important key to using goals is to realize they are a tool.  They are  a tool to focus your mind (all parts – conscious and subconscious) on achieving a specific outcome and to guide the management of your time.  Like any tool or instrument, the results you get from it have a lot to do with who is using it.  You can give me the greatest, most finely crafted accordion in the world but I can’t produce any worthwhile music from it because I have no talent or training for playing the accordion.

Find three people in your sphere of influence that are highly successful or otherwise appear to be good at goal setting or time management.  Ask them how they use goals and how they prioritize and organize the use of their time.  Ask them how they choose their goals.  Ask them how they became skilled in using goal setting effectively.  There are people all around you who have the skills you need.  See what they know.

The next posts on this topic will focus on what to focus on when you are setting your goals and how to most effectively use the goals you’ve set. 

David Zahaluk, MD is a practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

Michael Gerber, author of The EMyth Revisited, talks about the shift from working in your practice to on your practice.  Michael is a genius and he is completely correct.  Unless you get out of your own way, you will never develop a vision for your practice and then turn that vision into reality.  You have to stop focusing on the minutia, the day-to-day details that are important yet just as obstructive to progress, and gaze into your future long enough to invent it.  If and when you do that, you will soon realize that you are the biggest problem your practice has because you are basically in the way, slowing things down, keeping life slow, small, safe and predictable.  (My apologies if you are an outlier – I’m talking to the average doctor who is struggling, not those in the top 10%.)

But there is  a second ratio shift:  When you move from working on your practice to working on yourself.   If you become self-aware enough to see that you are indeed the problem, it only make sense that you might want to start changing some of your maladaptive hard-wiring.  That’s a hard pill for most to swallow but a success secret for the fortunate few who share that insight.

David Zahaluk, MD is a practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.