Attend to how choices serve you

Every day we are making choices that reflect our values (and perhaps our anxieties). Exercise could have been paper writing. First-author paper writing could have been working on administrative things or other people’s projects.

It is your job to make sure you are doing the things that will ensure your long-term success in the field – and that usually includes making sure your body and mind are healthy enough for long-term success and that you are doing activities to move towards your goals.

You can prioritize work for short periods, but my experience is that 2 months is a good limit before rebalancing – the longer you go unbalanced, the more time off (or at least inefficient or low-productivity time) you need to recover. Self-care is also work, skills that have to be practiced (particularly in chaotic times) and time that has to be taken, much like we need to take time to hone skills more proximately associated with being a successful researcher, or mentor, or leader (or for some of you, clinician).

A colleague mentioned that they are impressed by people who have kept up habits from the early days of the pandemic. This made me reflect as following.

1) For many of us, time was used very differently at the start of the pandemic vs. Jan 2021 vs. now, particularly as people were still learning what and how to shift to Zoom. So people had more time to fill up. But it seems like the longer the pandemic progresses, the less free time there is and also more expectations for how we use that time.

2) Our choices serve some purpose, regardless of whether we’re mindful of them. I choose to keep writing weekly letters in part because they give me a chance to reflect, and in part because feedback indicates they are beneficial to others.

3) I’m pleased that I’ve continued to make choices that prioritize my whole-self, and the wellbeing of my family, over those that would prioritize my CV. Or when I forget to do that, that the periods when I’m disproportionately over-prioritizing work are getting smaller. For example, at times in the pandemic while working from home I’ve been able to do mid-morning exercise between meetings, or take my meetings as hikes, whereas other times in my career I would have done something else on the to-do list.