Physicians + Lifestyle Design

/
Physicians + Lifestyle Design

By Greg Bledsoe MD MPH

Over on Freelance MD, I've posted a couple of articles about taking responsibility for yourself and "building your own ship" , and we've also gone through a few common reasons why physicians aren't the best at career modification.

In this post, I'd like to spend a little time introducing you to the idea of "lifestyle design," something that has become a bit of a buzz-phrase in the business world but as far as I can tell hasn't penetrated the world of medicine just yet (for a lot of reasons).

I'll begin with a personal story...

When I jumped off the academic track in 2006, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do as a career but I knew I wanted something unique.  My idea was to design a career that was flexible, fun, adventurous, and meaningful, all the while paying my bills and being a responsible spouse and parent.  Simple, huh?

I spent months thinking about how to do this as a physician.  I searched websites and blogs.  I spoke with mentors and colleagues.  I read the literature, all to no avail.  There seemed to be no conversation about a career like this in medicine.  I mean, there were a few articles about volunteer opportunities or non-traditional careers, but nothing really like what I was trying to create.

Read More

Investing In Yourself

/

The difference between people who invest in themselves... and people who just whine.

Believe me when I say this; there's an endless list of doctors who "say" they want to make more money, improve their website rankings, revise their staff training or improve their customer service... but never actually DO ANYTHING to get there?

Here's a simple litmus test: If you say you want something but haven't done any systematic work to achieve your goal in the last 14 days, you're deluding yourself. Really.

If you want to get something done your choice is actually very simple; (1) start taking action or (2) acknowledge that your goal really isn't that important to you, and give up.

Of course both of these options are perfectly viable choices. There's nothing wrong with making a coherent decision to give up on something that you decide is actually not that important or that the opportunity cost is too high. For example, I used to kill myself to try and answer my phone or return phone calls immediately (or within an hour) — that was my goal. After a while,  I was just unable to keep up with that schedule and it became more of a distraction. So I gave up on it. If someone calls me now it will almost certainly go to voice mail and I'll get back when I can. It's a huge weight off of my shoulders and removes a constant distraction. (In fact, my voice mail says to leave a message only 'if it's important". That one change makes everyone who calls me self-censor and has cut my vm messages by 90%. But I digress...)

The point? Give up on whatever you're not going to

Read More

Freelance MD's First 30 Days

/

If you've been around Medical Spa MD for the last month or so you may have noticed a few posts by guest authors from Freelance MD, our new sister-site.

Freelance MD is for physicians who are interested in non-traditional or non-clinical medicine as well as information about physician career and lifestyle control. To couch it as being a hit is something of an understatement. Here's the post I just published on Freelance about it's first 30 days.

Freelance MD was launched one month ago today. There have been a few changes.

Greg and I launched Freelance MD after meeting at the Medical Fusion Conference in Las Vegas at the beginning of November. We'd already had a number of discussions about the need but I wanted to talk to physicians outside of my usual cosmetic medicine contacts and listen to what they wanted, and gauge their reaction to what we were thinking about. Well, whatever doubts I had about the need for this type of community were quickly assuaged. I could see that the opportunity to provide a very broad, horizontal platform that focused on providing physicians information, products and services was growing and we were in a unique position to address it.

The conference ended on the 7th and on the 17th we launched Freelance MD in it's current iteration. Now, one month later, we've been astounded by it's growth and it's resonance with physicians. I've been involved with a number of online communities but the speed with which Freelance is growing is more than unusual, it's astounding. Here are a couple of notable milestones from our first thirty days;

  • We've grow to almost twenty authors that include experts on topics as wide ranging as physician entrepreneurs, non-clinical careers, wealth planning, investing, and writing. We've passed 100 posts from our own authors, had our first guest post. It's actually been difficult for Greg to get back to everyone as fast as we'd like—but we're trying.
  • We're growing fast. Take a look at the growth curves below. For a community site that's just one month old and hasn't launched with an existing network this is phenomenal. As a point of reference, when I started Medical Spa MD it took me more than a year (maybe two) to reach this number of unique monthly visitors. Fast growth often comes with volatility but this trajectory is better than we could have hoped for.
       

    Freelance MD traffic From November 17th — December 17th, 2010


    10,319 page views an more than 2,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 1,500+ unique visitors so far this month! ; )
  • We're sticky. Take another look at the image above and you'll see a wide gap  between unique visitors and page views. This shows that the average visitor views slightly more than 4 pages each time they visit. For anyone who knows something about user behavior online, this is a key indication of how 'sticky' a site is and how interested visitors are in the content. The fact that we're seeing 5 page views per visitor literally blows the doors off of most sites, especially since there are 20 blog posts that are visible on the first page. This indicator—even more than the growth curve—is something to get excited about since it denotes that readers are heavily engaged.
  • Readers are recommending us with 500 Facebook likes, more than 1,000 stumbles, and an unknown number of tweets. (You can do us a solid by helping out here and posting a recommendation to our favorite social networks.) If you look up in the right corner of the site you can see the number of times that we've been referred through popular social networks. (The Twitter number will change because it relates to the specific page you're on, not an aggregated total. That's why you'll see changing numbers under different posts.) We've also just added the new LinkedIn 'share' button. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what to think about what's going on there since I've never seen numbers like that appear so fast before.
  • We've partners with some fantastic organizations. You'll notice that our Select Partners list is growing and we're also excited about that. With partners like Health 2.0, ExpedMed, and the Medical Fusion Conference, we're tapping in to a number of other communities and events that we can add value to.
  • We've expanded our community to include Freelance MD groups on LinkedIn, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds... You can connect with the community through any or all of these. (You'll get bonus karma for connecting with them all.)
  • We're building out promotions for some of our partner organizations. If you haven't visited the ExpedMed CME Polar Bear Adventure to investigate your adventurous side or thought about attending the Health 2.0 Spring Fling in San Diego, you should take a look.

The numbers above are pretty impressive, but we're not going to be resting on our laurels any time soon. There's too much to do. We'll undoubtedly have some issues as we grow, but we're committed to pushing through these obstacles and making Freelance MD the single best community for action-oriented physicians on the web.

In the very near future we'll be adding memberships, downloads, a non-clinical physicians jobs board and even more authors to the mix.