One of the reasons I went into medicine is because I am largely motivated by feeling helpful and useful to other people. I almost always prioritize tasks that help someone in some kind of need.
In undergrad, a good portion of my free time went to tutoring classmates, helping talk people through tough situations, and in general learning to solve problems people had. It didn’t matter if it was the day before an exam or if I had a project due the next day. If someone had a need they expressed to me, I would address it. I’ve stayed up through the night multiple times before my own exams and projects to help someone study for their tests.
I thought that by going into medicine, I would be guaranteed to be able to perform my work as every task is related to someone’s needs, so I continued to prioritize tasks the way I believed was right in medical school. My own academic deadlines didn’t matter. I would stay up before exams, projects and other deadlines to write articles for LSIpedia, help my friends with research, or tutor acquaintances. I even stayed up a few times to talk to a friend I knew from my undergraduate years who was feeling depressed, and ended up staying up twice during exams to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves when they expressed some concern to me. In general, people acknowledged these efforts, and made me feel validated.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, blindly prioritizing other people’s needs isn’t conducive to good medical practice. In modern medicine, there are a myriad of bookkeeping tasks that are not directly related to anyone’s needs that must be performed with equal zeal in order to prevent future complications. I learned this very quickly during medical school. Previously, in my undergraduate years, I treated auxiliary tasks (such as reflections, timekeeping forms, and I’m ashamed to admit- documentation) as non-essential, and finished them when someone asked me specifically for them. Within my first two years I learned that “when someone asked me for them” was too late in the field of medicine. Medical school also had reflections, sign-ins to required events, and required documentation. In an effort to make sure we didn’t have trouble with these auxiliary tasks by the time we were actual doctors, OSU directly grades us on these in a “Professionalism” category, and at the time I was an M1 and M2, a single late assignment meant you failed the Professionalism category for a certain academic block. Despite my best efforts to develop habits to finish things on time, I still submitted an auxiliary assignment late for several academic blocks, as I was unused to keeping organizational habits.
It was harrowing. I hadn’t expected to find something unrelated to the direct work of medicine that I would have so much trouble with.
My motivation, as I’ve stated, is to feel useful to other people, and I hadn’t previously kept a checklist or calendar and maintained myself on it. In my undergraduate years, there were few enough tasks that I could prioritize them all in my head, so I had simply hopped from one task to the next based on what felt most useful. I feel like people trying to help me are frequently perplexed by this, as it is so incompatible with the typical pre-medical path that most people take to get into medical school. One of the first meetings I had to discuss with faculty why I had not submitted one of my evaluations on time, after I explained the circumstances regarding that particular late assignment, one of the faculty mentors asked me “Why would you, on the week before a test, the day before several assignments are due, go off to print study material for other people?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I can see why it seems foolish, but the reason I would go off to do that is literally the reason I entered medicine. I am here because I am willing to sacrifice my time to be helpful to others.
But the lesson I took from that meeting was not “if I want to be a doctor, I can’t prioritize other people’s needs directly.” It was “If I want to prioritize other people’s needs, I need to be more organized.” And so even if I failed a few times, I persevered. I learned to keep a checklist, I learned to keep a calendar. I learned to use technology to make these things available to me in all situations. Most importantly, I developed the habits to check and maintain these things regularly, and the habits to maintain redundancy in these so that even if one method fails, I have a backup. And this worked. I gradually made myself more organized and got to a point where I no longer missed auxiliary tasks. I didn’t have to give up my penchant for addressing other people’s needs to do it. I still do many of the things I used to do that made me feel helpful and fulfilled. I still occasionally tutor friends and family online. I still act as a support sounding board for depressed friends and acquaintances who use me as such. I still generate study material, and I still write computer programs for friends who find them useful. However I don’t miss any time-sensitive auxiliary tasks to do it.
I think that this has been one of my greatest successes in medical school, the development of personal organizational skills. I think that by going through the process, I’ve refined these skills to the point where they are above average, where I started well below average. I’ve been able to keep myself much more productive than I imagined I could be as a result, even for auxiliary personal tasks that I want to accomplish for myself. Over the course of my second and third year of medical school, I’ve learned new instruments (some basic guitar and basic violin), gone through flight ground school (in the middle of my IM rotation), learned some Spanish and Russian, and built devices that I’ve wanted to build (an endoscope). Thanks to the organizational ability I’ve developed, I’ve done all of this without sacrificing the things I want to do for other people, or sacrificing any part of my medical training.
I think sometimes having a flaw we are aware of teaches us how to improve much better than just believing we have some “natural ability” for certain things. At least, it certainly feels that way for me with organizing myself.
Thank you for reading about my journey of personal growth!