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Do you ever feel like you're spending more time managing your work as a physician rather than doing what you trained to do?
Endless meetings, emails, data entry and other trivialities can inundate us in a never-ending flood. Those commitments snatch away our focus from what is important to us, our families and our careers.
I've been there and I know exactly how it feels.
You feel like your goals and priorities aren't valued. You see your vision for your career disappearing before your very eyes.
Productivity Advice for Physicians (by a Physician)
There are innumerable sources of information about personal productivity. A quick Google search will surface thousands of books, articles, blogs and podcasts.
When I started this site, none of those resources spoke to my needs as a Physician.
A lot of the advice I was reading or hearing was just not possible to enact in my workplace. As healthcare professionals, we face unique demands on our time. We operate with restrictions that don't apply to other industries.
Parsing the breadth and depth of the productivity literature takes time and effort. We're all busy enough keeping up with our current workload.
Given I was already reading and listening so broadly, I imagined that my synthesis could be useful to other docs who don't have that time to spare.
The Productive Physician
The Productive Physician has a singular purpose:
to translate my learning about personal productivity into actionable advice that is accessible and applicable to Physicians.
To get started, click through to a popular article via the roadmap below or browse our archive.
You can learn more about me and this site at our About page.
I am always thrilled to hear from readers: please feel free to reach out via the Contact page.
Level up your personal productivity using some of our most highly recommended Resources.
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Sign me up!Explore this site and get in touch. Let's see if we can start a journey toward more effective physician practice and a more satisfying career.
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Testimonials
“This website provided me with essential resources and insights to become a truly productive physician.
I’ve always had an interest in becoming a better and more effective doctor and health system leader. I starting looking for that killer app that would help me achieve my goals. I quickly realized its not only the technology, but more importantly, about developing your own system to approach your work and personal life.
Like others, I read Getting Things Done by David Allen and quickly applied it to my work. As I dove deeper into understanding effective productivity practices, I was wondering if other physicians have used similar tools. That’s when I came across The Productive Physician website and was pleased to learn that there were others who had similar passions to become better physicians.
The website has a repository of tools and resources that help doctors start and enhance their productivity journey. Whether it’s goal setting, managing your email inbox or how to practice deep work, The Productive Physician sets up the roadmap to accomplish your purpose and goals.
Personally, I found the Create a Personal Mission Statement for the Life YOU Want the most valuable product on this website. This post helped me appreciate the importance of defining your why as a way to identify my important values and beliefs and apply these to my professional and personal aspirations. This piece is well researched and assisted the development of my personal mission statement which now fuels my everyday work and life experiences.”Dr Ryan Sommers
- “I am a physician-scientist with an interest in productivity techniques to help manage the large number of projects with which I am involved. I was a loyal reader of The Productive Physician blog when I decided to co-author an article for the prestigious scientific journal Gastroenterology on productivity techniques for academic physicians. Since The Productive Physician represented the pinnacle resource on the topic written by a physician and directed to physicians, I endorsed it as an important resource in the article.
Since then, I have continued to be impressed by the blog and the resources available to physicians on the site. At recent university and hospital workshops to help physicians at my university become more organized and productive, I strongly recommended the course Make the Medical Literature Come to You. This course is taught (via video lectures) in a very efficient and clear manner, and includes all the major tips I would provide my own students or colleagues.
I strongly endorse The Productive Physician, and all the resources created by Mark Lavercombe. Mark has truly changed the way that I work, and influenced my educational activities!”Dr Eric Benchimol
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology, University of Ottawa 
“I love reading Mark's in-depth posts - these are probably the most comprehensive and meticulously written productivity articles out there. It's one of those instances where you read and wonder 'how the heck does he do ALL THAT?!'
Mark is a doctor, a university professor, a grad student, and a father to two young boys. How does he get enough hours in the day to have it all and blog about it too? Oh right, he walks the talk.
His clear, no-nonsense, easy-to-read posts illustrate not only theoretical understanding of the subject (productivity) but true, deep knowledge - the kind that makes you implement what you know on the day-to-day basis.”Marina Darlow
Productivity & Systems strategist - Vision Framework
