For years, my Sunday evenings weren’t mine.
After dinner I’d sit down to catch up on charting. Then, because I was also running a residency program, I’d plan the week’s didactics and prep for the meetings waiting on Monday. By the time I closed the laptop, the evening was gone. It wasn’t a night off. It was a light shift.
I look back on those nights now and wish I’d spent them with my family.
The Challenge: you don’t know where the time goes
Ask a physician how much they work after hours and you’ll get a guess. “An hour, maybe.” “Depends on the night.”
That guess is usually wrong. We remember the charting because it’s the part we resent. We forget the ten minutes in the inbox before bed. The form filled out on the couch. The email to the program coordinator. Those don’t feel like work. They feel like tidying up.
For me, charting was only half of Sunday. The other half was work no one would have called clinical.
So this month starts with counting, not AI. Hand AI a guess and it hands you a plan built on a guess.
The Solution:log seven evenings, then let AI read it
Keep it light. This is not a time study.
For the next seven evenings, write one line in your phone’s notes app every time you open the laptop or the EHR after leaving work:
Day. Start time. Stop time. Bucket.
Five buckets:
- Charting
- Inbox (patient messages, results, refills)
- Forms and letters
- Admin and planning (meetings, schedules, teaching prep, committee work)
- Other
That’s it. Don’t analyze during the week. Don’t judge the numbers. Just write them down.
By next Sunday you’ll have 15 to 30 lines of raw data. That’s where AI earns its place. It does the part you won’t do at 9 p.m.: adding it up, finding the pattern, and naming the bucket to go after first.
The log holds times and buckets only. No patient information goes in.
The Prompt: paste into your fave AI
I’m a physician. Below is a log of my after-hours work for the past seven days. Each line has the day, start time, stop time, and one bucket: charting, inbox, forms and letters, admin and planning, or other.
[paste your log]
1. Total my time by bucket and by day. Show it as a short table.
2. Name the patterns. Which nights run longest? Does anything cluster on weekends? Does one bucket keep spilling into another?
3. For each bucket, tell me how much of the work AI could realistically draft, sort, or summarize, and how much needs my judgment. Be skeptical. Don’t oversell.
4. Pick the one bucket I should work on first, and tell me why.
5. Ask me two questions about anything in the log that looks off before you suggest a plan.
The Number: 86 minutes
In a study of 142 family physicians, EHR event logs showed 86 minutes of EHR work after clinic hours on a typical weekday. On weekends, EHR activity peaked twice: around 10 a.m. and again around 10 p.m.
That number was measured, not estimated. But it only counts time inside the EHR. My Sunday didactics planning would never have shown up. Neither would your committee emails.
That’s why you keep the log. The EHR tells part of the story. You have to capture the rest.
The Move
Tonight, make a new note on your phone called “Evenings.” Log tonight as line one, even if it’s zero.
Keep it going for seven days. Run the prompt next Sunday.
Next Sunday
Once you know where the time goes, we start taking it back one bucket at a time.
First up: the inbox. Patient messages, results, refills. How to use AI to sort and draft them without handing over your judgment.
Dr. Heath
P.S. Reply now with your guess. How many minutes a night do you think it is? Then reply next week with the real number. I want to see the gap.
I work with physicians on burnout, leadership, and figuring out what comes next. If this newsletter keeps describing your week back to you, that is usually a sign it is worth a conversation. Book a free Clarity Session.
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