Time Management for Healthcare Professionals: Why More Efficiency Isn't the Answer
Sonja Cronjé
June 23, 2026
In This Article
There's a book I keep recommending to the doctors and healthcare leaders I work with. It is called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – and the title tells you everything. The average human lifespan is roughly 4,000 weeks.
I keep a personal record of my own weeks – a simple spreadsheet I update regularly. Seeing the lived weeks in one column and the remaining ones in another is a good reminder of how short life actually is, in the best possible way.
It is worth working out how many weeks you have left. Depending on your age, you may have already spent more than half of them.
Oliver Burkeman is a British journalist who spent years chasing the perfect productivity system before concluding that the chase itself was the problem. Four Thousand Weeks is the book that came out of that realisation. It won't give you a better to-do list system or a better way to organise your calendar. What it offers instead is a genuinely different way of thinking about time.
Here are the ideas I find myself returning to most.
The efficiency trap
If you work in healthcare, you are probably very good at finding ways to work faster. And you will also have noticed that it never actually reduces the load. You clear the backlog, and more arrives to replace it.
Burkeman calls this the efficiency trap. The faster you work through your tasks, the faster new ones appear. Take, for example, a doctor who becomes efficient at clearing results, referrals, and emails in between patient visits. Before long, people learn she is responsive, resulting in even more emails getting copied to her, and more quick inquiries coming her way. Her efficiency didn't reduce her workload – it attracted more of it.
And it is not unique to that doctor. It happens across healthcare, and across almost every profession. The uncomfortable conclusion is that no productivity system will ever produce the feeling of being on top of things. That feeling, Burkeman argues, was never on offer.
The "when I finally..." problem
There is a pattern I regularly see among the healthcare professionals I coach – the sense that real life, or a manageable workload, will begin at some point, just around the corner. Once the fellowship is finished or the research project is done, things will finally settle down.
Burkeman calls this the "when I finally" mindset – treating your current life as a waiting room for the life you plan to start once conditions are right. The trouble is, that future never arrives. The fellowship or research project ends, and something else takes its place.
For healthcare professionals who struggle with self-doubt or imposter syndrome, there is often a sense that real confidence, or real legitimacy, will come once they have done enough. Once they have proved enough. One more qualification, one more milestone – and then they will finally know enough to feel like they belong. In the meantime, the present keeps getting deferred.
Burkeman's argument is that the conditions will never become right – and that accepting this is the only way to actually start living in the life you already have.
The relief in accepting limitation
This is where the book goes somewhere unexpected. Rather than offering a better system, Burkeman argues that the anxiety most of us feel about time comes from refusing to accept that it is limited. We behave, he suggests, as though we are immortal – as though there will always be enough time eventually, if we can just get organised enough to find it.
There is no shortage of worthy things to do with your time. The shortage is time itself.
Burkeman argues that many of us spend enormous energy avoiding that reality – keeping options open, trying to do everything well, waiting for certainty before we commit to anything. But a meaningful life requires choosing. The real question is not how to fit more in, but what is actually worth giving your limited time to.
He suggests a practical way of making that choice tangible. Write everything you want to do – professionally, personally, someday – on what he calls an open list. Then move just three to five items to a closed list. Those are the only things you focus on. You don't look at the open list again until something on the closed list is finished or genuinely abandoned.
What makes this hard is accepting that most of the things on your open list may never happen – simply because you are a finite person with a finite number of weeks, and you chose to spend them on something that mattered more.
Strategic underachievement
This is probably my favourite idea in the book, and the one that tends to get the most reaction from the healthcare professionals I work with. It means consciously choosing where to focus your best efforts, and deliberately doing everything else to a standard that is simply good enough.
In practice, this might mean a referral letter that covers what the receiving clinician needs to know, written in twenty minutes rather than an hour. Or writing a roster that is fair and functional, finished in an hour rather than an entire evening of tweaking. Or a literature review that includes enough references to make the case convincingly, without attempting to catalogue every paper ever written on the topic.
If you have spent your career in a culture that rewards excellence across the board, this concept can be difficult to accept. The natural tendency is to maintain the same high standards for everything – whether a routine administrative email, research paper, ward round, or departmental meeting agenda. But that tendency comes at a cost – hours and energy spent on tasks that ultimately detract from the work you actually care about.
Perfectionism promises that if you do everything well enough, you will eventually feel secure. Burkeman's view is that it mostly just keeps you busy. Deciding in advance what you will not pursue at all – that is how you make room for the work that genuinely deserves your attention.
The moments you will remember – last time thinking
One of the more understated ideas in the book is what Burkeman calls "last time" thinking – the practice of noticing that you may be doing something for the very last time, without knowing it.
We tend to assume that because we have done something many times, we will do it many times more. That assumption encourages a kind of autopilot – moving from one task to the next, always looking ahead, rarely fully present in what is actually happening in front of us.
When your days are dominated by getting to the next thing, whole seasons of life can blur together. Years start to feel like one long list of tasks completed under pressure.
Last time thinking is really about attention – being more present in the moments that make up an ordinary day, rather than rushing through them on the way to whatever comes next. It is a simple practice that makes ordinary life feel surprisingly rich.
Burkeman's point is not that you need to become deeply reflective about every moment. Paying fuller attention, even briefly, changes the texture of a life. Singing with your toddler in the car on the way to daycare, or the patient who made you laugh on a day when you really needed it – these moments tend to feel small and ordinary while they are happening, but they are often the ones people remember most clearly.
Worth your time
Four Thousand Weeks will not give you a productivity system or help you clear your inbox. What it might do is help you see that the overwhelm you feel about your to-do list was never going to be solved by a better system. It is evidence of being human, in a culture that has convinced us we should be able to transcend the very limitations that make us human. In healthcare, that pressure is relentless – and it is one of the reasons burnout remains so persistent in the profession.
I won't pretend I have this all figured out. My relationship with my own to-do list is still a work in progress. But updating my Four Thousand Weeks spreadsheet every Monday has become a small but useful habit – a reminder of how finite my time actually is and a prompt to consider whether I am spending it on the things that matter most.
I would highly recommend adding Four Thousand Weeks to your reading list.