I recent became aware of the work of the US physician Tait Shanafelt1 and their work around workforce sustainability and longevity in medicine.
In one piece of work, what really caught my eye was this statistic – if a doctor spends at least 20% of their time following their passion, the other time does not drag on ones energy and happiness.
Tait refers to this as optimising meaning in your work – that finding this meaning reduces the risk of burnout and that doctors who don’t have at least that 20% are at higher risk of burnout. Specifically they found that working at least one and half days a fortnight in a desired area halved the risk of burnout.
This idea has also been take up in other business book – Marcus Buckingham used in this 20% research in his book Work + Love. This focus was on the idea of red threads, work you can get lost in, but an important feature of his work is not the find your passion and work there, but rather find your great work and learn to love it.
These findings around a portion of time engaged with a subject matter that really resonates has been replicated in other studies. In a bit of a reversal of the Shanafelt work, a study of medical educators, showed that time incongruence between desired time allocation and mandatory work (administration) by more than 20% increased the chance of burnout.
This idea of enjoying your best work, that it does not have to be a passion was also carried out in Cal Newports book “So good they can’t ignore you“, I mention him in another post around career capital. The conclusion of his book is that occupational happienss does not a require a passion. Newport also points out that control is often at the heart of visions of a dream job – and setting up systems for niche can give more control that all comer work.
For me this 20% is my small business work in running the practice and my sexual health work – PReP, MTOP and vasectomies. These factors keep me engaged and although this is still hard work at times, I am recharged by this work. I can complete a full day of general consulting and look forward to work the next days if it has a couple of vasectomies or other work that is meaningful to me booked.
What would your 20% look like? Would this protect you from burnout?
I’ll talk more about how to identify your work that lights you up in some more posts.