After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money. Whereas when I was a doctor it was like someone was telling me out of one side of their mouth that I should take care of patients and money isn’t important but out of the other side they were whispering (but really shouting) that the patient doesn’t matter, just make money for the hospital.

Anyway, I really latched on to the concept of ✨optimizing time✨ and “time is money” and thinking of every hour as having an equivalent value that could be estimated in dollars and taking those quizzes that would tell you how much your time is worth and all of that, mostly because in medicine it’s beaten into your brain that money is evil and making money is greedy and you should just take care of the patients out of the goodness of your heart and because it’s a calling (obviously I’m oversimplifying and also in retrospect I wonder if I was also overly idealistic as a young doctor). When I think about it now, it’s kind of crazy that I spent 19,200 hours1 training to be a surgeon but probably at least half of that was spent doing tasks that (from a strictly labor efficiency perspective, not a taking-care-of-humans perspective) were below my pay grade or what I maybe should have been worth considering the level of training and experience I had, like rote data entry in clinical documentation, wheeling patients to the operating room, drawing labs on my patients because I wanted/needed them faster than the phlebotomist could come draw them, et cetera. And I did all that with a spring in a step and a smile on my face (less so as I got more senior, but I never complained) because I thought, I’m kind of a hero for doing whatever it takes to get these patients the care they need!

And then I burned out. Hard. (It seems obvious that that would happen in retrospect, but when you’re running on fumes for years, you don’t even pick your head up to look around.) Which was a confounder (or maybe the accelerant) for what really happened, which was my early mid-life crisis that led to me thinking, hey, maybe I don’t actually have to keep doing this and maybe there is some other way I can contribute to the world without draining my internal battery every day and only getting to charge it back up to 5 or 10% before having to go out and do it all again.

(I started out writing this based on a seed of a thought which is “Hey, you know how all those thought leaders are always trying to optimize their time and money and time is money and delegate anything you can to someone else so you can focus on the thing that makes you the most money, and they run that principle into the ground and use it to justify outsource every task in their life? Are they happy? What do they do with all that incredibly valuable time that they’ve freed up for themselves?” and then in very typical Kwon fashion have been setting context for the past three business days of writing this note.)

Anyway, that’s the short version of how I got a little bit into this cult of optimizing my time and my life. When I say optimizing, I mean I did things like:

  • move to Manhattan from Brooklyn in order to optimize my commute (from ~40 minutes on the Q train at rush hour to a 10 minute crosstown walk)
  • optimize my wardrobe to only have neutral colored clothing (a lot of black and grey) so that everything would match, and also keep it limited to a few, high quality pieces in order to reduce decision fatigue from selecting an outfit to wear each day or having to shop frequently
  • order a sandwich (or some other easy-to-eat-while-ambulating food) for pickup, go pick up the sandwich, and then eat it while walking to whatever my next destination was to optimize my transit time
  • send extremely efficient, businesslike messages to friends when making social plans in order to optimize for reducing the amount of back and forth (and get very annoyed if they did not do the same)—like, “hey [friend], it’s been a while! would love to catch up over coffee next week. i’m available tues 3 pm, wed after 5 pm, or sat before noon—any of those times work for you? feel free to send alternatives if not, otherwise i’ll send a calendar invite for whichever time works!” (but of course all lowercase so as to SEEM incredibly 💅🏻chill💅🏻, easy breezy, just a cool chill guy doing cool guy stuff over here!!!).

I have to point out here that while these behaviors are not specific or unique to New York, I do think they are common here, and also reading this (and having LIVED it), OBVIOUSLY New Yorkers are a little bit VERY ridiculous and often insufferable and if that is what you are thinking—believe me, I know, and I do not disagree. I am chuckling, slash cringing, while typing this out. But in general I have also learned to be kinder to my younger self since she was just doing the best she could.

Anyway! The pandemic shook a lot of this up, and one silver lining of it was that I really chilled out a lot in this regard. I don’t chastise myself for not being at PEAK PRODUCTIVITY 1,000% OF THE TIME and I even enjoy zoning out every once in awhile. I’ll take the long way to my destination if it’s a little bit more scenic. I am more likely to make looser social plans and it doesn’t feel like being flaky if it doesn’t happen or if it takes a while to solidify things (obviously for things like ticketed events or also with certain friends who I know value the firm commitment made efficiently I try my best to do things the “old way”).

The pendulum may swing back at some point; I don’t know. Busy feels different these days because I don’t constantly feel like I have to DO something so visible in order to add value. It’s okay to take a moment to think about things or to say “I’ll get back to you on that” if it can wait and I’m not equipped to answer the question or do the thing right this second. I also wear colors in my wardrobe even though it means it takes longer to get dressed in the morning (but also my wardrobe is now 90% sweatpants and linens so it’s basically changing from my bed pajamas to my work pajamas these days, hehe).

There’s another thread in here I want to pull on (but later because it’s late, this is already getting kind of long, and I have a show queued up on the telly a.k.a. the Netflix window behind this text file) which is that perhaps the bigger tide in which my small boat is getting swept up in but trying to resist is society’s move toward specialization (as a way to optimize efficiency), but that maybe we are sacrificing something along the way, which is a general self-sufficiency (thinking specifically about this very highly paid law partner I know who doesn’t know how to cook but also doesn’t have to because she can just pay someone to make her food… but is that a good thing or a thing to be proud of?).

  1. Here’s the math: I logged 80 hours a week for each of 5 years, which is 52 weeks a year minus 4 weeks of vacation per year (which by the way sounds great but residents don’t really get weekends or holidays and there were periods of up to 3 months at a time where I was in that hospital every single day), so 80 hours/week × (52 - 4) weeks/year × 5 years = 19,200 hours. This is almost certainly an underestimate since I definitely went over my hours very consistently, sometimes up to 100 hours a week, so it very well may have been closer to 20,000 hours. But 19,200 is what was on paper. ↩︎