In this episode of the Prosperous Doc®, our host Shane Tenny, CFP®, chats with Dr. Shenvi about how practicing better time management can lead to more fulfilling lives for busy professionals.
“We have 1,440 minutes a day. We tend to be pretty careful thinking about our finances or our money, but ironically, we can always make more money, but we can never make more time,” says Dr. Christina Shenvi, MD, Ph.D., MBA.
Dr. Shenvi is no stranger to the challenge of time management. Having earned a PhD, MD, and executive MBA, she was using timeboxing and other techniques before there was a name for them.
After coaching medical students for their exams, Dr. Shenvi realized that much of that success came down to how students manage their time. She then spent several years deep diving into psychology literature on procrastination, goal setting, and motivation and began incorporating this knowledge into her lectures. After working with students for a number of years, Dr. Shenvi started to speak on this topic to her colleagues - the medical school faculty. And she would get an overwhelming response that it really resonated with people.
This led her to launch Time for Your Life, which strives to help professionals through time management. “I started thinking about, how do I really help impact people's lives?” Dr. Shenvi said. “A one-off lecture can be inspiring, interesting, informational, but it's not truly transformational.”
Name: Dr. Christina Shenvi, MD, Ph.D., MBA
What she does: Dr. Shenvi is a practicing emergency physician, educator, keynote speaker, and leader. She created Time for Your Life in hopes of helping busy professionals reduce their stress levels and feel more fulfilled by better managing their time.
Company: Time for Your Life
Words of wisdom: “How you manage your time is really about how you manage your own mind.”
Connect: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
Top takeaways from this episode
[02:03] A nonrenewable resource: Unlike money, which can be earned, spent, and reacquired, you can never get your time back. This is why Dr. Shenvi emphasizes the importance of managing your time for optimal fulfillment.
[04:39] Time and effort: Dr. Shenvi compares making life changes to making bread. “You really need the time, the energy, the effort — yourself, or with a coach, or within a structure — to work that yeast into the dough.”
[15:35] Your true self: One of the key elements to mastering time management is looking inward and evaluating your priorities and values. Understanding what is deeply important to you can help you evaluate how you spend your time and figure out ways to prioritize those important things that fill you up.
[21:04] Life’s what you make it: As with most things in life, time will not just be handed to you. Dr. Shenvi emphasizes the importance of making and prioritizing time for the things you love.
[23:00] Psychology literature: When she first became interested in the topic of time management, Dr. Shenvi did a deep dive into psychology literature, such as Cal Newport’s Deep Work and A World Without Email, as well as the book The Four Disciplines of Execution.
[36:42] Additional reading: Dr. Shenvi recommends Laura Vanderkam’s Tranquility by Tuesday, which lays out 9 tips for leading a less stressful lifestyle, while host Shane suggests listeners read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Ever feel disorganized with your finances? Or confused about the right strategy with your student loans? Do you wonder about retirement or how to determine if you have the right amount or type of insurance? The Prosperous Doc Podcast is sponsored by Spaugh Dameron Tenny, one of the nation's premier financial planning groups for physicians and dentists. Their website is a host of information available to you for free, including information and guides for residents and fellows.
Check out all their financial resources to learn more.
Disclaimer: Prosperous Doc podcast by Spaugh Dameron Tenny highlights real-life stories from doctors, dentists, and those whose work can help them to encourage and inspire listeners through discussions of professional successes and failures in addition to personal stories and financial wellness advice. Spaugh Dameron Tenny is a comprehensive financial planning firm serving doctors and dentists throughout the U.S. To find out more about Spaugh Dameron Tenny, visit our website at http://www.sdtplanning.com . You can also connect with our host, Shane Tenny, CFP®, at shane@prosperousdoc.com.
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Top quotes from the episode:
[07:00]: “I have been realizing over the last number of years that those skills that got you here are not what will get you to the next step. In fact, those very skills may be the things that hold you back. So, while that brute hard work may have helped you be successful up to a certain point, those very skills could be your downfall. Now, a new set of skills are needed: being more strategic, being able to prioritize better, being able to take a bigger picture, being able to say no — that's one of the hardest words. ‘No’ is a full sentence, but it's one of the hardest sentences for many of us in medicine to say because we have a passion. We want to help people. We want to be the problem-solvers, the fixers, the people who are reliable.”
[14:24]: “A lot of managing our time [...] is really about understanding your identity, your values, what is getting in your way, not externally, but what are the internal things that are undoing you or getting in your own way?”
[21:07]: “You never have time. You make time. So, anything that you want to do, you will never have time for it. You have to make time, so that requires a little bit of planning.”