Balanced Progress

Last month was indeed a time of balanced progress, as I hoped for:

-The direct primary care conference in Kansas City was even more inspiring and future-shaping than hoped for, and I made some great professional contacts I hope to utilize in the future. 

-Brandon Alleman and I have almost finished writing the business plan for a resident-led direct primary care clinic focused on the uninsured working poor of Wichita. 

-I have an interview scheduled for one month from now at a hospital I am interested in working at in western North Carolina. I hope to get a couple more interviews set up over the next few months.

-The central line working group and noon conference committees I'm a part of have made some great progress in the last couple of weeks. 

-Although I sustained a minor shoulder injury at the beginning of the month, I am back to working out twice a week as well as doing weekly yoga, ultimate frisbee, and sprinting sessions. Mindy and I are also trying to walk more in the evenings, although that hasn't happened as much yet as we would like.

-I am gaining a lot of wisdom about how to interact with people through reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I couldn't recommend it more highly. 

-Mindy and I made some good headway on wedding planning, engagement pictures, financial planning, and general relationship-building. Photos will, of course, be available on Facebook soon.

This month, I am back on OB-- my second to last month on that service. I feel that my major goal should be to learn, teach, communicate, connect, work hard, and excel in all things OB. Hopefully the areas of my life listed are on autopilot enough that I won't regress in those areas. The concrete goal I have is to make several "cheat sheets" about various topics in Obstetrics, to both clarify things in my own mind and to better teach the interns currently on the service. Though it's not exactly opening up a new area of my life, focusing on OB is the most important thing I can do this month, besides focusing on my relationships with God and Mindy. As my final year of residency gathers steam, I feel an increased pressure to extract as much intellectual and relational marrow out of this time as possible.

Are you setting concrete daily, weekly, or monthly goals? You should be!