Work Rhythms in a Pandemic

Exploration of work life integration, work rhythms, and life seasons, as well as designing interventions for career management strategies through reflection, rhythms, and recovery has evolved through ten years of faculty development and mentorship conversations. The ideas became so compelling that workshops developed for idea sharing with national specialty academies. Innovations of novel management strategies were implemented in a virtual primary care start-up. This case report explores how 10 years of reflection offered fertile ground for operationalizing seeds of ideas. Concurrent with these ideas, Health Systems Science (HSS) evolved as a third pillar of medical education in order to develop system leaders in healthcare because we first lead ourselves, then our patients, our teams, and a health system. Implementation of work rhythms facilitates “systems thinking”. Additionally, the discipline of product management, specifically User Experience (UX) research and design, is founded on rhythms of discovery, design, and delivery from a systems-oriented mindset. COVID-19 revealed the stark reality that physicians and other healthcare team members need rhythms in order to innovate and then iterate in our health systems, in technology, or in our own lives. We are human users of our own work and life so the application of systems thinking and UX to design a work-life rhythm has never been more important.