008: The 4-Hour Workweek for Doctors

Struggling to find time for building remote income while juggling a busy medical career? In this episode, Dr. Kristine breaks down a strategic, manageable approach to creating flexible, location-independent income streams in just four hours per week. Learn how to identify opportunities, evaluate them, build visibility, and handle logistics—all tailored for busy physicians.

In this episode:

• The myth about needing to start remote work and how to reframe it
• The four key categories where to spend those four hours: opportunity identification, evaluation, thought leadership, and logistics
• How to optimize your calendar and delegate tasks to free up time
• Practical tips for networking, assessing opportunities, and establishing your online presence
• The importance of focusing on high-leverage activities that directly move you toward financial independence
• Flexibility in structuring your four hours based on your lifestyle and commitments
• Why small, consistent efforts can replace your hospital income sustainably

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You're listening to Doctors Abroad, the podcast for doctors who want to build remote income and create location independence. I'm Dr. Christine Goins, founder of Nomadem D. I've exceeded my hospital income while working part-time and living abroad, and on this show, we break down how to make hospital income optional. Let's get started. Let's talk about time and what your weeks actually look like right now. Perhaps you're working full days, you're on call, you're finishing notes at night, or catching up over the weekend because the inbox is inboxing. You're in meetings, maybe you're teaching, mentoring, writing, publishing. And then there's everything outside of medicine. Perhaps you have kids and you're going to games, recitals, helping with homework, trying to be present. Or maybe you're the breadwinner and still carrying a lot of the responsibility at home. Perhaps you are single, which means every decision, every responsibility financially or personally falls on you. Whatever your situation is, you are a busy doctor. So when people start talking about building remote income or creating another revenue stream, it doesn't feel exciting. Instead, it feels like, when would I even have the time to do that? Because most physicians assume that building remote income requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, or a complete overhaul of your entire life, but that is not actually how this works. And more importantly, that's not how it works if you do it strategically. And so what I want to show you in this episode is how you can start building remote income in just four hours a week. I call this the four-hour remote work week for doctors because these are the only four hours that you need each week to start replacing your hospital income. Not overnight, but in a way that is consistent, sustainable, and actually fits your life. And I want to walk you through exactly what happens in those four hours because once you see it, it stops feeling overwhelming. So before we get into it, I do want to say the objective of these four hours is not to do more work. It's really about doing different work for a very small, focused amount of time. Work that actually will move your life forward in a new direction, in a direction of more freedom and flexibility. Because right now, most of your time is probably going toward maintaining your current income. But these four hours are about creating a different kind of income. Income that gives you the time, the financial, and the location, freedom, and flexibility you've never had. So there are really four categories that these hours fall into. And the first hour is opportunity identification, networking. This is where you are looking for aligned opportunities, not just aimlessly scrolling job boards, right? But actually having conversations. For instance, if you want independent contracts, you are reaching out to specific leads who have information about remote positions that you want. I also provide my clients who prefer to have remote employed positions with a list of aligned contacts for those positions in their specialty area. So part of their opportunity identification and networking hour would be sending emails to contacts on that list or sending messages to people, right, within your current network, letting them know what you're looking for in terms of your next position. So they can connect you with people that they know. Right. If you are starting your own telemedicine or consulting company, same thing. You're connecting with people at conferences, you're getting on calls and having coffee chats, connecting with a referral partner that can send you patients or clients. This is how most of these opportunities actually happen. And it doesn't have to take a lot of time. This could be 30 minutes sending two to three intentional messages. It could be a quick conversation during a lunch break, a follow-up email after meeting someone. And it's really not sheer volume, right? It's specificity. It's knowing who to speak to and where to look for aligned opportunities. Number two, so that second hour is opportunity evaluation. So once the opportunities start pouring in, this is where you spend time learning more about the opportunity, getting the details that you need to make a confident decision about a potential remote position or a referral partner, asking important questions, assessing fit. Is this the right position for me? Is this the right collaboration for me? Is this institution or company one that I really want to be connected to? Right. And it might look like meeting with the company to learn more, talking with the clinic director, exploring a contract with an institution in more detail, getting to know what it actually says. Are there any restrictive covenants? This is where you're not just saying yes to anything, right? Something that we were taught to do and were used to doing in training, and perhaps even the early days of attending life was say yes a lot into almost anything. Not anymore, and definitely not now. Now you are deciding like, does this company collaboration or contract align with how I want to work? Does this support the life that I'm building? So, number three, that third hour is thought leadership. It's where you get visible. This is the one area where I think people wonder, you know, do I really have to do this? I don't want to do marketing. I don't want anyone to see me. Um, believe me, I have been there too. But but it's really not about becoming an influencer, right? This is just about being visible for your expertise. So your ideal patients or clients or companies that you want to work with can easily find you. And you only need one outlet, right? That could be LinkedIn, Instagram, it could be Facebook, a podcast, a blog, Substack, it could be speaking one place. It needs to be one place where you consistently share how you think, what you know, and who you help. And you may already be consuming content on one of these platforms, but just start participating, right? And it doesn't even have to be daily. This could be one thoughtful post a week. That is enough to start. So your one hour could be this is this is the thoughtful post I have for this week. And then the fourth hour. This is logistics, setup and support. This is your back end. During this fourth hour, you would be doing things like establishing your professional LLC to start telemedicine or consulting work, getting malpractice or your liability coverage set up, setting up your basic systems, a website, a schedule for people to actually book calls with you, an EMR system. These are not tasks that you'd be doing every week forever. But in the beginning, this is part of the process. And it doesn't take as much time as people think, especially when you have the right support. And that's it. Those are the four buckets: identifying opportunities, evaluating opportunities, being visible and setting up your back end. Now, depending on where you are in your process, right? Some weeks you'll spend more time in one area than another. So some weeks might be all networking and opportunity identification because you're at a conference or an event that week. Other weeks might be focused more on evaluations. Other weeks you might be focusing more on visibility. It doesn't have to be perfectly balanced. It just has to be consistent. There's also flexibility in how you structure these four hours. So some of my clients prefer a two to four hour block on the weekend. Others prefer 30-minute increments throughout the week. Some will even break it down into, you know, 15-minute increments. And an example can be, you know, 30 minutes before or after work, Monday through Thursday, and then a couple of hours on the weekend. That would still leave you with full days where you're not working on this at all, right? You are resting, you're living, you're having fun, you're being present in your life. Now, if you are listening to this and thinking, Dr. Christine, I don't even have four hours, then we need to be really, really honest about something. There are likely areas in your life right now where your time is not being optimized. And this is no judgment, right? It's just a good time to get honest with your calendar. There are likely things on that calendar right now that don't actually move your life forward in a direction that you want to go. It could be meetings, it could be certain activities, committees that you've signed up for, things like that, right? And there also may be some tasks or activities that you're doing that just really don't need to be done by you. And changing that could look like delegating more at home, getting support from family members, or even in-home professionals. It could be using tools like AI or hiring a virtual assistant to streamline tasks. It could be reducing time spent on things that literally don't matter to you and also don't matter to your freedom. Because these four hours are some of the highest leverage hours in your week. These are the four hours that are going to give you the option to never have to walk into a hospital or clinic again if you don't want to, to never have to live in a specific country if you don't want to, without having to worry about your income. Also, and I have this warning because I was also a victim of this. Don't spend these four hours on low value activities, right? So these four hours are not for perfecting your website, choosing the perfect colors for the website, coming up with the perfect name for your website, right? Those are all the things that make us feel very productive, but they don't actually move our freedom forward, right? So they don't help you to get those independent contracts. They don't help you to build a telemedicine or consulting practice. What does focusing on the conversations, the connections, the clarity, being out there, telling people who you help and how you help them? And I'll tell you something else. Some of my clients don't even need the full four hours. Some of them actually just do it in three. But I say four because I believe it gives you breathing room and it makes this feel very doable because it is. So if you have been thinking, I really would love to, but I just do not have time. It's that you haven't been shown how little time this actually requires when it is done intentionally. Four hours. That's where this starts. And those four hours can completely change how you earn, how you work, and how and where you live. So if you want help structuring those four hours in a way that leads you to replacing your hospital income remotely, you can book a one-to-one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. Thanks for listening to Doctors Abroad. If this episode was helpful, share it with a colleague who's been thinking about building more freedom and flexibility in medicine. And if you're ready to make hospital income optional, book a one to one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. I'll see you in the next episode.