How to Work Smarter, Not Harder

This week’s post may prove to be an interesting one. For my readers, I consider this post slightly off the beaten path. Why? Because I am less focused on a single topic and instead choose to share a publication plan I have concocted. As a full-time clinical physician juggling family and a growing side hustle, time can be a precious commodity. As such, my ability to increase the frequency of posts, at least for now, remains challenging. Further, I continue to have larger and larger aspirations for what this website can achieve.  

How can I avoid compromising my priorities while continuing to grow the website and provide helpful multimedia content? This week, I will share a plan for the site that will take me through the greater portion of 2024 (and beyond) and concurrently create a series of educational and entertaining content. Here is how to work smarter, not harder. 

What Life is Like as a Physician Blogger

I think it is important to describe life as a physician blogger. When I started The Motivated M.D., I had no idea it would grow to its current size. This year, I have been floored by the traffic our site continues to experience. At the publishing of this post, we already have well over 100,000 page views. Though this has already exceeded my wildest expectations for 2024, my ‘reach’ target is to hit half a million views this year. Still, anything beyond what I have already achieved is icing on the cake. 

However, this traffic did not come overnight. Since 2021, I have been writing and editing all my content for this site weekly. If you have not read My Story, I encourage you to do so. It provides more detail than I will get into for this post. However, to summarize, I started writing about personal finance as an outlet during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

I was still a fellow in pulmonary and critical care and needed something to help prevent burnout. So, in the late hours of the night and on weekends, I would write about any and all things that interested me. Overwhelmingly, this culminated in a deep dive into my own personal finances and how I chose to navigate the challenges and opportunities that physicians faced in their early careers. At that time, the website was just a pipedream, and my nights were primarily full of restorative sleep as my wife and I had not yet started a family.

Fast-forward to the present day. We happily have grown into a family of four and may continue to grow. I am now a full-time academic pulmonary and critical care physician, and my wife practices emergency medicine at the same healthcare system. Our weeks are riddled with alternating shifts, childhood activities, and a shared calendar that is more complex than the human genome.  

Because of this, I largely create content when the rest of my house is fast asleep. I continue to appreciate our site’s growth, brand recognition, and community interaction. I have no intentions of slowing down, but being a one-man show… my time has limitations. 

How the Website Generates Revenue

Aside from creating weekly content, I also must squeeze in business meetings, form affiliate partnerships, and generate sponsorships for the site. These interactions help generate revenue for the website and ‘keep the lights on,’ so to speak. This allows me to achieve two personally important things.  

First, it allows me to prioritize advertisements on the site that directly support our mission and apply to my readership. Second, our site can avoid intrusive advertisements like Google Ads, Ezoic, or Mediavine. Though these generate more revenue per click, they also save your personal information and are somewhat intrusive, in my opinion. I prefer to keep the website looking clean and running smoothly.  

Another important part of our mission at The Motivated MD is to provide services to physicians that I have personally vetted. Reputable insurance agents, loan refinancing, real estate investments, you name it; we are working to create a list of companies and/or individuals with whom we have directly interacted and feel confident that you will benefit by recommending them. 

Though all these avenues provide revenue to the site, the most important are the content and you. None of this would be possible without the incredible physician finance and personal finance community that keeps coming back to check in, read, and comment on the site. So, before I move on, let me take the time to say thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Sincerely.  

(Not) Passive Income

As I am sure you have already deduced, blogging is not necessarily as ‘passive’ as my former self initially believed. It is very much ‘active’ income generation. Still, I remain passionate about what we produce here, and the income generation is secondary.  

However, it requires time and dedication week in and week out. Because of this, like so many others in the personal finance niche, I seek ways to ‘kill two birds with one stone,’ so to speak. How can I continue to create helpful and entertaining content while simultaneously making something that may be an alternative to blog posts? Given the infinite scalability of online blogging, is there another avenue worth investigating? 

How to Work Smarter, Not Harder

This brings me full circle to the title of this post. As a busy clinician, a father, and a husband, how can I still generate excellent content for you all and create another alternative medium for helpful resources? I have decided to try something new, well, new for me at least. 

I have always wanted to create a book or e-book for the site. However, this process is arduous and time-consuming. In my current situation, I cannot break away from my weekly post cadence to write a book. I am juggling too many things already. 

Instead, I decided to use the website to write one. What better way to create an exhaustive resource on physician personal finance than to dole it out weekly? Readers benefit by being able to consume it in small, digestible bites. I benefit by being able to release my work in stages. Lastly, future individuals potentially benefit from its completion as it allows me to entirely transition it into another resource.

How Will This Work?

In my mind, the process goes something like this: Starting with my next post, roughly every week (variability based on my work schedule, sponsored post scheduled, and guest post features), I will work to publish what will be the equivalent of a ‘chapter.’ It should be noted that I use the term ‘chapter’ loosely.  

My goal is to use weekly posts systematically to tackle broad topics applicable to most physicians, trainees, and other healthcare professionals. These will still (hopefully) be a standard post length (i.e., 1800-3000 words); however, later, they could be updated or improved upon. I have created the following outline as a proposal for how I will order these posts, somewhat akin to a future table of contents:

• Introduction and Disclaimer
• Chapter 1: The Doctor’s Dilemma
• Chapter 2: Set Realistic Goals
• Chapter 3: Building a Budget
• Chapter 4: Write a Financial Plan
• Chapter 5: Creating an Emergency Fund
• Chapter 6: Guard Against Financial Disaster
• Chapter 7: Addressing Your Student Loans
• Chapter 8: Automate Your Savings
• Chapter 9: Be the Market (Investment Strategies)
• Chapter 10: Rent v. Buy
• Chapter 11: Let Your Lifestyle Creep Slowly
• Chapter 12: Offspring and Educational Savings
• Chapter 12: Estate Planning and a Living Will
• Chapter 13: Time as a Resource
• Chapter 14: Thoughts On The FIRE Movement
• Chapter 15: Hiring Help
• Conclusion

Currently, what you see above is very much a rough draft. Much of what will follow, from titles to content is subject to change, but as I continue to brainstorm this project, this is a structure that I feel tackles many important aspects of physician finance, but is in no way completely comprehensive. I think the topics selected are all necessary without descending into the weeds too much. 

I will do my best to incorporate additional internal and external resources as they apply to each topic. I am not the first nor the last to tackle a book or e-book, and so many who have come before me in this niche have created impactful reads. Examples include The White Coat Investor, The Physician Philosopher’s Guide to Personal Finance, and, more recently, Medicine Money Matters by The Prudent Plastic Surgeon.  

Future e-Book

Following the completion of this potentially 15 to 18 week adventure, I will not only have the ‘meat’ of a potential e-book, but I will also have the opportunity to combine that series of posts (alongside some edits and updates) into a long-form resource, an email campaign for subscribers, or an actual book, who knows? This will create another modality where readers can interact with our content, and I will have another resource to offer newcomers.  

Who knows if this will become more than just coordinated content, but my hopes remain high. Optimistically, I would love for you to come along, provide feedback and comments, and hopefully learn something. This is ideally the best way for me to work smarter, not harder. I cannot write a book adjacent to my weekly publication cadence while still managing all my other responsibilities. As such, I hope you will check it out and enjoy! 

Maybe this will prove to be my Sistine Chapel? Maybe not… If anything, it will be exciting to create a more complete resource for anyone who visits the website as part of their financial educational journey. What better way to say thank you?!

Take Home Points

I’ll say one last time: thank you all for visiting the site and helping it achieve steady growth thus far. I hope that by proceeding with this content series, I will potentially garner more traffic from the personal finance community while simultaneously creating something genuinely helpful and practical. I look forward to this adventure and I hope you will come along. Let me know what you think of this in the comments below and as always…

Stay motivated!

The Motivated M.D.

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Standard Disclaimer: None of the information on this website is meant as individualized financial or medical advice.  These posts may contain affiliate links.