There’s a particular kind of moment that used to happen in my house more than I’d like to admit.
My husband and one of my daughters would be talking about something — a situation at school, a friend, something that happened that day — and I would realize mid-conversation that I had absolutely no idea what they were referring to.
When I’d ask, they’d look at me with that combination of patience and mild exasperation that families develop for this exact situation.
“We already told you!”
Or: “You were there when we talked about it.”
And the thing is — I probably was there. Physically present, in the same room, maybe even nodding. But my mind was somewhere else entirely. Still at the office. Still running through a patient I’d seen. Still carrying something I hadn’t finished.
Still charting, in a way, even when the laptop was closed.
This is what I mean when I say that open charts don’t just cost you time.
They cost you presence.
And presence is harder to measure than time, which is part of why it’s easy to miss until someone points out that you were there for a conversation you have no memory of.
Time is visible. You can count the hours you spent finishing notes after dinner. You can track how often you opened your laptop after the kids went to bed.
But presence is invisible. Nobody keeps a log of how many dinners you were physically at but mentally absent from. Nobody counts the bedtime conversations that happened while you were still somewhere else in your head.
And yet that’s often where the real cost lives.
I used to think the goal was to finish my charts faster so I’d have more time at home.
But over time I realized that wasn’t quite the right frame.
Because even when I was home on time, if I was still carrying the weight of the day — the unfinished note, the patient I was second-guessing, the inbox I hadn’t cleared — I wasn’t really home.
The shift that actually changed things wasn’t about speed.
It was about learning to close the day the way I close a chart.
Completely. Intentionally. So it wasn’t still open in the back of my mind when my daughter was trying to tell me something important.
That shift — choosing to close the chart now rather than later — is something I wrote about recently.
That’s the work I do with physician moms.
Not helping them work faster or manage their time better in the traditional sense. But helping them understand how their thinking during the workday shapes everything that comes after — including whether they can actually be present when they walk through the door.
If you’re a physician mom who finds herself in rooms she has no memory of being in, you’re not failing at motherhood or medicine.
You’re carrying too much.
And that’s something that can change.
I help physician moms stop charting at night and get their evenings back. If this resonates, you can download my free guide at this link“
