It’s not uncommon for hospitals to provide clinicians with scorecards. While they may seem like a judgment of your quality of work, scorecards rarely provide data that will lead to flourishing in your career. But what if you made your own scorecard, filled with things that were important to you and fully within your control? If you nailed one of those each day at work, what would your experience be like?
In this episode, we explore what happened when Dr. Erin Broderick, a participant in the Unburnable Course, stopped using the hospital’s scorecard as her main definition of success and created a more personal one instead. Erin talks about how she took a new approach to patient satisfaction surveys, one that has eliminated nearly all the stress and distress associated with them.
Finally, we look at how intentional practices during and after a shift made Erin’s work feel joyful and sustainable.
Mentioned in this episode
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We Discuss:
Redefining Success with a Personal Scorecard
When Dr. Erin Broderick decided to stop organizing her sense of success around the hospital’s metrics, everything about her shifts began to change.
The standard measures the hospital administration cared about were all there—patients per hour, RVUs, sepsis order utilization, scan ordering, and other tracked behaviors—but none of them reflected what actually made a shift feel meaningful. Rather than trying to force fulfillment from numbers that did not resonate, she built her own scorecard around her personal values.
That personal scorecard came from identifying what mattered most to her: adventure, learning, kindness, order, and gratitude. From those values, she created a brief set of questions to revisit during a shift. Did I teach someone something? Did I show gratitude or give a shout-out? And was I a good leader? That framework gave her a way to measure a shift in terms of intention and contribution, rather than productivity.
Teaching, Gratitude, and Leadership
What makes Erin’s scorecard so practical is that it does not depend on having a calm shift or ideal circumstances. Teaching can happen in small moments, such as explaining an EKG to a tech or showing a patient where a fracture appears on an X-ray. These are not huge gestures, but they create meaning in the middle of a busy day and reinforce the idea that every shift holds opportunities to contribute beyond throughput.
The same is true with gratitude and leadership. Gratitude becomes something active rather than abstract, whether that means thanking a colleague in the moment, texting afterward, or sending formal recognition. Leadership is defined less by authority and more by presence: being approachable, communicating clearly, staying kind, and making sound decisions when things get tense.
Building a Post-Shift Routine That Closes the Day
Before the Unburnable course, Erin had never really considered the need for a deliberate post-shift routine. Once the charting was done, the shift was technically over. But mentally and emotionally, it often was not. Difficult cases, unfinished thoughts, and lingering stress had a way of following her home.
After the course, her personal scorecard became one of the tools she uses to close out the day. The scorecard itself is simple: did I teach someone something, show gratitude, and be a good leader? What changed is that she now revisits those questions after a shift—sometimes on the drive home, sometimes in the shower, and sometimes the next morning—so the shift does not keep running in the background.
That reflection is less about grading herself and more about creating closure. It gives her a way to process the day, reduce rumination, and create a cleaner boundary between work and home.
Closing Open Loops
Open loops have a way of following us home unless we give them somewhere to go. Keeping a Post-it note nearby during the shift creates a simple place to capture what needs attention later—a patient to follow up on, a topic to read more about, a person to thank, or a task to close out. Writing those things down creates reassurance that nothing is being lost and that the mind does not need to keep replaying them.
A compliment card serves a different but equally important purpose. It becomes a place to collect encouraging things people say, both at work and outside of it, creating a small reserve of perspective to return to on hard days.
Letting Go of Metrics That Don’t Serve You
Being selective about which feedback deserves attention has become an important part of making work feel more sustainable. Erin still reviews the hospital scorecard each month and notes anything that truly seems worth addressing, especially if she is an outlier. But she has stopped giving energy to patient satisfaction emails that do not offer useful or actionable insight. That choice is not avoidance for its own sake. It is discernment.
Some feedback is worth reviewing, especially when it points to a real pattern or a clear opportunity to improve. But not every available metric deserves equal emotional weight. Much of it is just noise. Comments about waiting room conditions or food options can get tangled up with judgments about clinical care, even when they have little to do with the physician’s actual work. The shift is learning to separate feedback that helps us grow from feedback that simply drains us.
Gamifying the Shift and Scheduling Recovery
Recovery works better when it is planned. One of the most practical changes after the Unburnable Course was scheduling breaks during the shift. Before, breaks felt unrealistic or not fully allowed. Now, two break times go on the same Post-it note used throughout the day, making recovery intentional rather than optional.
Those breaks are not elaborate. Sometimes they are about basic needs like eating, using the bathroom, or stepping outside into the sunlight. Sometimes, they are a chance to connect with a colleague and briefly reset. The transition has been to move away from treating endurance as the highest virtue and recognizing that a few minutes of recovery can make the rest of the shift more focused, effective, and humane.
Extending Intentionality Beyond the Hospital
Small morning practices can shape the entire day. The ideas from Unburnable extended well beyond the hospital, changing the structure of life outside of work, too. Mornings now include meditation and a short walk to the mailbox, with attention to what can be seen, heard, and smelled. These simple rituals make the rest of the day feel more grounded.
That same intentionality shows up in the use of “three bricks,” which identifies the three things that matter most for the day and sets alarms to support them. The structure reduces decision fatigue and helps keep priorities clear. Underneath it all is a new view of self-care—not something saved for collapse, but something built into ordinary life.
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