Don’t Let Summer Slip By: A Working Physician’s Guide to Actually Enjoying It

You spent the winter managing prior auth appeals, the spring reading OIG enforcement updates, and now it’s June. Here is how to make sure August doesn’t arrive before you noticed.

There is a particular cruelty in how summers disappear for physicians. You know they’re coming. You plan, loosely, to do something with them. Then you surface somewhere around Labor Day and realize you spent the entire season moving between parking lots and exam rooms, your only evidence of the season a slightly higher rate of sports injuries on the schedule and a waiting room that smelled intermittently of sunscreen.

This is not a productivity article. It is not about time-blocking your leisure or optimizing your recovery metrics. It is about something simpler: the fact that summer is genuinely different from the rest of the year, that it is finite, and that it tends to reward the people who treat it with a little intentionality — not a lot, just enough to actually feel it while it’s happening.

Why Summer Keeps Getting Away From Physicians

The honest answer is that medicine doesn’t have an off-season. July brings new residents. August brings back-to-school physicals. The EMR does not acknowledge the solstice. Prior authorizations are equally irritating in July as in February. The documentation burden that ate your evenings in March is still there in August, unchanged.

What makes summer different is not the work — it’s the light, the pace of the world outside the hospital, and the psychological permission that most people feel to live differently for a few months. Children are out of school. Evenings are long. The outdoors is accessible without four layers of clothing. Social gatherings happen spontaneously. There is a collective loosening that summer produces in people around you, and the question for working physicians is whether you participate in that loosening or observe it from behind a schedule that didn’t change.

The trap is passivity. Summer doesn’t require you to opt out of it — it just doesn’t fight to include you. You have to show up for it slightly more deliberately than other people do, because your structure is more rigid than theirs.

The First Move: Decide What Summer Means to You This Year

Not in general. This year, specifically.

Some summers are for travel. Some are for staying home and actually using the yard. Some are for a project — learning something, building something, finishing something that has been waiting since January. Some are for doing almost nothing in particular, which is harder than it sounds and more valuable than it gets credit for.

The error is deferring this question until you’re already in August. By August, the question answers itself: whatever didn’t happen didn’t happen, and there’s always next year. The question is most useful in late May or early June, when there’s still time to act on the answer.

One useful frame: what would you be disappointed not to have done by Labor Day? Not obligated to do, not scheduled to do — disappointed not to have done. That’s a different question than “what should I do this summer,” and it tends to produce more honest answers.

The Calendar Is Not Going to Protect You. You Have to Protect the Calendar.

The practical reality of physician scheduling is that time off does not protect itself. Vacation days exist on paper. Whether they translate into actual recovery depends on whether you defend them from the administrative erosion that will otherwise occupy them.

A few things that work:

Book the time before you know what you’ll do with it. The decision to take time off is separable from the decision about what to do with it. Request the days first. Figure out the plan second. Most physicians do it in the wrong order — they wait until they have a concrete plan, at which point the schedule has filled and the window has closed.

Create at least one thing you’re genuinely looking forward to. Not obligated to attend, not a commitment that will produce stress in the week before it — something you would choose freely. A hiking trip you’ve wanted to do. A long weekend to a city you haven’t visited. A week at a lake with no agenda. The specificity matters. “I’ll relax this summer” is not a plan. “We’re going to the coast the third week of July” is a plan that exists in the calendar and generates something to anticipate.

Protect evenings with the same energy you protect procedure time. Evening erosion is where summer disappears most quietly. Not on-call nights, not emergencies — the ordinary slide into inbox management that begins at 7 p.m. and ends at 10 without producing anything worth the tradeoff. The summer evening is a finite resource. A long walk, dinner outside, an hour reading something with no CME value — these are not luxuries if you’ve decided that summer matters.

The Small Things Are Not Small

Summer has a texture that doesn’t require travel to access. It’s available in much smaller units than a vacation week, and for physicians working full clinical schedules, those smaller units are often the realistic currency.

The morning before rounds when the air is still cool and the neighborhood is quiet. The farmers market on Saturday that you’ve driven past for three years. The swim at the end of the day that takes twenty minutes and costs nothing. The backyard dinner that doesn’t require a reservation. The bike ride with your kids on a Tuesday evening because the light is good until 8:30 and you don’t have to be anywhere.

None of these require a scheduling intervention. They require a decision to stop doing the other thing — the inbox, the outstanding charts, the CME module you keep pushing to the weekend — and do this instead. That decision is harder than it sounds, because medicine has an extraordinary talent for generating things that feel urgent but are not actually time-sensitive in the way that a July evening is time-sensitive.

The evening is not coming back. The inbox will still be there tomorrow.

On Being Present When You’re Technically Off

There is a version of time off that physicians know well: physically absent from the hospital, mentally still there. Vacation days spent reviewing emails on a phone, half-present at the beach while monitoring whether anything has happened to any of the patients you transferred coverage for, unable to fully release the background process that runs continuously during the week.

This is not a moral failure. It is a conditioned response to a profession that actively selects for people who are highly conscientious about not missing things. The difficulty of being off is proportional to how seriously you take being on.

But it is worth naming, because the goal of summer is not the accumulation of time off — it is the experience of restoration, which is a different thing and requires a different input. Restoration requires psychological detachment, not just physical relocation. Research on physician burnout consistently finds that the mechanism of recovery is not rest per se but the capacity to mentally disengage from work during non-work time.

A few things that support this:

Establish a clean handoff. The anxiety that runs in the background during time off is often about specific patients or specific pending items. A thorough coverage handoff, clearly documented, reduces the background load more than any mindfulness practice. Know that the things you’re worried about are in competent hands, and you will find it considerably easier to actually be at the beach.

Build a re-entry buffer. Don’t schedule your first day back at full clinical load. The transition day — even half a day — serves a function. It lets you process what accumulated, reduces the anticipatory anxiety about return, and makes it easier to genuinely disconnect in the days before.

Leave the pager behind sometimes. Not always possible. Sometimes entirely impossible given your role and coverage structure. But when it is possible — when coverage is genuinely arranged and your patients are genuinely covered — leave the device in the car. The half-vacation is sometimes worse than no vacation, because it creates the experience of being off while maintaining all the psychological triggers of being on.

The Specific Pleasures of a Medical Summer

There are things about a working physician’s summer that are genuinely good, that don’t get enough acknowledgment.

The cases in summer are often different — more acute injuries, more outdoor exposures, more of the seasonal presentations that remind you why medicine is interesting. The acuity of summer emergency medicine, the sports medicine of summer camp physicals, the honest satisfaction of treating a child’s laceration from a bicycle fall on a warm afternoon and sending them back outside: these are not the parts of medicine that burn people out.

The colleagues are different in summer too. July brings new trainees who are genuinely enthusiastic, who ask questions you’ve stopped noticing, who remind you why the answers matter. Teaching in July, if you do it, is often better than teaching in February — there’s more energy in the building, more willingness to slow down and explain.

And there is something to be said for the rhythm of the long summer evening after a day of clinical work. The transition from the controlled environment of the hospital or clinic to a warm evening outside is sharper in summer than at any other time of year. The contrast is itself a form of relief.

One Permission Slip

You are allowed to have a summer.

You are allowed to be a physician with a demanding schedule who also sits in the sun on a Wednesday afternoon and feels nothing about it except that it’s nice. You are allowed to not chart during a vacation week. You are allowed to miss a conference that you probably would have attended but don’t actually need to attend. You are allowed to prioritize an evening with your family over a task that can wait until morning.

Medicine will ask everything of you if you give it everything. It has never been shy about that. The question is not whether the demands are real — they are — but whether you reserve enough of yourself, specifically in this particular season when the light is long and the world is warm, to feel like someone who lives a life and not just works one.

Summer is short. It is the same length every year, and it is short every year. It rewards people who notice it while it’s happening.

Notice it.