The Guilt of Leaving on Time

My kids have never once asked me how many patients I saw that day.

They have asked when I’m coming home. They’ve asked what’s for dinner, whether I can drive them to their friend’s house, whether I saw any cute puppies, what costume they should wear for Halloween, and if anything gross happened at work.

But they have never asked whether I saw 12 appointments or 22. They have never been impressed that I squeezed in one more sick patient, stayed an extra hour finishing records, or answered three more messages before walking out the door.

And yet, for a long time, leaving a veterinary hospital on time could somehow feel like I was doing something wrong.

When did leaving become something to feel guilty about?

Veterinary medicine has a complicated relationship with staying late.

There are absolutely days when it is unavoidable. The emergency walks in at 4:55 p.m. The euthanasia needs more time than the schedule allows, because of course. A patient takes a turn. A client needs you. Medicine does not care that your shift technically ended seven minutes ago.

Those days are part of the job, and I think most of us understood that when we signed up for this career.

But plenty of late nights have nothing to do with an emergency.

Sometimes you are still there because you finally have time to finish the records from the patients you saw six hours ago. You have callbacks to make, lab results to review, prescriptions to approve, estimates to finish, messages to answer, and a pile of tiny tasks that accumulated while you were busy doing the actual medicine.

And somewhere along the way, staying became associated with caring.

The person who stayed until 8 at night was dedicated. The veterinarian who squeezed in another appointment was a team player. The practice owner who answered messages from the couch was committed to the business. 

So when you finished your work on time and walked out right at close, it felt weird. Especially when everyone else was still there. And while dedication, commitment, and being a reliable team player are commendable traits, they should not be defined by how late someone stays at work. 

The guilt follows you in both directions

I have been a veterinarian, an associate, a practice owner, a mom, a wife, and some combination of all of those things at the same time. One of the strangest parts of juggling those roles is that there can be guilt waiting for you on either side of the hospital door.

Stay late, and you think about home.

Leave on time or (gasp) early, and you think about work.

You can be sitting at dinner wondering whether you should have answered one more client message. You can be at the hospital finishing a record while wondering whether you are going to make it home before bedtime.

There is always one more thing you could do.

Could. That word matters.

Because veterinary medicine will happily take every additional minute we offer it. There will always be another record, another email, another callback, another task, another appointment.

For years, we have talked about this as a personal time-management problem. Get faster. Be more efficient. Organize your day better. Find the right planner. Block your schedule. Learn to say no.

And that advice is useful. But eventually I started looking at the systems around us, too.

Why were so many highly trained people regularly unable to finish their work during the hours they were scheduled to work?

My kids don’t care about my production

There is something incredibly grounding about coming home to children who are completely unimpressed by your professional accomplishments.

Your hospital could have had its biggest production day of the year and somebody at home still needs help finding a missing shoe. You could have diagnosed an unusual disease, managed a complicated case, helped a family through an incredibly difficult decision, and successfully navigated a completely overbooked schedule.

And your kid would still really like to know whether you remembered the thing they asked you to get at Target.

And I actually love that.

Because our families have a way of reminding us that our value cannot be measured entirely by how much work we can produce.

The veterinary profession talks a lot about efficiency. How can we save five minutes here? How can we streamline this workflow? How can technology help us see more patients?

Those are worthwhile questions. There are days when fitting in another appointment means helping a sick pet who otherwise couldn’t be seen. There are practices struggling with access to care, staffing shortages, and margins where greater efficiency can make a meaningful difference.

But I think we have gotten so used to translating every minute saved into more capacity that we sometimes forget there is another option.

We can give the time back to the person who saved it.

If technology gives a veterinarian 30 minutes back in their day, maybe the highest-value use of those 30 minutes isn’t another appointment.

Maybe they will go home.

Maybe a technician gets to pick up her kid instead of texting that she’s running late again. 

Maybe the practice manager eats dinner with her family. 

Maybe the doctor who has had back-to-back appointments since 8 a.m. gets 30 minutes when nobody needs anything from her.

That has value, too.

In fact, after spending most of my career practicing medicine, owning hospitals, raising kids, and now helping build technology for veterinary teams, I think we need to get much more comfortable saying that out loud.

Sometimes the best thing efficiency can earn us is a night off.

That is one of the reasons why I care so much about veterinary technology now.

I want technology that helps practices run better. Of course I care about charge capture, efficiency, growth, and helping more patients. I own a veterinary hospital. Those things matter to me. But I also care deeply about what happens to the minutes we save.

I also want it to help someone leave on time.

Because those goals can coexist.

That’s what we are building at Shepherd. A medical record completed during the appointment is one less chart waiting at the end of the day. Automatic charge capture is one less thing someone has to remember. Discharge instructions created from the medical record eliminate duplicative work. Reminders, tasks, and client communication built into the workflow mean fewer open loops following someone into the parking lot.

None of those things sounds particularly emotional on a software feature list.

But they feel a lot more emotional when the result is a veterinarian walking through their front door well before bedtime.

Curious what that looks like on a regular Tuesday? Schedule a demo and we’ll walk through your most common appointment in Shepherd, from SOAP to discharge to payment. 

Maybe leaving on time should be normal

I would love for us to get to a point where leaving the veterinary hospital on time is completely unremarkable.

No guilt. No apology. No joking about taking a half day because you left at 5 instead of 7.

Just the very normal expectation that most days, the work we ask people to do can reasonably be completed during the hours we ask them to be there.

There will still be emergencies. There will still be terrible Tuesdays. There will still be days when the schedule implodes before lunch and everyone orders dinner to the hospital.

That is veterinary medicine.

But those days don’t need help from inefficient systems, duplicated work, unfinished records, lost messages, or technology that adds another thing for our brains to remember.

We already have enough hard days built into this profession.

And leaders have a role in making that normal. If someone finishes their work and leaves on time, we shouldn’t make a joke about their “half day” or immediately fill the space they created with something else. When efficiency works, sometimes the reward should simply be that the day ends when it was supposed to end.

My kids still won’t care

I have spent a lot of my career thinking about what makes a good veterinarian, a good practice owner, a good leader, and a good mom.

I am pretty sure none of those things can be determined by what time my car leaves the hospital parking lot.

There will be days when my patients need more of me. There will be days when my team needs more of me. And there are days when the people waiting for me at home deserve to get more of me, too.

My kids still aren’t going to ask how many surgeries I performed. They won’t ask whether I successfully untangled a tricky lab panel, managed an unexpected anesthetic complication, or calmed an anxious pet owner.

They are much more likely to ask one simple question:

“When are you coming home?” Or, even more poignantly: “Will I get to see you today?”

More and more, I think we should be building veterinary medicine so that most days, we can give them a pretty good answer.