Start Here

The 60-second version

Read the welcome post. It explains what Life After Call is, who it’s for, and what I’m doing here.

If you’ve got ten minutes

Read the welcome post, then pick one pillar that matches the part of your life that’s bugging you most right now.

  • The Efficient Home if your kitchen, calendar, or household is the chaos.
  • Career and Wealth (non-clinical) is for the rental, the side venture, or anything to do with physician money.
  • Parenting and Family covers kids, school, and the family logistics nobody else is going to handle for you.
  • Elevated Leisure if you keep skipping vacations because the planning feels like another job.
  • AI Technical Insight is the under-the-hood layer for anyone who wants to understand how this stuff actually works.

New to AI?

You’re not behind. You’re busy. That’s the most common worry I hear from colleagues, and it’s almost never true in practice.

Three pieces of advice before you read anything else:

  1. Pick one tool and stick with it for two weeks. Don’t shop. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are all fine starting points, and all three have free tiers. If you already live in Google’s apps (Gmail, Docs, Sheets), Gemini may be the best fit for you. The cost is low and the in-place benefits inside your existing workflow are significant. A full post on that is coming.
  2. Pick one task that’s not clinical and not life-or-death. A meal plan, a trip outline, a draft of an annoying email. That’s your test case.
  3. Write more in the prompt than feels natural. Prompts drive almost everything. Your AI output will only ever be as good as the prompt you wrote to get it. A four-sentence prompt beats a four-word prompt almost every time. A full post dedicated just to writing better prompts is on the way, follow along.

Once you’ve picked the tool and the task, the rest of the learning curve is mostly repetition.

The tools I personally use

There are four I open most weeks.

  • Claude for longer writing and document work
  • ChatGPT for quick lookups, brainstorming, and image generation
  • Gemini for help inside Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail
  • NotebookLM for asking questions of a stack of PDFs or articles

You do not need all four. Most physicians I know do fine with one.

A few of the questions I keep getting

Each of these is going to get its own post eventually. Short versions in the meantime.

“Where do I even start?” Pick an annoying non-clinical task this week and hand it to one tool. The goal isn’t to learn AI. It’s to finish that one task faster than you usually would, and notice how it felt.

“Is it safe?” For non-clinical, non-PHI tasks, the major consumer tools are fine for most people. Read the data settings once, turn off training on your own data if you want, and you’re set. Patient information never goes into a consumer AI tool. Period.

“I tried it once and it was bad.” Almost always one of three things: the prompt was too short, the model was an older or free tier when a better one would have done the job, or the task was a bad fit for AI (anything where you need to be sure of a fact and there’s no source for the tool to check). The fix is usually a better prompt, not a different tool.

“Will it make me lazy or dumb?” Depends on how you use it. People who hand off their thinking get duller over time. People who hand off the typing and spend the saved minutes thinking harder don’t. The trick is to be in the second group.

“Am I behind?” No. Most of the colleagues who sound confident in conversation are using maybe two features of one tool. You can catch up to the useful part in a weekend.

How to follow

Whichever you already check.

Strictly non-clinical. Nothing on this site is medical advice. I do not post about patient care.

Strictly non-clinical. Nothing on this site is medical advice. I do not post about patient care.