Rich Doctor

The Handover

One considered letter, every Sunday morning.

Free, every Sunday. No spam; unsubscribe in one click.

AboutHow we workContact

Life

The rest of your life.

Medicine is what you do. This desk is about everything else: the hours that are yours, the people you love, the places you live, and the person you are when nobody is calling you doctor.

A brass name plate on a front door at dusk, the first name in focus and the title blurred.

Essay · Identity outside medicine

The name without the title

Medicine gives you a title before it gives you a career. On the slow work of remaining someone without it.

The Editors3 min read

The desk

Six ways of looking at a life

Sixteen subjects, gathered into six places so that each one has room to be written about properly.

  1. Time and energyThe hours that are yours, and the attention you bring to them.Time · Mental bandwidth · Hobbies
  2. RelationshipsLove, friendship and family, on a schedule that rarely cooperates.Dating · Marriage · Friendship · Family
  3. HealthLooking after the body and mind that do the work.Health · Fitness
  4. PlacesWhere doctors travel, live and put down roots.Travel · Living
  5. TasteWhat doctors read, wear, use and enjoy.Style · Culture · Technology
  6. IdentityWho you are when you are not being a doctor.Identity outside medicine · Unusual lives

From the desk

Essays, stories and guides about the life outside the hospital.

A dark dining room with a single lamp on, a work bag on a chair and a phone face down on the table.

Essay · Mental bandwidth

The last ten percent

On the attention left over when you get home, and why it shapes more of a life than the hours themselves.

The Editors3 min read

Two coffee cups on a kitchen table beside a phone propped up for a video call, early evening light.

In preparation · Marriage

Long distance during residency

Two cities, two rotas and one shared calendar. Couples on what kept them close, and what nearly did not.

In preparation · Marriage

When both of you are doctors

Two rotas, two sets of exams and one household. Couples on whose career goes first, and how they decided.

In preparation · Living

The town I did not choose

A rural posting began as something to survive. It became the place I measure other places against.

Collections

Read one idea, all the way down.

Each collection gathers pieces around a single idea, in an order chosen by an editor, with a rule for what gets in.

All collections

  • No. 01

    Off Rota

    What doctors do with the hours that belong to them.

    2 of 5 pieces published

  • No. 02

    The Week, Accounted For

    One hundred and sixty-eight hours, as doctors actually spend them.

    2 pieces in preparation

  • No. 03

    Uncommon Practice

    Doctors whose lives took a shape nobody planned for them.

    2 pieces in preparation

  • No. 04

    A Working Knowledge

    Short guides to things worth knowing well, written by doctors who do.

    3 pieces in preparation

  • No. 05

    Two Calendars

    Love, friendship and family when medicine shares the house.

    5 pieces in preparation

  • No. 06

    Postings

    Doctors on the places their training sent them.

    2 pieces in preparation

The Week, Accounted For

Your week has 168 hours.

The rota accounts for some of them. This collection asks real doctors to log the rest, hour by hour, for one ordinary week, and prints what they find exactly as kept. No ideal routines to copy, just an honest picture of where the time goes.

Read the collection Offer a week

An empty week: seven rows of twenty-four hours. Each piece in the collection fills one in.

Our standards

How we write about life

A life outside medicine is not a product to optimise. These rules apply to everything on this desk.

  1. No formulas

    We do not sell morning routines or ten steps to happiness. We report how real doctors live and think it through honestly.

  2. No gurus

    Pieces on dating and relationships draw on people’s experience and on evidence, never on tactics, scripts or stereotypes about men and women.

  3. No flex

    We never mistake expense for taste or status for a good life. A good weekend can cost nothing at all.

  4. No glorified exhaustion

    We do not celebrate overwork, and we do not publish stories that make burnout look like dedication.

  5. Real people, with consent

    Everyone in a story is real and appears with their consent. Anonymised or composite accounts are labelled as such.

The Handover

A richer life, every Sunday.

One considered letter a week: the best of the Life desk alongside career, money and technology, written for doctors with somewhere else to be.

Free, every Sunday. No spam; unsubscribe in one click.