Bite-sized dental wisdom in under 2 minutes.

The last two weeks have been a mess.

We’ve been trying to hire a new nanny because our last nanny left to have her own baby, which honestly still feels rude.

After a few candidates that were clearly not it, we finally found someone who was… okay. She hit the bare minimum: has transportation, can change a diaper, and appears to know that children need supervision. So she was hired.

Then she got sick.

Which, to be fair, everyone in Colorado seems to be right now.

But instead of the usual, “Hey, I’m sick, let me see how I feel tomorrow,” she basically decided she was taking the whole week off to recover.

And the second that happened, I already knew where this was headed.

I’ve been down this road before. This is usually the part where someone quietly disappears, doesn’t come back, or makes you realize you need to start looking again.

Which is exactly what I did.

And yes, the whole thing feels weirdly similar to hiring in a dental office, which is annoying because I thought stepping away from practice ownership meant escaping at least some of this nonsense.

But the real point isn’t that finding a nanny is hard.

The point is what happens when something like this blows up your week.

Luckily, I’m not seeing patients right now, so I have more flexibility. But I still have plenty of work that only I can do: strategy, decisions, the kind of work that doesn’t happen unless I do it. Honestly, it feels a lot like owning a dental office. You’re the one who diagnoses, the one who produces, the technician. If you’re not there, a whole category of work just doesn’t get done.

And what I’ve realized again is that when life goes sideways, I cannot do the 50/50 thing.

I can’t half-watch the kids while trying to dictate an email on my phone.
I can’t play with them while mentally working through strategy.
I can’t feed someone lunch while I’m on Zoom pretending I’m fully present in either place.

I’ve tried all of it.

And every time, it ends the same way: I get overwhelmed, the kids get the worst version of me, and the work still isn’t very good.

So when shit hits the fan, I do the only thing that actually works.

I park the work.
I give the kids 100%.
And when they go to bed, that’s when I sit down, open up my laptop and get to work.

Is it ideal? No. But it works.

And I think that’s the lesson.

When life gets chaotic, the answer usually isn’t trying to multitask everything at once. It’s deciding what gets your undivided attention until you can switch.

Because when you split yourself in half, both things suffer.

-Dr. Alex

P.S. This is also why I care so much about systems. When life goes sideways, you need as few things as possible relying on your brainpower. Milo launches soon if you want help with that. Click below and I'll send you early access before everyone else + a bonus scorecard to see which systems you're missing.