Welcome to Life After Call

I’m Alex. I’m a practicing anesthesiologist. I built this site because I needed it to exist, and when I looked around, nobody was writing it for people like us.

A quick story to start.

About a year ago I came home from a long call shift, opened the fridge, and realized the only thing in it was a half-empty bottle of fish sauce and three kinds of mustard. My kid had a school project due the next morning that I had completely forgotten existed. My rental property statement had been sitting unread in my inbox for six weeks. My wife had asked me, gently, twice, whether I’d booked anything for our trip in March.

I was good at my job. I was bad at the rest of my life.

That night I started doing what I’d been quietly avoiding. I sat down with an AI tool and asked it to help me, not with anything in the hospital, but with the boring parts of being a person. A meal plan. The school project. A first draft of an email to my property manager. A rough itinerary I could finish in the morning.

It was not perfect. Some of it was bad. Some of it was so good I felt a little embarrassed I hadn’t tried sooner.

That’s what this site is about.

What Life After Call is

Life After Call is one practicing physician (me) writing for other practicing physicians about how to use AI for the part of life that happens outside the hospital.

Five pillars. Everything I publish fits into one.

• The Efficient Home. Meal plans, household logistics, the chores you keep putting off.
• Career and Wealth, non-clinical. Real estate management, financial systems, side ventures. The parts of physician money nobody actually covered in residency.
• Parenting and Family. School schedules, kids’ projects, birthday parties on a post-call day.
• Elevated Leisure. Travel planning, hobbies, and what off time is supposed to be for.
• AI Technical Insight. Agents, prompts, and workflows explained for physicians who do not have time to learn another tool.

If a topic doesn’t fit one of those, I probably won’t write about it.

What Life After Call is not

I do not write about clinical work. Not patient care, not charting workarounds, not clinical decision support tools, not AI scribes, not anything touching the inside of the hospital.

That’s a deliberate, hard rule.

There are two reasons for it.

1. Professional and liability. Clinical AI is its own world, with its own regulators, its own validation requirements, and its own malpractice considerations. It deserves to be discussed by people who can do that properly. That’s not what I’m here for.
2. Brand focus. The hospital already takes a lot from physicians. Most of us get pretty good at our clinical work over time and pretty bad at everything else. This site is the other half. The part that gets short-changed.

So: nothing here is medical advice. I do not post about patient care. I will pivot, every single time, if a topic drifts that way.

Why I’m writing this

A few honest reasons.

One. I keep having the same conversations in the doctors’ lounge, on the call room couch, in the line at the coffee cart. “How are you using this?” “Is it actually worth it?” “I tried it once and it was bad.” I figured if I’m answering the same questions ten times in person, I should write them down once.

Two. A lot of physicians I respect have quietly told me they feel left behind by peers on AI, and they’re a little afraid to ask. They don’t want to be the person in the room who doesn’t know what an agent is, or who admits they’ve never actually used ChatGPT for anything useful. So they nod and Google it later, and that’s a tax on time we don’t have.

I want this site to be the place where there’s no stigma. You’re not behind. You’re busy. There’s a difference.

Three. Most AI content on the internet right now is written either for engineers, or for the kind of person who has time to test 14 productivity tools in a month. Neither describes the average physician I know. The advice doesn’t survive contact with a call schedule.

I’m writing the version I wish existed.

What you can expect from me

A few promises, so you know what you’re signing up for.

• I’ll try the tools so you don’t have to. I rotate through new AI tools regularly. Most are not worth your time. Some quietly are. I’ll tell you which ones, with examples.
• I’ll show, not tell. If I’m going to recommend a workflow, I’ll show you the actual prompt, the actual output, and the actual time it saved me. No “imagine the possibilities.”
• I’ll keep the bar high. If something only works for me because I’m an early adopter with a custom setup, I’ll say so. The default recommendation is “this works the first time, on a normal account, for a tired person.”
• I will not chase trends for traffic. If a new model drops and it doesn’t change anything practical for a physician’s life, I’m not going to write 800 words pretending it does.
• I will not run an affiliate hustle. If I mention a tool, it’s because I use it. I’ll disclose any exception clearly.

The tools I actually use

I want to be transparent up front about which tools I open most weeks. There’s no “best AI” answer. There’s the one that fits your habit.

Claude. This is where I do longer writing, anything that involves a real document, and most of my drafting work. The voice tends to be the most natural, and the long-context handling is the best of the bunch for things like reading a stack of articles or a long PDF.

ChatGPT. This is my quick-answer, brainstorming, and image-generation tab. When my kid needs a poster about the water cycle at 9pm, this is what I open. When I want to dump a half-baked idea and have it organized into a list, same.

Gemini. I use this almost entirely inside Google’s apps. Drafting a Gmail reply, summarizing a long thread, asking a question about a Google Doc I’m in the middle of, or pulling something out of a Sheet. The in-place help is the value.

NotebookLM. This one is underrated. When I have a stack of PDFs, articles, my own notes, or transcripts, I drop them into a notebook and ask questions. It cites where the answer came from, which I trust. It’s how I learn a new topic without reading every page.

That’s it. Four tools. You do not need all four. Most physicians I know do well with one or two. I’ll publish deep-dive posts on each over the next few weeks so you can decide which fits your workflow.

The questions I keep hearing

Some of the ones that come up most often, with short, honest answers. I’ll expand each into its own post.

“Where do I even start?”

Pick one annoying task in your week that has nothing to do with the hospital. Meal planning, trip planning, drafting a tough email, organizing a folder of statements. Hand that single task to one tool. Don’t try to learn AI. Try to finish that one task faster.

“Is it actually safe to put my information into these tools?”

Short answer: for non-clinical, non-PHI tasks (meal plans, household stuff, trip planning, personal email drafting), the major consumer tools are fine for most people. Read the data settings once, turn off training on your data if you want, and you’re set. Do not put patient information into a consumer AI tool. Period. That’s not what this site is about anyway.

“Will it make me dumber?”

Honest answer: it depends on how you use it. If you use it to skip thinking, sure. If you use it to skip typing while doing more thinking, no. The way I use AI looks more like having a fast, slightly over-eager intern than having a magic answer machine.

“I tried it once and it was bad. Why?”

Almost always one of three things. The prompt was too short. You used a free or older model when a better one would have done the job. Or the task was a bad fit for AI (anything where you needed to be sure of a fact and there was no source for it to check). The fix is usually a better prompt, not a better tool.

“Am I behind?”

No. You’re busy. There’s a difference.

If you’ve been quietly thinking you should “really sit down and learn this AI stuff,” you’re not alone, and you’re not late. Most of the colleagues who sound confident about AI in conversation are using maybe two features of one tool. You can catch up to the useful part in a weekend.

A short note on the name

“Life After Call” is on purpose.

Anesthesiologists know what “after call” feels like. So do my friends in surgery, EM, OB, hospital medicine, and every other call-heavy field. It’s the day you swore you’d use to catch up on everything, and instead you slept until 1pm and ate cereal for dinner.

I’m not trying to fix that day. That day is sacred.

I’m trying to fix the system around it, so that when you wake up at 1pm on a post-call day, your life isn’t quietly falling apart in the background.

That’s the whole project.

How to follow along

Pick whichever one of these you already check. Don’t add a new habit.

• LinkedIn (primary). Most of what I write goes here first. Follow on LinkedIn
• Newsletter. A short weekly piece with the workflow of the week. Get the newsletter
• Facebook. Follow the Page
• Instagram. Follow on Instagram

If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a post, or a workflow you’ve been trying to figure out, send it. The best posts on this site are going to come from real questions from real physicians.

Thanks for being here on day one.

Alex, MD

Practicing anesthesiologist · Founder of Life After Call

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