Pajama Time Is Stealing Our Evenings — How Can We Get It Back?

Ask almost any clinician today about their workday, and you’ll hear a familiar phrase whispered with exhaustion: “Pajama time.”

Pajama time is what we call the hours spent at home — long after clinic hours are done — finishing charts, answering portal messages, reviewing labs, and chasing loose ends that didn’t fit into the day. It’s the reality of modern medicine: the documentation doesn’t end when the last patient leaves. It follows us home, into our living rooms, onto our couches, into the moments we once saved for our families, hobbies, and rest.

At first, pajama time might feel like a small sacrifice. But over time, it adds up. It turns into chronic stress, resentment, emotional exhaustion, and the quiet erosion of the parts of life that recharge us outside of medicine.

Why Does Pajama Time Happen?

It’s not because doctors are inefficient. It’s not because they don’t work hard enough. It’s because most clinical systems were designed without enough thought about how real-life workflows actually happen. Messages pile up. Lab results arrive after clinic. New tasks appear in the inbox faster than they can be addressed. Documentation requirements keep growing, but the hours in the day stay the same.

And because clinicians are committed to doing things right — to answering thoughtfully, to documenting properly — they end up stretching their days into their nights, quietly paying the price so that care doesn’t suffer.

What Can We Do About It?

The solution isn’t to tell clinicians to “manage time better” or “work faster.” It’s to build better workflows. To design tools that support thinking quickly without cutting corners. To create systems that lighten cognitive load, not add to it. To give clinicians smarter ways to handle patient messages, review results, and document care without chaining them to their laptops after dinner.

We have to rethink what “efficiency” means in healthcare. It’s not about pushing more patients through. It’s about protecting the critical thinking time clinicians need during the day — so they don’t have to steal it back at night.

Reclaiming Our Evenings

There is a better way. Smarter documentation support. Smarter inbox management. Smarter clinical workflows. Not magic — just thoughtful, clinician-first design that recognizes that the time doctors spend outside the clinic matters just as much as the time they spend inside it.

Pajama time doesn’t have to be a permanent part of the job. But getting our evenings back will take real change — not just in technology, but in the mindset of how we value clinicians’ time, well-being, and lives outside of medicine.

Because if we lose that, we lose the heart of healthcare itself.