09/22/2026
Six minutes. That's how long it took a new physician I met with to click through her entire open enrollment — squeezed between two patients, phone buzzing, a countdown clock ticking down in the corner of the screen.
She doesn't remember which boxes she checked. She remembers being exhausted enough that none of it felt real.
Almost a year later, we sat down together and found it: her 401(k) contribution had quietly defaulted to 3%. Her employer would have matched up to 6%. Twelve months of free money — the kind that never comes back around twice — gone, because of six rushed minutes on a Tuesday.
She didn't do anything careless. She did exactly what almost every exhausted new attending does with the most consequential paperwork of the year, dropped into the most chaotic week of a new job.
Open enrollment is happening again right now. If you clicked through just as fast this year, it might be worth twenty minutes to go back and actually look — before it costs you the same way.
