How to Create Time

Description:

How do you implement something you've learned to better run your practice when you have no time? The answer is one bite at a time with dedicated focus.

This presentation will cover:

• Are you the Tortoise or the Hare? (Who got distracted?)
• How to manage distractions during your admin time.
• Learn the "Teflon Drill" to get others to solve problems.
• Find out the 4 D's of Time Management

Remember: “Little changes lead to massive success!”

Coaching Program #1

Coaching program post-roll #1

Schedule a consult with Shaun by visiting  https://ptpracticesuccess.com

Transcript

0:09

Hello there. Hey, I want to talk to you about time management. How to, how to create time is what I call it. You, you have those moments where, oh, man, you got so much stuff done, and then you have those days where you, you come home, you're exhausted, and you've got a laundry list of things you didn't complete. And so how do we create the time in our schedules? How do we create the time for not only what we do, but our team, staff does to get more done because every time you add one more personnel that you then you need to get the job done because of an inefficiency or various time sucks that take place. It comes out of hip National Bank and you can't afford to have it come out of hip National Bank any longer. So when we have moments where. where we're not treating patients, we have to use that time very intelligently. And what I'd like to share with you is something from a much larger workshop, just little bits and pieces of some information I think might help you in bettering your time management. The owner is very involved in the day to day patient care. He or she has very little administrative time. The way you get time is to handle time intelligently. Like, I have a client that I work with who I adore, and I'm working with his VP of Operations, and he's like Shaun, how do I get more management time? I go, well, you, the way you get more management time is to improve your ability to make other people more productive. And if you can make the practice grow getting other people more productive and efficient, then you will have the time to manage. So you kind of have to make it happen before you get to experience the benefits of having more time in which to manage. So you can block out huge chunks of time on your schedule. But if you waste that time, then. You may as well just treat patients. So as a clinician, you generate so much revenue per hour as a business executive, a competent one in a, in a practice that's growing and expanding, your one hour of admin time better generate more revenue than your one hour of patient care time, otherwise you'll think where you belong is full time flat out patient care. Now in some professions, like. Being a doctor, surgeon dentist, even, you know, one hour of, you know, dentistry or surgery kind of out pays one hour of physical therapy. So in those situations, you often have a kind of a kick butt office manager who runs kind of the day to day. Not everybody has that going on. So if you have a bit of window of admin time, let's make it very effective. Okay. So I want to share some things. Okay. So when you look at how you waste time, how we all waste time, it usually is related to delaying things, you know, things that we're kind of I'm going to get to, or I allow interruptions, or other things to stop me, right? So we can think how easy it is to lose time. We lose time because we add time. We add time to decisions. We add times to taking action. We add times to things that are uncomfortable, but must be faced at some point. So we keep adding time. And so if you've got this little window of admin time. And the thing you need to do in the admin time isn't very comfortable for you, then you will allow anything to interfere with that time. We have to start something, we have to move it along, and we have to finish it. Some of us are really good at starting things. If you're an executive, you're usually good at dreaming stuff up here. You know, ideas are plenty, right? So we could do this. We can open another office. We can bring in a new blah, blah. We can get a piece of equipment whatever, right? Ideas are cheap. Everybody's got them. And if you own your practice, you're the idea maker, but are you the idea executor, the guy who can get others to get things done. So we dream up something, we move on and we carry on, we implement it and then we achieved the end result of that thing. So there's three parts to actually getting anything done versus overcoming inertia, right? So starting something, well, when you look at what, what kind of inertia do we run into? Well, if it has to do with personnel, sometimes it's personnel that's hard to face. I talked to a guy several years ago, who was just having a fit about his office manager. It was the first time I ever spoke to him. And I said, when did you know that she wasn't a good fit for the practice? And you needed to do something about it. And he said 19 years ago. So for 19 years, he's been grossly dissatisfied with his office manager, but didn't handle it, nor replace her. So it sits there in his mind as something that he never did complete. He kind of started with, I think I got to have a a wake up call with my office manager and either get her on board or get her off the ship. But I never did it, but I always wanted to, but I never did it. So when you look at these types of things, when you kind of know you need to do something and you don't do it. It does not go away. It still sits there. If you think of every kind of indecision that you might have as a business owner about personnel, about growth plans, about executing something, and you didn't do it. I can guarantee you, if you just think about it slightly, it'll pop into view. It's just there. It's an incomplete action that you intended to get done, but you never got it done. So you never even started, but it sits there kind of in your way. So sometimes you have to just decide that I'm never going to do that and you let it go forever, but for many of us, it still sits there as like the dream, the thing, you know, the conversation that we wanted to have, but we never had. So we have, we find people who are good at starting things. We have find people who are good at kind of routine, keeping things going, you know the wheels on the bus kind of people going round and round. They're. Not very good at change. They're very good at doing things. You usually don't find these guys in high exec positions. They're, they, they like routine. They're like, this is how we do it. They rally against change. So some people are much more like, just tell me how to do it boss. And I'll do it that way until I retire. I mean, the guy on the assembly line who takes a device. Turns it 90 degrees and pushes it, and he does that for 40 years blows my mind, right? I blow my own mind. I couldn't even think with how that could actually be done, but there are people, that that is where they're at. They're super comfortable with routine not a lot of change keep things simple. If you look over your team, you probably can spot staff who like routine and whenever you want to start something new, Implement some kind of change they're the first ones to speak out. It's different. We've never done that before, what we do works. And so they're They're generally not the best dreamers but, once you groove them in on how it's to be done, even if they hate it, they'll do it, because that's who they are. They like to follow routine. And then we have people that are really good at stopping things. So you have to start something, move it along, and finish something. So there are people who are just really good at stopping things. They stop things in, in a variety of different ways, not necessarily by force. Sometimes their, their way of stopping things is just don't do it. And then see if you have the guts to call them out on it. And maybe that happens, maybe you don't. But you have these three types. Now you find people who are good at starting something, people who are good at moving that thing along and people who are doing good at getting things done. And those are your leaders. Those are your leaders. So you look at yourself. You've got a little bit of window of admin time. Are you getting things done? Are you moving something already along that exists? Make sure that it gets done. Or are you sitting there dreaming up what your next game to play or activity you want to accomplish or, or conquer. Right. So who's good at starting things. Who's good at changing things. Who's good at stopping things. Changing being, moving something along, keeping it moving, keeping it routine. So if let's say we start marketing, you have this meeting, you talk to your marketing staff and look, we need to go out and we need to visit so many doctors a week and make ourselves known or whatever it is, drop off our doughnuts or whatever the thing is that you, you want them to start doing right now, you'll find some staff that will follow that order exactly. And they'll go out and do exactly what's told, but you also have some staff that won't some people that are supposed to be doing that. They won't, they'll have excuses. They're working on their excuses as you're talking to them. Right. And they actually don't execute. Right. So then what can happen? You can go back and go, something's wrong with what we're doing, but you have to find people who have a same mindset of getting things done. If you put anybody in a leadership position, they are people who can get things done and get things done quickly. If they can get things done quickly, they create time. Best example, I like to use like a workshop in an office or something like that is if, if any, if anybody and say, I'm talking to your team, if any of you were going on vacation to the Bahamas and you needed to catch a flight at five o'clock, and you had to have all of your documentation done, would you have it done? And they all said, yeah. Why? Because that's a hard deadline and it had to get done. So part of creating time is compressing time. Like, how quickly can I accomplish something? So if you're making a list of things that you want to get done in a day or a week, right, you're making a list. When you have that window of time, don't let anything but that well thought out list get in front of you. This is what I need to get done. If I have to get my notes done before I catch a flight somewhere, then that moves to the top of anything else. So some staff member wants to come up and just chew the fat with you. Like, leave me the hell alone. I'm getting my notes done, right? You made that a priority because not accomplishing it was not going to be good for you. So part of being good at creating time is managing certain distractions that you might experience, Now, as a business owner, there's many times, myself included, where we'll have something that we're just not comfortable facing. Okay, it will be a hard conversation oh gosh a decision that you need to make that you might be wrong with you're really not sure on and you'll feel the effort of that now when I say effort, I mean physical and mental anguish Okay I mean, is there ever been a time when there was something that you needed to make a decision on and you felt like stress, physical stress, like you felt like your heart was racing or I dunno, got sweaty felt a little queasy to your stomach. All that is bound around indecision. It's bound around indecision, something that you know that you should be doing or handling or confronting or facing and you're not doing it and you'll feel the effort. The more you try to avoid a problem, the more effort you're going to experience. So if you've got a staff member that needs to be shown the door and you've known that for 19 years, you're experiencing that effort all the time with that particular staff member, or you've decided to swallow that effort and just make that part of who you are. Right. So when you're experiencing that effort, which is mental and physical anguish on not making a decision, you need to make the decision. It doesn't even have to be the right one. You just have to make a decision. I tell clients all the time You only have to be 51 percent right to make it. You just can't be afraid to be 49 percent wrong. So when you sit there on an indecision, should I stay? Should I go? Should I invest in this thing thing for my practice. Should I, you know, get involved in some marketing campaign? Should I work with a coach? Right? You can sit there and you work through all these types of mental anguish, right? And never make a decision. Many, many years ago, there was a guy that came to one of our new patient marketing courses, and I won't tell you from where, but he wanted to start a private practice and I sat down with him. I said, yeah, where are you at on, on this whole process? And, and he had a list of doctors that were all over the town that he'd lived in and he had them all pinpointed on a map with them colored pins and where all the practices were with colored pins. And, and I said, my gosh, that took a lot of work. He goes, well, I update it every year. I said, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You've been wanting to go into practice for how long? He said, 10 years. So I find out almost 15 years later that he's posting stuff about looking into going into private practice. That's a lot of indecision. That just chews up a lot of time. You know, thinking about, worrying about, wondering about, could it be, could I live the best life, all those types of things, but never make the decision. I mean, you'll be happier if you make a decision that you don't want to do something versus sitting in the middle of should I or shouldn't I, but those things create time. So when you're massive indecision, physical and mental anguish in presenting the effort, then you're going to waste time. If you're confronting the effort, you're able to make the decision and good to go into action quickly. You are creating time. You are getting more done per unit of time, and that really is what it's all about and how you create time. It's not like we can make 40 hours in a day. We only have the same number of hours. So, it's like when you are caught in an uncertainty. Or indecision, you're going to be stopped. And most of the time that I've experienced that is it was something that I couldn't quite comfortably face. It could be a person, it could be a piece of technology, like, Oh gosh, Facebook ads, Oh crap. So it could be something that, you know, is a little bit outside of what we normally do. But we need to know this information. So. What we do, we can hire somebody that's, that's always a solution. Sometimes it's the best one, right? We can roll up our sleeves and learn it, but we can't sit and say, you know, I really need to do this. I really need to do this for 19 years. That ability to kind of impinge and capture attention is in to get things done has to do with your ability to execute and your ability to get others to execute. If you can get other people to execute on your behalf, you will have more time. I talked to one of my clients yesterday and he's got a therapist that's going to work with him and, and it seems like a little fireball could be a good fit. Right. But he's, but he drives an hour away and he's looking to complete a fellowship and he needs his hours. And, and it's you know, this client is saying, well, I think this guy is going to be a practice owner. I'm like, okay, well, let's make lemonade out of that. So, why don't you partner with him when the time comes when he's ready to leave? Because he doesn't want to drive an hour each way. Why don't you just partner with him and open up another clinic? And he was like, whoa, you know, and he was like, looking at the effort of like, the hassle of bringing in the guy on, putting in his hours. You know, what, what if he just leaves and go out and starts a practice? I'm like, he's going to start a practice. He's the kind of guy that's going to do that. So, why don't you just partner with him and just, make it so right so he went,"wow" and he was caught up in the effort. Don't get in caught up in the effort Just when the time comes and he seems like that kind of guy and you like this guy and you wouldn't mind partnering with him in some kind of endeavor, have a conversation simple as that. He doesn't Wow Just like that. Yeah. And yet through the rest of the conversation, he kept talking about ways to complicate it. Well, how would the deal be structured? What kind of legal is involved in all this kind of stuff? I like the guy hasn't started on his first day. Keep it simple. Keep it light. So sometimes, we will have something that we're confronting and facing and we need to look at it in steps. We have to complete this step. Does the guy fit in the practice as it is? Yeah. Check. Good. Is he a good producing individual? Good. Yes. Check. We've a little bit more time. Do you like the guy? You know, want to hang with him? Check. Right. Do you see this guy as an entrepreneur? Have you given him projects and he killed it? Good. Now we'll have a conversation about what his future may hold and whether or not he wants to be a private practitioner as an example, right? So sometimes we're trying to, to digest the entire thing, but sometimes it's just taking the first step and the first step cascades every other step. The hardest thing to do is to start something. That's the hardest thing. The easiest thing to do is to stop something, but the hardest thing is to start something and or the hardest thing is to do is to keep it going. Once you started it, our motto or with my head out of the way is little changes lead to massive success. And that is something I believe firmly in. And so it's starting something, and continuing it, it doesn't stop. But each time you layer down another little step and you move it forward, you get ever so closer to achieving your longer longer term goals. When you're uncertain about anything, you will start to have a problem. And again, you only have to be 51 percent right to make it. There's never a hundred percent. Never 100 percent certainty on anything you're only going to be 51 percent right to make it. But the one thing that chews up the most time is indecision. So, if you think of like in your noggin, you've got this bunch of chips of RAM, right? You have so much available RAM storage in your noodle and you're caught in a whole bunch of indecision about anything I mean anything. Do we open another clinic? Do we close the clinic? Is it time to sell? Is it time to talk to people about selling? Is it you know, what can be done about our reimbursement? Right? All these different thoughts come into your head and you're, you're like an indecision on taking action or following through it, chews up your available RAM. It just, you, so then you have a window of admin time and you're paralyzed during that time. Because you don't know which way is up. So it's just like, what are we doing? I don't know, right? So you can have all of these things, the indecision is the paralysis. So if you can just decide,"Hey, we're going to do this. I'm 51 percent sure it'll work." or I'm not going to do this. I'm 51 percent sure or more that it won't work if we did. Okay. You'll get there. You'll get there. You'll move forward. Being good at managing time is looking at information when it comes to managing your practice. So certainly I do hope that you're looking at statistics and you're paying attention to that. That's that's definitely something that as each week ends that you should take a look at your numbers, find out what you are doing, right, that actually is influencing those numbers, and then plan out what you want to do in the following week, right. So that ability to take a look at what's going on, make decisions, and to then act on that is what you find in anybody who's an able executive. They can look something over. They can make a decision and they can take action on it. Right? The staff look at you if you're a business owner, they're looking at you being all knowing and If they don't look at you as being all knowing it's because you're not faking it, right? So, you know that whole fake it till you make it It's like you do have to make the call because no one's going to make the call without you. So if you sit in indecision, they sit in indecision and everything just has a paralysis. We're looking things over, but we're not calling, you know, we're not making the decision, right? So, in, in order to achieve what you want to achieve and get things done and how to create time, you actually have to do things that brings about time. So bring, bring in about time, take a list of any of indecisions that you might have, right? When you start getting things done, you're going to experience a lot more general happiness. So there's four D's that I like to go over when it comes to time management. Four D's. You can write these down. It's do it, delegate it, dump it, or delay it. So something comes on your plate. If you're going to do it, don't even start it. If it's short, unless you get it done. Because, again, if you start something, start something, start something, start something, start something, and you don't get it done, your RAM's tied up. You can't have that. Like, if you make a list of 10 things you want to get done in a day, you'd be smart to just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. If you laid it out appropriately, you might be able to do that. And then, every time something gets on your plate, and it will every day, you have to quickly assess, that thing that some staff member has a problem with, is that more important than the 10 things on my list? And if it is, where? It's number four, and you're on number one, you say, I'll get to that. When I get to this. You control your interruptions, you make a list, you don't let anything get on your list. You don't have a list, then you're going to get ordered about by your staff. And you're going to get increasingly more ticked off about it. You're getting orders from your staff because that's what you think you should do And if you'd like to change that. You do have to plan, you have to create a list of things you'd like to get done in that time so you can knock it down instead of thinking about it at 11 o'clock at night when you're in bed. So you make yourself a list. If anything comes at you, you put that In relationship to where it belongs on the list. So the first thing is do it. Okay. You take a look at that. This is a four D's of time management. Do it. Delegate it. Oh, we as business owners generally are terrible at this at first. I mean, we get better at it, right? But delegate it. Organizationally, who is supposed to handle that thing? Well, they weren't sure what to do. So they wanted to run it by you. You tell them that they should just fix it. You tell them that they should handle it. You tell them that you believe in them and you want them to do it because that is their job. If you are very easily coerced into solving other people's problems, then you get to have more problems. So, you know, part of being an executive is that ability to get others to execute. So as we manage time well, we need to know how to delegate. If you take it all on your shoulders, you won't have enough admin time to get it done. So we have do it, we've delegated, we've dump it. I call it swallowing the problem. And so sometimes it's like, I'm just not going to do that. You just like someone presents something or something staring in front of you and you look at it and you go, well, let's say I never did it to the end of my practice career. Would it make a hill of beans of difference? And if it wouldn't, then don't do it. So have the foresight to look at something and not everything has to be actioned on. Not everything. So sometimes, you know, staff will present a problem and, you know, you are the problem solver. And so sometimes it's just-you swallow their problem- and you say to them something like, Hey, I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention. Let me see what I can do. And then just swallow the problem. Don't do anything, completely ignore it. If it keeps coming up, keeps coming up, I'm afraid you're going to have to deal with it in some way or get others to deal with it, right? You either do it or you get others to do it through delegation. But sometimes we just small the problem And sometimes we're solving the wrong problem. The problems that we should be dumping, we are continuing to power through to get to the other side. So if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, then maybe you shouldn't be squeezing. Right. So dump things. And then sometimes it's delay. Sometimes what is on your plate right now is not the most important thing, but it's important. Now, sometimes I'll find it with clients who will say, I need to get a real big policy and procedure manual written up, or I need to write, do a big writeup of the front desk position because, you know, I think it's important, it's more professional than when new people come in, they got something to look at, they got a reference material. And I'll say, Hmm, what problem are you trying to solve? And they're like, what do you mean? How come this popped into your noodle all of a sudden you have to create a policy and procedure manual? Why is that? Well, because my receptionist keeps making mistakes and I keep having to deal with it. Okay, have you had better receptionists before? Oh yeah, we've had great receptionists and my office manager was a receptionist and she's amazing, right? So how much of a manual did that woman have? She never had one, right? Right. So you might be solving a problem. Your solution isn't a solution to the problem. Yeah, I might have a personnel issue that you're solving it with a, you know, job description, right? So some, you know, sometimes it's just, we just have to, you know, basically. Dump it or delay it. So I'd say right now, I wouldn't think that's important where it becomes important is when you have the best receptionist ever. So why have someone to write up a job description who doesn't do the job incredibly well. So just put that on the back burner. We'll do that down the road. It's not something on fire today. It's not the most important thing to confront or face. So we do it, we delegate it, we dump it, or we delay it. Those are the four D's. And we apply those kinds of steps as we start moving towards the, the, the reaching of our goals. Manage interruptions in your admin time of your office. I hope you have one. I hope you have a private place. Think that you're not in the middle of everyone. But you have a little private place. That's called your office. And then you should have some policy related to your office. If you're in there and the doors open, you can interrupt me. If the doors close, you cannot. Right. It's like, must be death or something like that to be interrupted. And then you take that time that you've carved out and you focus on stat analysis. You focus on any action plans that you think you need to take on to, to better the week, you put them in order of importance to handle. And you do the toughest things first. If you do the hardest thing first, you will get much more done during the week and you'll create much more time if you put the hardest thing at the bottom. You put the hardest thing in the bottom, there is no motivation to get to the bottom of the list. If you put the hardest thing on top, you know, sometimes it's like I got to fire Joe and you make that the end of the day, he might be there 19 years. Okay, so we need to put the hardest thing on our list up front If it's not timed, right? Like the guy I need to fire doesn't come until 11. Well, then maybe he's not the first thing I do. I'm just giving you an example. That would be a hard thing. It would be hard for me too. So, you know, it's on your list. It's like, I got to do it. I can't. I'm going to push that all the way out till the end of the day at the end of the month, the end of the year, 19 years later. Right. But yet it sits there as a problem that floats in time for the next night 19 years is this Joe guy. I probably should have let go, but he's still here. You know, Now I feel obliged to keep him, you know, it's kind of like a dog that shoes on furniture and, you know, craps on your living room floor, but he's so adorable, you know. You're going to keep them right so you can have a staff member like that that's not a good fit and you'll keep them forever because you've never really confronted what you needed to have them do or completed what you needed to have them do to be effective on their position. So talking about a variety of different random things when it comes to time management, but the things to walk away with is: First is that you, you put down a, something that you want to accomplish during the time that you have available in your admin time or anytime you write it down. Like you think of a honeydew list on a weekend, you know, you have a list of 10 things to get done and you know, when you get them done, you feel great and you find that generally doesn't take as much time as you thought. That's when you, you know, wonder about it, lay around on it, think about it right over it and the garage never gets cleaned. So we put the toughest things on top. We focus on the toughest things up front and when doing so, we get where we want to go faster. We do that. First, we take a look at anything that comes at you and you have to apply the four days to it. Am I going to do it? Then I'm going to put it on my list. Somewhere where it's perfectly fits and I'm going to get it done. If it's, if it's something that needs to be done, but there is somebody in my organization whose job it is to handle that. I make them handle it. And if I can't do that, I got to handle my own indecision. Otherwise I'm going to tie up my RAM and I'm going to have to solve it anyway. Okay. Then, you know, maybe I just need to dump it all together. Swallow the problem, just not do it. Just take a look. You might be in the middle of something going, this crap isn't working. This thing I'm doing is not making a difference. Matter of fact, it's annoying my staff. Who knows what. Quit doing it. And then sometimes you might be doing something that's like, you know, for office number three, when you're on office number one and you're only got half the space filled out, you know, and someone saying there's this property coming available like next month and you're like, I should look at this. I'm going to go take a look at it. It's like, hold your horses. You haven't filled your own box yet. Right. So just delay that. You know, I'm sorry, but this is not a good time. Well, this is a deal of a century. It's like, yeah, but I'm not in that century yet. So I got to get there first. So sometimes we have to delay it. DO IT, DELEGATE IT, DUMP IT, or DELAY IT, the 4 Ds. Hope that this is helpful to you in some way. Love ya. Take care.