Our goal as Private Practice owners is to create a successful and thriving business that will allow us the stress-free freedom and the flexibility we want in our lives. The reality though, for some of us is, there will be a point in your life when the long hours, pressure and stress will create a feeling of being overwhelmed and burnout.
Here are 8 simple but practical productivity tips that focus on burnout prevention.
Identify time-sucks
If you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, it might be time to sit down and identify if you have any activities that zap your work productivity. Some time-sucks are harder to recognise than others as we feel we are being productive, whereby in fact they are distracting us from completing important tasks. Most of us have at least one area where we can improve on. Once you have found out where your biggest time-sucks are, you can make a plan to reclaim your time.
Common Time Sucks include:
- Attending immediately to non-essential emails and meetings.
- Spending time on Facebook and other social media platforms
- Chatting on your phone and looking through social media.
- Chatting with co-workers and
- Multitasking can slow progress on all the tasks.
Prioritise and organise your calendar
Do you feel overwhelmed when it comes to managing your time? If you want to be productive then you need to embrace the power of scheduling in your calendar. Spend a few minutes each day writing down all your appointments and tasks in a centralised calendar. Colour coding and creating tags will allow you to organise the tasks via urgency and importance and get you back on track!
Delegate
If you’re feeling overloaded it might be time to hand over some of those tasks that are non-essential for you to complete. Delegating simply allows us to get more done as it reduces your workload and allows you to focus on more important tasks.
Many of us have a fear of delegating and it’s natural to have concerns. So how do we delegate successfully? Defining and planning the tasks, establishing the outcome, setting feedback processes and reviewing the tasks are all essential steps to creating a smooth delegating transition.
Use your team effectively
As an employer, leading your team can be inspiring, rewarding but also exhausting. Productivity tips for managing your team effectively involve creating a clearly defined purpose for your team members and providing them with the tools, information and processes they need to complete the tasks. Maximise your teams’ skills effectively so; they have the best opportunity to succeed and focus on creating a healthy and supportive work culture which encourages communication and feedback.
List your top priorities
So how do you define your top priorities when everything feels like a priority? Start by collecting a list of all your tasks, identify which are urgent versus important, assess their value and the estimated effort and time to complete. We often can’t get to everything on our lists, but knowing where we are with our priorities gives us a sense of control over our schedule. So, take a deep breath and dive in!
Outline what you need to achieve these
If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, How Will You Know When You’ve Got There? In the midst of running a private practice, it can often be challenging to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Creating a business plan provides a roadmap that outlines how you will grow and develop your Private Practice. It will keep you on track and help guide where you put your time and energy.
know your peak performance times
It’s true; not all hours are created equal. Have you noticed that sometimes an hour is enough to speed your way through a complicated project effortlessly and other times all you manage is to send one or two low priority emails? You may already feel you know your peak times for maximum productivity or creativity. It can be a useful exercise to document your focus and energy levels while experimenting too with work windows and break patterns.
Work with your scheduler (person booking appointments)
Finding the perfect scheduling balance that is right for you is essential to running a stress-free business. Work with your scheduler and develop realistic strategies and set up policies for how you will handle scheduling, no-shows and cancellations and allow for a contingency plan. Whether you use paper scheduling or software, find a system that works for you.
