When it comes to running a medical practice, time really is money—and it always seems like there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything you need so you can keep that money flowing in the door.
Freeing up time in your day can help you perform more revenue-generating responsibilities like analyzing your accounts receivables, scheduling your team to allow for more patient visits, and negotiating with payers.
Discover how prioritizing can help you improve your time management skills and free up time to run your practice more efficiently.
- Differentiate Important Tasks From Urgent Ones
Dedicating yourself to items that are important—but not urgent—is what distinguishes effective individuals from those who are ineffective. After all, if you’re always chasing down urgent requests, you can’t get to your more important responsibilities, which are often income-generating ones.
To differentiate important from urgent, check these key definitions:
- Important: Marked by significant value in content or relationship. For instance, filing your medical claims to insurers on time would be considered important because it’s how your practice generates income.
- Urgent: Requiring immediate action or attention, often performed in response to a pressing or critical situation. For example, if a patient says they’re going to contact the medical board because of the wait time in your office and you need to calm them down, that’s urgent.
- Categorize Your Activities as Important or Urgent
Once you know the definition of important and urgent, you can classify all of the responsibilities for your day into one category or the other. Ultimately, the goal is to spend most of your day tackling activities of high importance but low urgency. This allows you to get to everything important before it becomes urgent so you don’t have to spend your day putting out fires.
Some people make the mistake of putting off important tasks because although the consequences for ignoring them may be severe, they aren’t immediate. Some practice managers avoid important tasks so they can deal with someone else’s urgent responsibility. But it’s essential to evaluate whether those are actually urgent, or if other people believe they are, because they shouldn’t necessarily take the place of your important tasks.
Once you can start prioritizing each day’s to-do list by classifying by important vs. urgent, you’ll be able to analyze how much time you’re actually able to put toward dealing with what’s important. If the answer is “not much,” then you have some work to do in delegating responsibilities, ensuring that everyone in the practice is focusing on important tasks to avoid urgent ones, and getting systems in place to minimize urgent requests.
Of course, every practice will have urgent responsibilities come in from time to time. For instance, suppose you work in a specialty orthopedic surgery office and a referring physician has an urgent request to help a patient who broke her hip. You should be able to address that quickly and urgently and without hesitation. But by keeping a list of prioritizations, you’ll more easily be able to differentiate truly urgent items from those that can actually wait.
- Get Important Items on the Schedule
If you plan to handle important responsibilities, you can’t just hope there’s time in the day to do them. It’s a good idea to put them on your schedule and block off the appropriate amount of time you think each task will take you. That way, you can handle them as you would a face-to-face meeting, without interruptions or a way to put them off. If your staff members have things they need to discuss with you, share your calendar and invite them to schedule time with you when you have availability, rather than just meeting with them as soon as they get the idea.
This allows you to improve your time management skills, as well as the skills of your colleagues. They’ll be able to plan out their days and so will you.
- Use the 80/20 Rule
When you start prioritizing the items on your to-do list, it can be challenging to determine what to do first. That’s why many experts advise using the 80/20 rule. You’ll identify the top 20 percent of responsibilities that will produce the greatest payoff, and do those first.
For example: Suppose you’ve got a to-do list that includes three tasks. The first is spending 10 minutes talking to your billing company about the errors they’re seeing that are causing your claims to be rejected. The second is spending 30 minutes planning your practice’s holiday party. The third is spending 20 minutes talking to a nurse about the list of supplies needed for your exam rooms. Because the first task will likely lead to the greatest payoff (and takes the least amount of time), you’ll prioritize that as your first order of business, and then your second responsibility should be getting the supplies set up with the nurse. Finally, the holiday party planning should happen last.
- Plan the Next Day Before Leaving Work
One way to start your day fresh with your prioritization in place is to create a to-do list for the next day before you leave work. On Fridays, you’ll plan Monday’s to-do list. That way you can sit down at your desk each morning and start on the list without hesitation.
Want more time management tips? Check out Time Management Tactics: Get More Time to Run Your Practice. Leadership expert Chris DeVany will provide you with actionable advice that can help every medical practice free up time. Don’t hesitate: Sign up for this free 90-minute training session today!
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