In this article you’re going to learn about the importance of time management, prioritizing, and staying organized. We’ll also look at common production killers and how to practice conscious time management. The focus of this article will be dental front desk professionals, but many of the concepts discussed here are appropriate in many other settings. And if you need help with any of it, I offer powerful coaching sessions where we will work together to optimize your time management abilities.
What is Time Management?
Before we get started it’s helpful to define our topic. Time management, for our purposes here, is the action of managing your time so that you can get all of your work done as stress-free as possible. This last part is very important and often overlooked. You want to be a happy and healthy person – everyone does – but you also want to be competent at your job. I’m here to tell you you can do both.
Remember, part of your job as a dental front desk representative is to have empathy for patients, your colleagues, and yourself all day long. It’s a monumental task that most people, even experienced front desk reps sometimes, have trouble doing successfully. One of the keys to doing it successfully is to manage your time correctly, and that’s why we’re looking at it today.
Production Killers
This next part applies generally to healthcare settings.
Production killers are those things that keep your work from being efficient; things that bog you down and take up too much of your time; things that stress you out because they are taking up too much of your time, and as a result of that stress and inefficiency kill your production.
So that’s a morass you don’t want to get into obviously. But what is the opposite of that dreary vision? What does good production look like?
When you’re productive and stress-free you are:
- Keeping the office running smoothly.
- Maintaining a good flow and constant stream of patients.
A good flow is ensuring patients are coming in regularly, in a sequenced manner that is easy to deal with. Their needs are being met and their concerns are empathized with. They are getting seen in an appropriate amount of time relevant to their appointment, are paying their dues, and are then leaving the office in a reasonable amount of time.
What are the primary ways this good flow is compromised?
To ensure good flow you want to spend only the appropriate amount of time with each patient. Some patients can talk your ear off, and some front desk reps respond in kind getting involved in all kinds of unnecessary discussions that ultimately kill production. Have some rapport with patients obviously, and be empathetic of course, but also keep your eye on the ball, and move them along at an appropriate rate. If you don’t do this, you will quickly fall behind and the whole office will suffer, including any patients that come in after the talkative patient.
Overbooking is another area where production is positively killed. As a front desk rep, one of your most important tasks is keeping the schedule filled, but in a way that makes sense and doesn’t have patients staying too long or not being there long enough. If you don’t understand how to book patients for procedures you need to study how long typical procedures take for each doctor in your practice that you book for. There are basic standards but each doctor may have individual differences or preferences for how much time they like to spend with each patient for each procedure, as well as how much time they like to set aside for emergencies on a daily basis, lunch, and break time. Get to know your doctors and their preferences, as well as standard procedure times for common procedures like fillings, crowns, and dentures, and you will be well on your way to front desk rep mastery by keeping your schedule filled appropriately and being productive.
Finally, no next-appointment planning will kill your productivity. You want to always make sure you are scheduling patients for follow-up appointments when they are done with their current appointment. Whether that be just a check-up on what they just had done, the next appointment in the sequence of work they need to be done, or the next cleaning…make sure to offer that next appointment to the patient and try to get them to set something up. This is of course for the practice to continue to make money, but it’s also for the patient’s health and it’s good practice to remind patients always, especially when they want to avoid setting up follow-up appointments, that your practice is dedicated to their positive oral health which is good for their overall health. Drive that point home.
24 Hours a Day
There is a common saying that we all only get 24 hours in a day. Of course, this is obvious and yet it’s worth remembering that that is how much time you have, and to use that time wisely. It’s easy to get lazy and not do what needs to be done because sometimes time seems to move slowly and therefore, it seems we have all the time in the world. But this, as you know, is an illusion.
Conscious Time Management
Thus the best strategy for managing your time is conscious time management. This means being aware at all hours of the day, while at work, of what you need to get done for the day, and for each hour, and using that time accordingly.
This involves the following strategies:
- Planning ahead. This can be achieved by looking over the day’s activities the day before, usually, before you go home for the day, and again when you arrive to work in the morning.
- Being ready to re-assess. You can’t plan for everything. Stuff comes up during the day. Emergencies occur that mess up the schedule. Things take longer than planned. Personal stuff comes up. Interpersonal issues arise with colleagues. You have to always be ready to reassess your plans and re-prioritize as needed on the fly.
- Prioritizing tasks. Speaking of which, you need to prioritize your tasks in your planning (which are the most/least important and rank them). That way, you can work on the most important items when you come in in the morning. When emergencies occur and other things crop up you can push the least important items to the back and still work on the most important tasks.
- Keeping your desk clear. This sounds like a very small thing but it does wonders for your mentality. If your desk is clear it’s easier for your mind to be clear and uncluttered allowing you to focus on the task at hand.
- Just say ‘no’. Sometimes you have to say no to requests you cannot fulfill if you have other tasks that are more urgent. A request from a co-worker to help them with one of their tasks? Ordinarily, you’d like to help out of course, but sometimes you can’t. If you have urgent priorities that take precedence over a request from someone else say so.
- Not being afraid to delegate. Sometimes you need to delegate some of your urgent tasks to others who may have less on their plate. Take advantage of others’ free time without being pushy and while respecting their own urgent priorities.
- Reflect on what worked. Take a few minutes during your work day (or after it’s over) to reflect on the time management strategies that worked for you and which didn’t. Where could you improve? Study the things you didn’t get right and commit yourself to trying again or changing tactics. Get help where needed.
Conclusion
If you follow the strategies outlined in this article you’ll be well on your way to effective time management and is an extremely effective and productive front desk rep. Try out the strategies mentioned, reflect on what did and didn’t work best for you, hone skills that are difficult for you, and keep trying until you get better at them. Most importantly, be persistent in your personal growth and self-development, and don’t give up!