We are closing out this series on making your time more value and breaking the link between time and money inside of your practice. Over the past several Weekly Reports I have been tough on you to prevent any complacency in the execution of high value priorities, tasks, and actions.
All you have, my friend, is time and if you want to get more out of what you’ve got then we can’t just think about it differently, we have to act differently.
Every doctor sitting here reading this can remember a time when their days of dentistry were less than they are right now. They, perhaps you, at the time thought themselves to busy and doing ‘well enough’ and yet you’ve found your way here. Not just here with me, though this is the most positive place to be in all of dentistry, you found your way to higher ground, higher value, and higher level execution of your time.
The question then is what’s next for you?
What do you want… more money per day, fewer hours per day, fewer days per month, greater value dentistry, all of the above? Because it is all possible.
What I want most for you is more consistency of your highest performing days – your best days repeated with reliability. That’s really the secret to unlocking your full potential.
Last week, I gave you so much to think about as we did a deep dive on your schedule and your allocation of time in your day. The week before that I challenged you to put as much thought and discipline into your business time and personal time as you do your clinical time.
The fact is the more preparation, planning, organization, and discipline you have with your time, the less you need of it to get more done and achieve greater results (therefore you end up with more of it for yourself).
This extends beyond yourself. Here’s a challenge… what if you had every single team member take inventory of their day and how they use their minutes.
Imagine how much you could learn if every Hygienist, Assistant, Lead Receptionist, Scheduler, and Treatment Coordinator actually documented everything they did and said throughout the day.
Now, to be fair, we could give you an equally hard time (and every other doctor) about wasted minutes or frequent distraction from their highest value priorities.
We know it’s human nature to do what’s easy, what’s quick, what’s low value, what’s familiar, or what’s (supposedly) urgent regardless of its actual importance.
This is why phone calls and new patient leads don’t get called back fast enough; why claims haven’t been submitted or resubmitted; why assistants forget things in the room or weren’t ready in the first place; why treatment plans take too long to get done; why labs are late; why pictures are ‘when I have time’ instead of taking precedence in a visit; why schedules aren’t dialed in every single day; and why money doesn’t get collected (how could anything possibly get placed ahead of this one, ever).
The list, as did the one from last week, goes on and on from each team member’s perspective.
This is why you must change the mentality and set a culture of always focusing on that which is most important. It begins first by understanding what is the origin of the value for each person – that is where you’ll find leverage to elevate daily performance all in the same amount of time and take your results to the next level.
This takes us back to the original point of our time series… becoming creators of opportunity by actually controlling where we put our focus and what we put in our time.
We’ve talked about everything related to time in the past few weeks, but somewhat ironically, that doesn’t help you utilize your time better; just as reading a weight loss book doesn’t make you healthy. Making decisions is different than making commitments and making commitments is different than executing.
It’s not enough to just set a higher daily goal and randomly hit it once in a while.
It’s not enough to have a new scheduling structure that helps you be more productive if it is never adhered to and followed.
It’s not enough to say that we are going to create more anchors, consolidate visits, and present complete health dentistry, you have to commit to the verbiage, systems, experience, and high-level actions that bring that big picture to life in the minds of your patients.
It’s not enough to put new patients in the schedule if you aren’t going to do what’s necessary to develop them and prepare them for accepting treatment.
It’s not enough to follow-up with patients if you aren’t going to actually take ownership of the outcome of the call and encourage them to move forward.
What is not happening enough in your practice right now that would push you over the edge, get you to the next level, and increase the value of your time because you increased the value of everyone’s moment by moment execution?
You can certainly time block the ‘other things’ that must get done eventually – but in real time – it’s got to be the things that matter most that receive priority.
There’s a million dollars lesson in this Weekly Report Series because when you put more value into your time by putting more time into the most important things that make the greatest difference – you will find more opportunity and success every single day.
This is more than just closing gaps or longer check lists. It’s taking responsibility for what happens, what gets done, and the outcomes that are realized as a result.
We always are taught that we are responsible for our own actions – but no one ever finishes the sentence. If that’s the case, then we are also responsible for the results of those actions. Why not take that seriously and create the results you want on purpose by owning the actions that fill up your time. That’s the only way to truly value your time in the first place.
Next week, I’m going to shift gears to something we’ve never done here. We’re going to go inside of actual conversations with do a deep dive in verbiage and how you can create better outcomes by having better communication.
We will begin with patients, then move into the team, and round it out with actual ‘lessons in leadership.’ You certainly won’t want to miss it – stay tuned.
In the meantime, you’ve got work to do making sure everyone is focusing on their highest priorities and setting clear expectations on what is (and isn’t) important. That is how you achieve greater results in the same (or less) time.
