Where else would we begin our first official Weekly Report of the New Year other than with the ultimate determining factor for the results of each day and that’s with the value of your time.
I promised some return to fundamentals early in the year because it always comes back to the things that your practice success is built on in the first place that will lead to the biggest growth opportunities and room for improvement going forward.
There are three big shifts that you must make to create leverage in your practice and break away from the limiting plateau of hours in your day and time in your schedule.
When you bring these three concepts to life in your practice you have the ability to achieve financial goals that most would simply not believe possible. What’s even better, no matter your current level of success or daily averages, this is the place you can always go back to refine your approach and unleash even more potential.
The value of what goes in your hours determines the value of what you get out of your time. This is the origin of success.
First, in mindset, you have to get rid of the idea that you are just a producer of dollars of dentistry for hours of work. You are not a machine nor piece of equipment.
In fact, you are paid for what you know and do (knowledge and skills), not the time it takes to actually get it done. Never forget that.
Once you realize that yes, the dentistry has to get done, but you should not be at the mercy of your production per hour (we’ll work on improving this metric as well, as it’s an indicator of how much you’ve increased your value over hours).
This is why I call you a creator. You are able to create opportunity and that is where your time value and leverage comes into play.
You can in fact ‘create’ any amount of dentistry for yourself in any amount of time based on your engagement with patients and your communication and diagnostic skills. And then you expand that by way of your team’s abilities and coverage.
So, the point is, you are not a ‘producer’ or a ‘deliverer of dentistry’ – you are a creator of opportunity and your time value is in what you do with it, what you know, and most of all how you engage people.
This leads to the second big mindset shift related to time.
The highest value activity, of everything you do, is diagnosis. I know I sound like a broken record reminding you that you have two major responsibilities and goals every single day… motivate the team and diagnose the dentistry. If you do these, it’s a rising tide that lifts up the value of all the rest of your time.
In doing this, you can achieve a multiple of what you are use to by shifting your focus to creation and being on offense.
The reality is (in most practices), everyone, especially the doctor, is playing defense. They are running around dealing with insignificant things because the operations are not efficient, because the team isn’t taking initiative and working independently, and because everyone is working beneath their highest value priorities and tasks. That’s why the results are average and they seldom break through plateaus.
I have said this many times: the trap practices fall into is ‘taking what they get’ instead of ‘creating what they want.’ While I say it here nearly every single week, if you actually take it from the screen and bring it to life, you would ask yourself…
“What am I doing right now to CREATE what I want?”
If every Team Member ask themselves, “What is the outcome I want for my patient I’m talking to right now and is everything I’m doing focused specifically on that outcome?”
This same question should be applied to time: “Is what I’m doing right now the highest value action I should be doing, thinking, executing, following through with?”
The discipline to do what is most important (and the strength to ignore anything that isn’t) is the hardest part of breaking through.
When you rush diagnosis or you short change a visit or you make a new patient wait or your front team has to follow-up with a patient because they aren’t prioritizing things properly to close the treatment while the patient is there – all of these things are the result of confusion about what is most important.
Thus, the second point about time is: are you clear about what actually is your most valuable actions, tasks, and responsibilities and are you dedicating appropriate time to these opportunities.
Finally, the third mindset shift to increase the value of your days and your time is to understand that this applies to all time, not just your clinical hours.
I wrote recently that most doctors, at the very best, control their clinical hours but they don’t have any parameters or structure to their non-clinical business hours or to their personal hours outside the practice.
So, the mindset shift is, value yourself and your time above all else, in all ways. The last thing you should do is give away or waste your time.
Give away your words, your money, even your energy if you must but don’t give away your time. At least do it very consciously, very deliberately, and with great intention.
Waste any of these if you must – they are all able to be replenished – your time is not and therefore the value of your time is not.
Some things matter a lot, some things matter less, some things just don’t matter at all. Some things make a difference, some things make less difference, some things make no difference at all.
Ultimately, the value you get out of your time, energy, and effort has everything to do with you knowing the difference and then being as strict as you can be with it.
Your lessons this week are very basic and yet they are the lessons you must master if you want to make your days worth more to you with less stress, effort, and hours.
You create the value of your time, you do not produce the value of your time. The actions you put into your hours must be the highest value functions to drive the creation goals you have and the results you want.
And most of all, all time matters, not just your patient hours between the morning and end of day huddles. I say all the other hours and what you do with them (either work or leisure, practice or life), determine whether those clinical hours are worth it in the first place…or second place, in this case. Follow that philosophy and you’ll find harmony and happiness in and out of dentistry.
Next week, we’ll do a deep dive into your schedule structure and how to level up your game in 2021. I’ll show you some big leverage factors that will elevate your dollars per day no matter where you are at right now.
My challenge for you today and I hope your commitment to yourself is: value all of your time by paying attention to it, putting a structure around it, embracing the fact that you are in control, and own your ability to create whatever you want with your time.
Remember this: your time is never ‘spent’ doing anything if it’s used doing the right thing. Instead, it’s invested and that means there’s a return whether quantitative or qualitative. So don’t let a minute pass you by.
