BY THE NUMBERS

Time Can Be On Your Side

Budgeting your time and delegating to staff can let you plan your growth

it’s year-end. It’s time to reflect on yesterday and plan for tomorrow. What went right this year? With what did you struggle? Which employees performed well? Who needs development assistance? What marketing changes will you make? Where will you invest your capital? What objectives have you laid forth for 2015? Where will you invest your leadership time? A thousand questions…few answers.

PLANNING A PLAN

For most ECPs, what little planning they do is ad hoc. Rarely do I come across a professional who can recite their year’s plan; largely because such a plan rarely exists. But in a world of eroding margins and market dominance by deep-pocket competitors, having at least a modicum of a plan is critical.

In my experience, most ECPs don’t plan because they lack the data with which to plan and the insight as to how such planning will help them. Perhaps more important is that ECPs are a busy group. There’s never enough time to do what needs to be done. Or is there?

SPOTTING THE TIME-SUCKS

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving that tries to identify the root causes of faults or problems. Using RCA, it’s not all that challenging to find more time in an otherwise busy schedule. For an ECP, there are generally a few significant places to look for time. Ask yourself these questions:

Am I organized effectively?

Am I delegating effectively?

Let’s start with organization. What sucks up your time?

Using my own world as an example, I learned a long time ago that trading phone calls to speak with someone is a huge time-suck. While email has improved connectivity by not requiring two people to coordinate a schedule, email will never replace an important conversation.

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

Do you find yourself trading phone calls with vendors, patients, colleagues, etc.? Well, STOP. You schedule patients, why not schedule phone calls?

I have an assistant who coordinates my calendar. She’s responsible for scheduling all of my calls. I generally neither accept nor place calls without them being calendared. As a result, I avoid interruptions and all of my calls show up in my calendar, just as your patients show up in yours. If I need to prep for a call, that time is scheduled beforehand.

This process alone probably saves me five to 10 hours per week, allowing me to invest my time in more productive areas.

ASSIGNING OWNERSHIP

What might you do with your extra few hours? How do you turn that time into highly productive investments? Let’s now look at delegation.

Most ECPs perform far too many tasks that others could do and likely do better. I hear about trips to pick up office supplies, changing light bulbs, painting rooms, even vacuuming the carpets. While you might consider that these are the responsibilities of ownership, with so little time outside of patient care, I believe that you’ve better uses of your time.

You can rid yourself of these tasks by assigning ownership to staff. And because you’ve crunched garbage time (see sidebar, right) out of your schedule, you’ve likely freed up time for your staff for the same purpose—to get stuff done.

Make a list of all the tasks that you handle. Write each on an index card and then rank order the cards, lowest to highest in importance that YOU do the task. Weekly, take the top card and think through to whom you will assign the responsibility. Then teach that individual how to perform the task and provide them with all the tools they’ll need to do the job. If it’s purchasing office supplies, give them the parameters and access to the credit card necessary to handle the job…the entire job.

Taking these actions will result in as much as a 20% improvement in your efficiency and effectiveness. Now take that time and use it where it matters most.

— Alan Cleinman

Alan Cleinman is founder and CEO of Cleinman Performance Partners, a business consultancy specializing in the development of high-performance optometry practices. The information in this column is derived from the database of Cleinman Performance Network, the members of which are generally large optometry practices, and is not intended to represent national averages. ©Cleinman Performance Partners, Inc.