Monday, January 22, 2018

Stop Wasting Time

Time is arguable the most precious commodity you will ever manage in your life. Using it unwisely is like a leak in your canteen as you walk across a desert. Today you have more distractions and ploys out there that are vying for your time. Efficient and judicious use of your time is solely up to you and how you choose to spend it. If time were a bank account, imagine having your day begin with 1 million dollars in the account, at the end of the day those dollars will be gone weather you spend them or not.  What will you have to show for your use of those million dollars?

In a chiropractic practice, most docs frivolously utilize time. I will review the significant 7 ways most offices are wasting time.

1.                    Multi-tasking- I lead off with this one only because it is the doctor and the staff that are trying to do many things all at the same time. This has been proven over and over again to be the most ineffective and costly way to run any business. Multitasking is a myth that assumes that if you are busy you are getting a lot accomplished. The opposite is actually true. The more you are multi-tasking the more likely you are to make mistakes, have incomplete work and also end up not being present with your customers/practice members.
2.                    Curing Closets- I know you may have some great reasons in your limited thinking why you are still adjusting patients in a closed room with the door shut, but it is again a time vampire sucking the life right out of your practice. The open concept for adjusting can offer every benefit that a closed room offers, baring gowning your patients. If you are having patients put a gown on for every adjustment then you should consider moving your practice out of a chiropractic college. There are so many upsides to open concept adjusting from not only efficiency of time, but also quality of service, fun, patient education, and it eliminates the possibility of sexual harassment claims.
3.                    Using therapies, treatments, and multiple techniques- Trying to be everything for everyone is huge debate and a touchy subject in our profession. If you feel you have to offer multiple services have other staff or professionals do them for you. You are a chiropractor and your job is to identify and adjust subluxations. No one else is licensed to do so. Your dentist does not do the cleanings or the complicated surgeries. They concentrated on their specialty. They also are not massaging your stiff neck or looking at your sprained ankle. Yet we feel like we should be looking into every ailment and trying to treat it with some type of natural cure or even heaven forbid some jokers want to write prescriptions. The most efficient and effective, highest volume, most fun, and most profitable practices (net, not gross) use one technique.
4.                    Not talking TIC- Talking about insignificant topics like the weather, last night’s game, vacations, news, gossip, politics, cross-fit, golf, or whatever else comes up, not only wastes your time, it erodes the significance of the care you provide. Thus it leads to drop outs and the need to process more new ones to keep the ship afloat.
5.                    Individual reports- This area is another touchy and even scary subject for many, couched in many limiting beliefs, it is the notion that the doctor must do one on one reports. Again the highest volume practices do group reports. Why? Because they are the most effective, efficient and best way to educate a new practice member. Many docs try them and struggle because they don’t know how to do them properly. Can you be successful without them? Absolutely, but ask yourself how many people can you adjust in the time that it takes to do one individual report? One of the other major benefits that we see with our clients doing them regularly is they end up seeing more children and families due to the quality of education. If you do 8-10 individual reports in a week, will you always be on your game for each of those reports? You may think you are, but as a practice gets busier the doctor gets rushed, and the results show a practice that is stuck no matter how many new ones you process.
6.                    Hours of operation- Being open more hours and more days does not mean you are doing a greater service or you value your service more than others. If that were the case then we should have every office open 24/7. The majority of the docs we survey are working loads of hours, open 5-6 days a week, seeing the national average of 80-90 adjustments per week. What if you could adjust those same people in a morning shift, have a great lunch with your spouse, take a nap, do some reading, exercise, meditate and come back for the afternoon and adjust that same number again? For some it seems inconceivable because they are held in bondage by what someone once said to them.
7.                    Not cluster booking- Packing your adjustment hour times before offering more times is how your time is maximized. It forces you to be at your best and cut out all the extracurricular things that don’t produce excellent patient outcomes. When it comes to appointments there are 3 types of people, those that show up early, those that show up on time and those that are always running late. Cluster booking smooths these inconsistencies out and keeps you from waiting for people to show up when you could be doing something more important than checking your Facebook feed.

Be honest with yourself, are any of the significant 7 preventing you from having the practice and life you always wanted? If not, keep doing what you are doing, kudos to you! If you want to learn more about how to fix these delemmas, join us at our next Chiropassion event, or contact us at www.chiropassionconsulting.com

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