How to Schedule Your Day

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How to schedule your day

Wonder how to schedule your day? Q&A was part of Next Level Practice, the most supportive community for therapists starting a private practice. In this video, Joe answers the question based on how to schedule your day.

Question: How to Schedule Your Day?

How do you schedule your day?

How to Schedule Your Day Answer

I start with scheduling my week. So, I look at what does my week need to look like, based on the goals that I have for the practice. So if I know that I need to be hiring someone, or if I know I need to get some blogging done, I look ahead and I say, ‘How am I going make sure that it gets done over the next month?’ If I know every blog post takes me an hour to write, I’ll put that in my schedule ahead of time.

For example, as you get started, you might want to put in your schedule to repeat that the first Thursday of the month, for 90 minutes, you send emails to people that you could connect with or refer to, or they could refer to you. Maybe once a week, or every other week, you have a big block of time to blog. You just structure those in and view those as if they were clients.

Scheduling Your Day

Also, if you want to be working 30 hours a week with your practice, and you’re not doing that yet with the number of clients you have, I would say make sure you’re doing the number of hours that you eventually want to be doing. So, if you want to be working:

  • 9:00am to 4:30pm every single day, or 9:00am to 4:00pm three days a week, do that no matter what.
  • If you have one client, then you should be spending 29 hours working on all this other stuff. A lot of times what happens is when you’re slow, people are like, ‘Well, I’ll take another yoga class, or I’ll go for a walk with a friend, or have a cup of coffee’.
  • And it’s like, ‘No, you want a full-time practice, do this’. I would say definitely structure your time around what you want the outcome to be.

Then, when you have new clients don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m wide open, you can come anytime you want’. Even when I had a full-time job, I would say ‘I have a Thursday at 4:00pm, or a Wednesday at 3:30pm, which of those works for you?’ And they say, ‘Oh no, only Mondays work’. And I say, ‘Well, let me see if I can rearrange a couple of things’. Those couple of things was ‘do I go home after my full time job or not?’ But, they didn’t know that.

Consider This in Scheduling Your Day

A couple of other things I’d say is, for me, I start every morning with a green smoothie with some kale. I add a couple of berries, some carrot juice, and some seeds. And, for me, that helps me just feel like I start with some really good energy, and then I have my cup of coffee. For me that really works. I feel like then I at least have my veggies for the day. So I start with that on the way into work, I think about what it is that I need to accomplish today. What’s my one or two really big things, other than what’s on my calendar.

So it might be that today I need to work on reaching out to new referral sources, and so I’ll make sure that I do that before I check email. Because, as soon as you get that one email that pisses you off, or you get that one thing that’s a crisis, your day is happening to you instead of you happening to your day.

Schedule Micro-Plans

Then, I always look for ‘micro’ moments that I can be working on goals. So, if I have someone that’s five minutes late, I don’t just sit around and relax or you know peace out. I say, ‘No, I have five minute,s I need to work on it’. So right before this started, there was a Facebook message to me from one of my consulting clients that was really important. I didn’t push that off for later, I made it happen right then and took care of it. I made sure that I really got a lot done in a short period of time. And, oftentimes I’ll spell something wrong or something. But, to take action that’s imperfect is so much more important than creating perfect action that takes so much longer.

Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC

joe-sanok-private-practice-consultant-headshot-smaller-versionJoe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant. Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI. To link to Joe’s Google+ .