TREAT YOUR PRACTICE LIKE A (OH NO!) JOB (May/June 2002 Issue)

One reason most people start their own private practice is the freedom to be their own boss. In your own practice, the only boss you have is your checkbook. You can set your hours, take time off, work in your PJ's, do things the way YOU want to have them done. If your checkbook likes you, then you're doing okay

A healthy checkbook is a sign that you are doing two things right--you're doing enough marketing activities to bring in new business, and --you're giving good enough service to your old business so clients are paying you. Reporting to your checkbook rather than a boss is called freedom, and freedom is the main reason private practitioners leave their jobs.

Freedom has its price tag. There's a danger lurking in total time discretion and only the "bottom line is my boss." The time-lag distance between cause and effect can be wide so you don't get the immediate feedback loop you have with a "real" boss. If you stop marketing yourself in January, you'll experience an income drop months later, say, in April. When it drops in April and you jump back on the marketing wagon, your biz won't pick up again until August.

This cause and effect time-lag makes it possible to squander vast amounts of time before you know it's a problem. If you were employed, your boss would have goals, objectives, and regular reports of your activity. Your feedback loop would be speedy... you'd know quickly if you were spending time in the right place because your boss would tell you waaaaaay before it showed up in the bottom line.

So, even though in some respects it's what we don't want -- still in some ways it's best to treat your practice as a job.

Which ways? Well, in "office hours," and in "report to the boss."

One way people manage their practice to simple spend all their waking time on it. That style encourages working a lot of hours, but ineffectively.

When you have "all the time in the world," you can spend a lot of time on things that don't matter and avoid the really productive things. This system always leaves you with more to do, because no matter how many hours you put in, you'll need to do more because you're not doing the productive things in the first place. So, your private practice becomes a 24/7 thing keeping you very busy, but not very productive.

Another way people manage their business is at the other extreme. Instead of devoting every available minute, they just "squeeze it in" when they can. This is especially tempting to people starting their practice part time, on the side while holding another job. Another way of expressing that is that you're doing the business not part-time, but spare-time. There's your trouble: no one has any spare time, nowadays.

You can do a private practice full-time or part-time, but you can't do it spare-time. A Spare-time business looks like this: you "intend" to get some things done, but something else "gets in the way." Since things don't move themselves, they really don't "get in the way," rather, you choose to value something else more and spend your time on that. In choosing to attend a movie, visit your family, perform do-it-yourself home repairs, etc., you are making choices. You are placing a higher priority on other things and that's what makes them "get in the way" of your practice.

One way to take control of your time in this regard is to set Office Hours. Of course you'll have office hours when you've scheduled to meet with a client -- I'm not talking about those hours. It's the hours to do marketing, accounting, writing, etc., that need to be defined. Parkinson's law says, "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." If you give yourself all day, it will take all day.

On the other hand, if you give yourself set times to work, you'll tend to finish the work in that allotted time.

One interesting bonus for defining "time on" is that it lets you have "time off." I sometimes suggest this to my clients on job search, too. If they don't give themselves specific hours on, they have no time off. Anytime they do something that's not their job search, they feel uneasy, guilty, like "I should be working on my job search." So even when they do take time to watch a movie, talk with a friend, etc., the joy is robbed by guilt. When they set hours, then the time off is guilt-free and really restorative. Their time on is more efficient. If they quit at 5, then the letters get mailed by then. If they have no quitting time, they'll futz with the letters to midnight.

So also in a private practice. If you know your hours "on," you'll enjoy your hours "off."

The second way to manage your time management is by setting specific measurable goals and establishing accountability for those goals. Without having written, or at least spoken-to-another-person goals, you can too easily slide into activity, not accomplishment. The heart of a private practice is building your visibility and credibility in a targeted population. It takes OBECS, speeches, newsletters, referral sources, etc. Some of these activities are less enjoyable than others. Left to our own devices, we'll avoid the difficult ones and do the easy ones. Bad idea.

So, get a buddy/mentor/colleague to set weekly goals with (maybe even daily in some circumstances). Discuss with that person what your hours, or what your limits on your hours will be. You will...

1) Enjoy your time off,
2) Get more done in the time on,
3) Focus on the high-yield activities,
4) Feel better each day knowing you've spent it productively,
5) Achieve a consistency and balance in your activities that will...
6) Make a better balance in your checking account.

Have a prosperous and satisfying day!

Jack Chapman is author of:
Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute
He is a career consultant in private practice and runs ongoing support and training teleconference sessions for career consultants in private practice.
He can be reached at 847-251-4727 or jkchapman@aol.com.