Manage Your Priorities, Not Your Time

Do you manage time, or do you manage priorities? In this guest post, Productive Dentist Academy's Director of Learning Systems and Practice Development, Dana Salisbury, explains the finer details of dental hygiene time management.

‍We can manage money, our team, and our practice schedules. However, when it comes to time, that's a different story. Time can only be accounted for. It can never be “used.” We do things through the passing of time, and once it’s gone it cannot be regained. Time, then, is a finite resource. We lose money with open time in our schedule. We lose time in team members that we neglect to train or refine within their job. There is more that we can do in order to manage our time effectively, but we must first understand the misuse of time before we can change our ways of utilizing it.

If you suspect that you have dental hygiene time management issues, you’re most likely wrong. A resource I enjoy is 50+ Better Questions to Ask than How to be More Productive. I've found it useful for discovering how to better lay out your day and to maximize your time. How we perceive the value of time varies from our past experiences. As Einstein once said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.

”It’s necessary that within our dental office teams, we communicate the value of time. Share ways your team can utilize it on the schedule better. Show time as an effort and how valuing it can help the practice succeed. The way we are taught to think about time helps us better use time. If you believe that you have time management issues, I would bet that you are wrong. What you may have, however, are priority management issues. Stop thinking about how you can manage your time most productively and shift your mindset to how you can better manage your priorities. In doing so, I'm willing to bet you'll find more time in your day!

‍Save time in your day! Learn more about how RevenueWell improves case acceptance and creates more close-knit relationships between practices and your patients.