The Secret to Effective Scheduling

Has a patient ever accepted your treatment plan, and you suggest to your assistant to place an hour and a half in the schedule as soon as possible to get it done? Your assistant asks, "Are you sure? With how much you like to talk and explain things during the procedure? Better make it two hours." Then the receptionist looks through the schedule and says there is no way she can fit in a two-hour appointment in the foreseeable future. But she does have an opening for an hour and 10 minutes next week. You book the procedure for that time and it gets done efficiently and smoothly without any compromise in the quality of care.

You may not have a story that goes exactly like that but I am sure you have had moments where you have surprised yourself with what you could do when you simply had no other options. There is a big lesson in there that I think we miss too often.

There is of course such a thing as having too little time. This is where you find yourself rushed or pressured and unable to deliver the kind of care you want to the full extent of your ability. You know when that happens. But there is also such a thing as having too much time, and that's something you may not recognize.

This is because there is a phenomenon in life where work expands to fill the time you designate for it. Give the average person six hours to complete a project and they can do it. Give that same person seven hours and it will take seven hours. Not because they are lazy, but because they will use the gift of time they have, whether it is strictly necessary or not. The important thing to recognize is that same person in most cases can often accomplish the same task, to essentially the same level, in five hours, if that's what is required.

In a dental practice, as in life, time is your most valuable resource. Too little time creates uncomfortable stress. Too much time is a hidden production loss. Of course there are successful practitioners who simply prefer to work at a more measured pace and they have mastered their scheduling and team support to reflect that style while maintaining a good value of time. The answer for every dentist is to be ruthlessly honest about what constitutes your best "effective time" and to build your strategies around that.

This is where good block scheduling comes in. This is where you reserve the time in the practice in a way that maximizes results. It's about prioritizing the right mix of cases in the correct way, with the exact amount of time for each. In case you missed it, I laid out the fundamentals of how to make your schedule work for you in the previous article, “How to Get Your Schedule to Work for You”.