64. Three Things You're Wasting Time On as a Busy SLP

In today's episode, I'm revealing three things that you're wasting your time on as a busy speech pathologist.   Tune in to hear personal insights and practical suggestions on how to recognize and overcome these habits. Whether you're listening to the podcast or watching in the SLP Support Group, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help streamline your workflow and improve your effectiveness. 

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Transcript

Hey, SLPs, welcome to the show. Today I am talking about three things that I think busy SLPs, PTs, OTs waste their time on. And just a little trigger wording, this might annoy some of you. This might frustrate you. This might sort of be the hard truth that you Might not want to hear, but you absolutely need to, which is what I'm here to do.

So whether you are listening to this on the podcast or maybe you're in the SLP support group and you're watching this video thank you for being here. I'm happy that you're here, and I'm just going to dive into these three things. and talk to you a little bit about what they, how they show up and what I mean by them and give you some suggestions of how you can determine if this is something that you're doing, what you can do to start fixing it.

Okay, so let's get started. Jump in. . So [00:01:00] these are not the only three things that I think you're wasting time on, but they are three of the biggest things. And I share this from personal experience.

When I was practicing as an SLP, these are things that I was wasting my time on. These are things that I know my coaching clients have struggled with, and I have seen colleagues that struggle with this. So this is something that I have personal experience with, and I say this with just love and zero judgment.

Okay. So the first thing that you are wasting time on is planning your sessions. Now, I want to be really clear here. I am not saying that it is bad or wrong to plan out your sessions. In fact, I think that that is a really smart, useful thing that you can do if that's something that works for you. However, what I often see and what I often would do was [00:02:00] over plan.

How much planning do you really need? Before you go into a session. Now, I know there are some people who never plan at all. They just walk right in. They grab things and they go with it, right?

And that's great. However, earlier on, As an SLP, when I was first starting out, I definitely needed to do a lot of planning and even as I was continuing on and was more experienced, still found myself leaning on. the session plan to what I thought was to maximize the session and give that client my best work.

However, what I will ask you how, like I said before, how much planning is really needed? And that is a genuine question. Do you really need to search for new activities, new materials, new crafts, new ideas. Every single week, how many of you who are [00:03:00] listening or who are watching find yourself scrolling Pinterest or, you know, on Instagram, looking at the highlight reels or the, the, I don't even know Instagram, clearly, whatever you call it on Instagram, the reels or the social media.

stories or whatever people do on Instagram these days, looking at all those beautiful pictures that are, you know, socially curated and have the really fun toys and colorful, you know, crafts and teacher's paid teachers, like all of that stuff that we sort of get stuck in. Instead of actually planning out what goals were targeting and what we're going to be using to target those goals.

Bing, bang, boom, done, right? So if you are somebody who plans sessions, I want you to think about why you are planning those sessions, not to tell you that you shouldn't be planning those sessions, but so that you can get really [00:04:00] clear on the goals motive or maybe even the underlying reasons that are driving you to plan out those sessions to such an extensive degree.

Right? So, especially for those of you who are very experienced, and you've been doing this for a while, you have a pretty good understanding of what works, what doesn't work. You kind of know what your go to materials are, or your go to games are, your go to ideas. And I understand that sometimes it can feel stale.

We can feel tired. We kind of want fresh new ideas. However, I also know that it's so easy and very common to dive down deep into that research hole thinking of all the different fun ideas that you can use only to look up and realize that you've spent the last 30, 40 minutes [00:05:00] searching, 

Actually plan out the session. And even if you did accomplish the planning piece, did you? How long did it take you? Did you do it in a way that was excessive or maybe not efficient, right? Maybe inefficient. So one way that you can sort of again, discern which category you fall into is what are your underlying thoughts when you are in those planning modes?

Okay, like what is your brain offering? What are the thoughts that are going through your mind? When you are planning your sessions, because if you start to pay attention to what those thoughts are, it can give you some insights about what your motives are, what you're either hidden motives are your conscious motives or subconscious motives.

Sometimes what I see is a therapist going down those planning rabbit holes because [00:06:00] they are bored, they want a dopamine hit, they want, something fun and creative that feels good. feels good. It's, it's feels good. It gives you that little dopamine hit. And it also feels productive. You're telling yourself that, Oh, this is for planning.

This is for my clients. This is what I need to do. Right. But really subconsciously, it feels productive, but it feels like you are sort of validating your skills as a clinician and in reality what you're doing is avoiding something else, whatever that something else may be. There's probably a lot of something else that you might be avoiding.

Usually though, it is a task or a group of tasks that are less fun, less creative, not giving you that dopamine hit at all, and are probably harder and more And overwhelming and [00:07:00] maybe difficult taxing more of a cognitive load that's required in order to complete those tasks so we can stay here in this fun Instagram Pinterest worthy mode or we can.

Go over to the report writing mode or the, you know, documentation or email, answering emails or communication or see use the stuff that maybe that really, quite frankly, doesn't feel as good. Right? Probably takes you longer to get those things done, and you're just avoiding the stuff that actually needs to be done.

So what I want you to do is if you find yourself falling into this trap The next time that you sit down to plan your sessions, be an observer. Of what's happening in the moment. Be an observer of yourself and what you're thinking as you're planning and how long it takes.

Now, for those of you who are listening or watching, [00:08:00] if you are neurodivergent, maybe you think you are, maybe you don't have a diagnosis, but you think you have a diagnosis of ADHD, you might struggle with time blindness where you lose track of time. And you also have difficulty estimating how long something has taken or how long something will take.

This planning mode, planning sessions, is such an easy trap when it comes to clinicians who are time blind or who have or struggle with time blindness because You could look up and lots of time has gone by and you actually haven't accomplished the planning, right? 

But how many sessions are actually done? So I want you to be an observer of your planning process. Look at how long it takes. Look at what you do and look at what your thoughts are when you are doing it. And that will help you to get clear on. what the underlying reason is, [00:09:00] and if it is necessary, To do all of that work to spend all of that time planning to be an effective and awesome clinician that I know that you are, whether you're, you know, spending 30 minutes, an hour planning a session or five minutes before you are an excellent clinician and you don't need to spend hours and hours of time scrolling in order to have a good session.

Okay. That's number one, planning. Number two is checking email. The second thing that we waste time on as SLPs is email. Now, just like I said with number one, I gave you sort of a clarifying statement. I'm going to do the same thing with email because what I am not planning saying is that you should not spend any time checking email.

I'm not saying it's wrong to check email. I'm not saying that you're necessarily always wasting time when you are checking email. However, [00:10:00] what I know to be true from personal experience and from professional experience and from coaching other SLPs is that we absolutely waste time on email and here's how, here's why.

How many of you who are listening or watching check your email a million times a day? How many of you find yourself, whether it's mindless spam, Or it is actual intentionally picking up your phone and opening up the email app on your phone to see what's new. I do this all the time. I'm guilty of this. I absolutely fall into this trap.

How many of you might have your, you know, you're at your desktop or your laptop or whatever, and you're doing work and you have your email open and you hear the ding and you're like, ooh, Pavlov, right? You're just responding immediately when you hear the notification or maybe the notification is silenced, but you see it flash up on your [00:11:00] screen or it comes up on your phone and you stop what you're doing.

You interrupt whatever it is that you're doing in that moment, and then you go check the email. And nine times out of ten, at least in my case, I'm not in a position to respond to the email that I'm checking. And then what I do is read it half focused, half distracted. I either mark it then as unread to come back to it, or I flag it, or in some cases I forget to do both, and I forget about the email entirely, but either way, I've now given myself another error.

Basically, I'm now checking that email twice because I'm like, okay, well, I can't respond to this right now. I'll come back to it. So I've already stopped and read it once and now I have to remember to go back, reread it, because when I go back to respond to it later, I forget what was written.

And then I have to reread it, generate a [00:12:00] response and send it. so I'm basically doing double the work. I also think it's really easy for things to slip through the cracks. If you are checking your email whenever you happen to think of it or notice it, and it's really easy for you to not be in a position where you're paying close enough attention.

And so you forget about things and Drop balls, right? The balls are dropped. Something happens. Something slips through the cracks, or you're also trying really hard mentally to remember that thing, but it's now an open loop in your brain, right? And you're thinking, Oh, gosh, I gotta respond to that email, 

So what I want to offer is instead I'm glad. What if you only checked email at certain times of day or you only checked email when you have intentionally decided that you are in a position to open, read and respond to whatever emails are in your [00:13:00] inbox. So instead of checking it a million times a day, you're only checking it at certain times of day and you get to decide.

How often that is and when that is, and I know that there are people that are listening who are Uncomfortable with this idea and I want you to ask yourselves. Why why what is the tension or the stress? That's coming up for you. What is that about? What are you thinking so identify the thoughts that are Driving you to check your email I know oftentimes for me or for clients I've coached, it's FOMO, it's fear of missing out on something, it's thinking that something is incredibly urgent when it actually isn't, your brain just tells you that it is, and so you sort of panic and try to control for that in advance.

Also, I think we do that to people please. And we're worried about what other people are going to think of us if we don't respond quickly. [00:14:00] We also are worried that something's going to go wrong. You know, what if a family needs me? Or what if one of my employees or my contractors need something urgent?

And what I say is, They're going to find you like one way or another. Chances are they have more than just your email address. And if there's something on fire, you're going to know about it. Okay, you don't have to panic about missing an email notification, especially if you know that you have carved out specific times of day to check it.

You don't have to worry. So to alleviate some of that stress, Okay, I also want to offer that there's a high, high chance, chances are high that you are checking your email to avoid doing something else or and or you're checking your email because it feels productive. It feels like, okay, I can just sort of check this, check it done.

It's off my list. But usually that's not the way [00:15:00] that it goes. And even if it does go that way, you've stopped doing whatever it was that you were doing in the first place. You've been interrupted. It's going to cost you more time to go back to that thing and get back into that mode or that flow to do that task that you were doing when you stopped for your email.

So if anything. I hope that this sort of points out the possibilities of how this could be true for you, and I just want you to start thinking about, okay, is this true for me? In what ways might it be true? And start to pay more attention to what's going on when this happens. So planning sessions, checking email.

And then the third and final thing that I am going to share in today's episode that we waste time on as busy SLPs, or PTs and OTs, is documentation. I mentioned documentation at the start of this episode when I talked about, you know, planning. But I really want to [00:16:00] dive into this together because documentation, in my opinion, is one of the biggest things that we waste time on.

Again. I want to clarify. I am not saying that you shouldn't spend time on documentation. Obviously, that is not the case. That's not what I'm suggesting. what I want you to ask yourself is how much time do you really need to write a good effective session note?

How much time do you really need to write a good effective report? Whether that's a progress report, an evaluation report, whatever that is, how much time does it really take? Is it possible that you're actually procrastinating while you're doing these tasks? So hear me out. If you're feeling a little bit triggered or attacked, hear me out.

You sit down, right, let's say you gotta write an assessment report. So you sit down, you've got the test protocols on your desk, you open up the [00:17:00] file for the report on your computer, and then what do you do? Do you immediately start writing the report? You probably then check your email.

So if, in which case, refer back to number two. You might also start scrolling or searching for things on your computer and you're not actually in the writing mode, okay? So, procrastination. But even if you're one of the rare ones who sits down, opens up the document and starts writing, here's what I'm gonna guess is that Sometimes happens, often happens or has happened that you start doing other things within that report, like even even that feels like it's related to this assessment, but it's not actually writing the report efficiently.

I would start Googling different tests, different test descriptions. Even though I've given that assessment a million times, I have a template that describes that assessment. I [00:18:00] sort of question or doubt what I've already come up with. And I think maybe there's a better way to say this.

Maybe there's some, more updated. A description of the assessment. Maybe I should go into a little bit more detail. So I start searching for different ways to describe the assessment or the sub tests of that assessment. I might also start opening other reports from past clients that I think are similar.

Because I think that I need the information from those reports and that's going to save me time because I can take that information and I can copy and paste it and then modify it to reflect this current client, this current assessment. never works out that way.

Happens that way for me because usually I spend more time sort of fitting a square peg into a round hole. I have to modify too many things that it would have just been easier for me to start from scratch rather than pull from a client who's sort of similar but not exactly similar 

I also start googling examples of You know, [00:19:00] different morphosyntactic structures. So I am looking for examples of different structures that were tested in that assessment during that evaluation to to explain more clearly what I'm trying to say, even though I already have examples, even though there's examples from the assessment that are right there in my protocol that I can use, right?

But I think that there's another way to say it a better way to say it a better example. And so I start Googling that and start putting them to put them in the report and all of these things feel like I'm writing the report, but I'm not actually writing the report and they're unnecessary. They're not necessary.

And do you know what you're actually doing? I know what I'm actually doing. I'm procrastinating. I'm telling myself that I'm being productive and that I'm doing my best work, right? Oh, this is how I write my best report. But in reality, nine times out of ten, I'm subconsciously or sometimes consciously avoiding a [00:20:00] task that's going to feel hard or it's going to feel overwhelming.

It's going to really require me to be a little bit more thoughtful and it feels more difficult, right? These are the easy things. These, these are not so hard. They're not so taxing, but it feels like I'm working on the report. And next thing you know, it's two hours have gone by and nothing has actually gotten accomplished.

Or, If you know, sometimes I don't do this, I won't write reports in a two hour block. I might do 30 minutes here or an hour there. Nothing has actually gotten accomplished or very little has gotten accomplished way less than I could do realistically in that block of time. Had I just been focused on what really mattered.

That is the piece that I think so many SLPs and other clinicians are choosing to overlook or just simply are not aware of. What actually matters? How good. Does your report need to be? How [00:21:00] detailed does your report need to be and how much of what you are worrying about and focusing on is not actually relevant to what matters for for your client?

So if any of this resonates with you, whether it's the planning piece, planning sessions, or email or documentation, what I want you to do is click the link. 

It's free. It's virtual. There will be a recording, but you should make every effort to attend live because I'm going to be talking all about procrastination, all about how these things are actually forms of procrastination and what you can do about it.

So make sure you sign up today. You do not want to miss it. I can't wait to dive in with you and I will see you all there.