My best tip for upping your productivity and reducing stress is featured in today’s podcast. May is Better Speech and Hearing month, and I’d like to share how I become a better therapist. Improving my productivity while reducing my stress allows me the time and mental space to problem solve in areas where I’m stuck. Try it! It can work for you, too. 

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Developmental Sequence of Phonemic Awareness – Ep. 004

Prime to Rhyme Cards

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Because May is Better Speech and Hearing Month, I thought, what better way to be a better speech language pathologist than to arrange things so that you have time to focus on what really matters, and that’s helping your clients, helping the ones that you don’t quite know what to do with, having time to figure that out, reaching out to other SLPs, maybe listening to a podcast or two, getting some tips, and also just being rested.

Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, here with co-host Dan. And today I’m going to share one thing I do that has made a huge difference in my effectiveness and productivity in my private practice.

Dan: Now productivity, that’s something I have loved for years. So I’m quite eager to get into this topic. So you titled this episode I Can Sleep When the Wind Blows, are we sleeping outside?

Denise: You wish.

Dan: No. No, I don’t.

Denise: I know for those of you don’t know, Dan hates camping. Anyway. It’s based on this children’s fable about a farmer who hires a young farm hand, and when he asks the farm hand why he should hire him, the young boy says because I can sleep when the wind blows, which rather mystified the farmer, but he decided to give him a chance. And so one night this huge storm came up and the farmer was worried about barn doors flapping open and gates swinging wide, hay going everywhere, all that kind of stuff.

But he found out that this farm hand had taken care of everything, securely, fastened everything in case of a storm. And so the farm boy was sleeping peacefully away because he knew he’d taken care of everything. That’s what he meant by. I can sleep when the wind blows

Dan: Ah-huh. Okay. What do you do to, uh, sleep when the wind blows

Denise: Monday mornings, I don’t have any clients until about mid morning so that I can plan my entire therapy week. And I don’t let anything get in the way of that. I don’t answer the telephone if it rings, I don’t answer email. I just get right to it. And when my whole week is planned, it feels so wonderful.

Dan: What are the benefits? How does this help you?

Denise: Well, I never feel rushed to plan. Um, I feel in control. So it’s like planning my week instead of my week planning me. So let me just describe some things that used to happen before I did this. So it used to be that I might plan just for the clients I was gonna see in the morning, have a little afternoon break and then plan for the afternoon.

But what if, uh, a parent called and talked longer than I expected?

Dan: There are a million things that will interrupt your day.

Denise: A million things that come up, a million things that come up and, and you just kind of feel rushing outta control. If you’re like, oh, I can’t attend to this now because I’ve got to right now plan, I’ve got, you know, three or four clients coming, boom, boom, boom, right in a row.

And I’ve got a plan for them. So it just takes away that feeling of anxiety or unsettledness if you haven’t planned, because I have the whole week planned.

Dan: Does it take longer to do it this way?

Denise: No, I think it takes me less time because of the value of chunking a like task.

Dan: Oh, blocking is another term I’ve used.

Denise: Yeah, I’m blocking it. So it does, it takes me less time to plan.

Dan: Because you get into planning mode and you just easily flow from one to the other. That makes sense.

Denise: Yeah, and with this saved time, there’s more time to ponder on clients who I feel we’re getting kind of stuck with and to search for answers, because as I mentioned before, instead of the week planning me, I’m planning the week, well, I’m now in charge of these other chunks of time that are freed up to really think about the clients that need to spend some extra time pondering on.

Dan: Is there an advantage to planning ahead as far as preparation for your materials?

Denise: Yeah, there is because I can see that I might use the same toy or whatever, several times in the day, and so I just, oh, I, I get out less because I sort of chunk, oh, I’m using that with this client. I can use that with this client. When I plan for the week, if there’s something that I want consistently and it keeps popping up, I wish I had that. I wish I had that. If it pops up enough while you’re planning the whole week, then I’m like, oh, I should buy that. Um, you know, I should buy that certain toy. I should buy that product. So my purchases are less impulsive and they’re more spent on what I actually need to spend my money on, I guess. And also if I spend too much time creating something, I mean, we speech therapists, we do create materials, right.

But if I’m thinking, oh, I gotta create this. I gotta create this. I gotta create this, then, aha, I should hire someone to do that for me. because time is money for us, right? And my prime to rhyme cards are a perfect example of that, which I developed about a year ago. And I was, uh, spending a lot of time looking at pictures on the internet for these certain rhyming words and I needed tons of them. And then I thought. I’m just gonna hire someone to do this for me. And I use that set all the time. It was so worth my money.

Dan: It was so simple for us to, to outsource that too. There’s a service out there that we use called Upwork. And, uh, there’s another one called Fiver that we’ll use from time to time too, but we can detail what we want, and for really very little, some of these people across the world will sign up to do it. And in this case, Prime to Rhyme was put together by a, a nice man for us in India.

Denise: Yes, he’s a wonderful artist.

Dan: And so it took way less of your time and it was wonderful to pay him because we know we were helping him and his family as well. So that is a wonderful thing to, to do is to make sure that you, you protect your time and use it wisely. If you can look ahead and you can also check supplies and you’re running low on mini marshmallows. You’re not running to the store in the middle of the night.

Denise: Well, that’s true. That’s true. I do look ahead and I make a list for like Saturday or whatever. These are things I need to get for the clinic and I’ll get them on the weekend. Yeah. I don’t have any of those emergency runs.

Dan: I, yeah, I know, cause I’ve made a few of those emergency runs in the middle of the night, so I’m really glad for that. Thank you. By doing your weekly planning all up front. How does that help the rest of the week for all the other things that you have to do, those million and one things.

Denise: Have you ever heard the analogy about you have a jar and you have to fit in sand and you have to fit in ping pong balls. And if you put all the sand in first and then try and put your ping pong balls in, they won’t fit. Right. Okay. But if you put all the ping pong balls in first, then the sand fills in the cracks and it all fits. It’s just like that. I have time for my reports. I have time for the phone calls. I have time for the emails. I just take care of the most important thing first, which for me, is that weekly planning.

Dan: Now I’ve noticed that you’re using this, not only to batch your planning, but you also batch your phone calls too. You don’t necessarily take all the phone calls as they come in. You let, ’em go to voicemail and then you’ll take and set aside a time during the day to just answer all your phone messages at one once.

Denise: Oh yeah. Because this doing things in little chunks, it, the little pieces, it just eats up your time.

Dan: It’s just an interruption. Right. And speaking of interruptions, what have you learned about interruptions? What advice do you have for people who get interrupted a lot?

Denise: And when I used to work in the school district, the unplanned interruptions happened a lot or, uh, meeting going longer than you expected. I didn’t do this planning back then, and I don’t know how possible it would’ve been to do it, but I really would’ve tried it if I known it because you’re in this meeting, it’s going longer. And you’re thinking I’ve got a, a kid in 10 minutes. I haven’t planned yet. it’s it’s anxiety producing.

Dan: Takes you out of the meeting too.

Denise: If I were working in the schools, I would certainly try to make something like this happen.

Dan: so how has this helped the profitability of your practice?

Denise: I can take more clients on my caseload without feeling spent because I’m more efficient. And, I realized when I counted up, just as I was preparing this podcast, I was like, oh yeah, I’m taking more than I would’ve said I would’ve taken two years ago because that was exhausting me just because I’m more efficient.

Dan: Right. And now what’s the, the big payoff.

Denise: My time is my own. My free time is my own. Where I used to sit on the couch on Saturdays, writing evaluations or reports. I’m like, oh, why am I doing this? Why can’t I do this faster?

Dan: Why can’t I be out in the garden?

Denise: For the most part, um, when I’m done, I’m done. And you can shut the computer, shut everything off. I don’t answer the phone on weekends. You know, I just let, ’em go to voicemail. Every once in a while, I do have to write a report on a weekend, but, uh, not very often anymore. So I love that.

Dan: So how long have you been planning this way and why’d you start doing it?

Denise: It was total serendipity. Cause like I said, I used to plan maybe my morning and then my afternoon. And then I started planning a whole day in the morning and then it happened that my Monday morning just cleared out. For some reason, just opened up all my clients graduated or whatever and I realized I could plan for the whole week.

And it’s been so wonderful. Ever since then, I’ve kept Monday mornings open.

Did this make the planning easier?

No, not really. I have to make myself do it. I just have to practice at self-discipline because it’s a solid chunk of concentration and analysis and evaluation that you’re doing all at once. You’re doing your kind of thinking for the whole week. About what each client needs. I review my soap(?) notes. Um, go through plan. Let’s see, is this really the best one? Is this the next step? Look at my tracking sheets. So yeah, I mean, I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s a brain strain, but it’s just worth it. So I do it.

Dan: Well, there’s a million things, especially now in the age of the internet that are so distracting, and it’s so much easier to go to Facebook or YouTube rather than do something valuable like planning. What are some of the precautions that you do as you sit down? To make sure that you stay with it?

Denise: I have everything I need downstairs. I have my water. Well, for those of you who don’t know, my clinic is in the basement of my home so I can get distracted by heading upstairs. So if I’m gonna wanna a mid-morning snack, I better bring it down with me. I better have my water with me. Uh, I can just get distracted if I walk upstairs for something.

Dan: Do you turn your phone on silent?

Denise: Yes. My phone is on silent, yeah. And I don’t answer emails, you know, they come pinging through, right. I just. I just don’t answer them.

Dan: Do you just like turn off the, the email app completely and just say you don’t exist?

Denise: I didn’t know I could do that.

Dan: But yes, you can. I’ll show you how to do that. Yes. You can close down your email app and have it completely turned off. You know, what’s the consequence? Will you, you won’t see your email for an hour or two and life will go on just fine. I teach a productivity class to all of the interns at my company every six months, and this is one thing that they’re all shocked at too. I don’t have to answer email immediately. No, if it’s an emergency, they’ll pick up the phone and call you. And if you’re not answering phones well, then they’ll come find you. If the building is burning down, we will find you. They always tell me, well, that’s so old fashioned. Well, yes, I know I did grow up in the day before email existed if you can even imagine that far back. But it’s okay to turn off email. It’s okay to turn off Twitter. It’s okay to turn off instant messenger, all these things have been designed to interrupt your day and believe me, those software developers are plotting to interrupt you.

That is their whole goal in life, and you have to actually take action to stop them. So you have to shut down instant messenger. You have to turn off notifications. You have got to carve out time for yourself.

Denise: Well, I feel like concentration might be somewhat old fashioned, but it’s so, so valuable. We need to concentrate and we teach our clients to concentrate. We need to concentrate.

Dan: Well, you’ll do a better job of planning if you do. So what does your day look like at the beginning? If the planning’s done, what’s Tuesday like? What’s Wednesday like?

Denise: Or Monday after my planning, what does it look like? Cuz that’s when it really starts. When, when my Monday clients do start coming, well, I have all my therapy plans for the day typed out. So I just print out Mondays. I take a little yellow notepad, I draw a line down it. And on one side I write gather, for all the materials I need to gather. And on the other side of the line, I write prepare, that just tells me what toys I’m gonna gather.

And I have a little toy box that is closed, you know, and that’s where I just dump everything. I can pull it out as I need it. All my materials for the whole day, I can gather them and under prepare it’s I need to print something. I need to laminate something. Is there something I do need to prepare and my gather list should be much longer than my prepare list.

And if my prepare list looks too long, that’s my little clue. You’re spending too much time on this prep stuff. Either buy something to do for you, have someone make it for you.

Dan: What are some of the drawbacks to this approach? Are there any?

Denise: The Mondays that are holidays. And there’s not that many of ’em, but I have to remember on Tuesday morning to get down here a little bit early, a couple times I’ve forgotten and it’s been a huge shock.

Oh, I just don’t open up and print out Tuesday. It’s not there yet. So, and a bit of a scramble.

Dan: Yeah. I know there have been some three day weekends where we have gone on a trip or something and we get back late Monday night and suddenly you’re you’re behind the eight ball.

Denise: Yes. And so that happens, but I try and catch up.

Dan: Are there any clients situations that make this a struggle? I mean, what about…

Denise: Oh yeah. So the twice a week clients, I only have a few of those. So I do plan for them separately, because I just like to plan based on what happened on the last session.

You could project ahead, is that I think I’ll do this on Tuesday and I think I’ll do this on Thursday because there probably won’t be that much of a change, but I do have to remember that.

Dan: How long does it take to do a planning?

Denise: It takes me about two hours. I have about 30 clients. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, a little bit less, but yeah, I think that’s, that’s really good.

That is really good. You think about two hours for 30 clients? That’s four minutes a client.

I did the math. But some of them are honestly two minutes and some of em are five minutes and…

Dan: But it all works out.

Denise: It all works out, yeah.

Dan: But that saves you so much time in the back end of the thing. That’s a great tip. I think there’s a lot of people who might be able to use this.

Denise: Because May is Better Speech and Hearing Month, I thought, what better way to be a better speech language pathologist than to arrange things so that you have time to focus on what really matters and that’s helping your clients, helping the ones that you don’t quite know what to do with, having time to figure that out, reaching out to other SLPs, maybe listening to a podcast or two? Getting some tips and also just being rested and having your time to yourself, that’s really, really important so that you are refreshed when you come back to work.

Dan: Well, doing your planning is really mindful speech therapy, cuz you’re able to be present with every one of your clients for just a few moments every week.

Denise: Oh, that’s true. I hadn’t thought of that. And you are present when you are talking to parents on the phone or who ever calls you or whatever interactions you need. You can be present with them. You can be present with your family. Because you have put your work away.

Dan: That’s a wonderful thing. Well, we would encourage you to help your fellow speech therapist too this month. If you found an idea in this podcast, please share it with one of your colleagues and send them over to the podcast too. Please rate our podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast that helps other SLPs find us. Thank you, and remember that when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself, have a great week.

Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP ProAdvisor. Visit SLP proadvisor.com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise’s highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs. A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you’ve think. Join the [email protected].