Welcome to the Productive Therapist podcast!
My name is Uriah and I’m a licensed marriage- and family-therapist and the Head Nerd in charge.
My goal is to give you some quick tips and tricks that will save you time so you can be a more productive therapist. I want to help you get more done so you can have more fun. Sounds good, right?
So I would have to say that one of my superpowers is organization. It’s not as exciting as invisibility or being able to fly, but it’s quite useful in my life and my work.
So I love organizing tools and storage containers in my garage. I like organizing tea in my kitchen cabinet. And I also love organizing information. And that’s what I’m talking about today.
As a private practice owner, you likely have at least a couple of projects that you need to manage. This is true whether or not you have a team working for you. However, group practice owners tend to have a few more projects to manage.
Here are a couple of examples of common projects you might need to organize and track: one-time projects might be a website design or redesign, maybe an office remodel, creating an online course, giving a talk or workshop, maybe putting together an employee manual or possibly hiring a virtual assistant.
Some examples of ongoing projects could include social media marketing, other content marketing like blogging or podcasting, maybe community networking, regular employee reviews or possibly hiring clinicians for a group practice. You probably have some specific projects you’re currently working on or planning on starting soon.
I highly recommend using some sort of system to plan, track and complete important projects. This could be as simple as a dedicated notebook, maybe a whiteboard on your wall or a task or project management software.
Lately, I’ve been looking at and comparing various project management software platforms because I guess that’s what I do for fun! And there are some amazing ones out there, like Monday.com, ClickUp, BaseCamp, and others. However, I’m finding that they’re actually more complex than what I really want or need.
I like to search for simple solutions whenever possible. So I continue to use what I have, which is ToDoist – you might have heard me talk about ToDoist before. And it’s my current and all-time favorite task manager. I use it every single day and it keeps me organized.
When it comes to project management, I use it in a slightly different way that I find helpful.
Last year, they added a board or Kanban-view to the standard list-view. If you’ve ever seen or used Trello, you know what this looks like: it’s a series of columns populated by cards that hold information.
So I just create a new column for each section of a project and then add associated tasks below that. I can move cards between the columns, complete the tasks, delegate certain ones to my team and just generally track all the important parts of the project.
For Productive Therapist, I use the system to plan and track all of our content each month, so I have a column for podcast episodes, one for our weekly newsletter, one for social media posts, one for blog posts, etc.
It works nicely and it makes my organizational brain happy, which is good. The system is just functional; it’s not overly complex.
As a private practice owner, you’re not a full-time project manager, and neither am I really. But we do have things that we want to get done; sometimes those things are larger than a single task or a few tasks. For that, you need a project management system.
I suggest keeping it simple: use what you already have in place or take a look at something like Asana, ToDoist or Trello.
The important part is that you take small steps towards your big dreams so you can accomplish your goals and love your life in the process.
I hope you found this helpful!
I have one closing question for you: do you want to get more organized, increase your productivity and learn to delegate like a pro?
Thanks for listening and have a great day!
