8 Tips and Tricks to Manage Time for Therapists and Coaches
As an entrepreneur and mental health expert, I know and understand the value of time.
Time is our currency. We’re all given the same 24 hours to our day. What we do with it is up to us.
After years of struggling with time management, here are the seven time management tips and tools I’ve used to manage my time as a business owner in a way that makes me feel good and present (i.e., avoiding burnout). Great time management helps with me boundaries, allows me to stay in my zone of genius, and sets both my clients and me up for success.
8 Tips & Tricks to Manage Your Time in Private Practice
01. Use Google Calendar or iCal to Block out your time
*I’ll break down setting up your ideal schedule a bit below, but for a deeper dive, check out the full blog in our post, Setting up your ideal schedule in private practice.
Step 01. Determine how many clients you want to see in a week.
As a fee-for-service provider, I know my income is based on the number of sessions I book in one week. To find how many sessions I want to see in a week, I calculate my desired gross income divided by 48 weeks. Remember, it’s important to block off time for vacations, sick days, and business development, so don’t plan to work 52 weeks a year.
Let’s say I want my annual income to be $100,000. I’ll divide that by 48 weeks to account for vacation and sick time. $100,000/48 = $2,083 needed a week.
DESIRED GROSS INCOME/48 = INCOME needed a week
Next, I ask myself how many clients I want to see in a week. Right now, my ideal number is 15. So, I divide $2,083 by 15 which would give me a session cost of $138.88. Let’s call that $140 for simplicity.
INCOME NEEDED A WEEK/DESIRED # OF SESSIONS = COST/SESSION
Step 02: Block off time in your calendar.
If you want to see clients only three days a week, think through what that looks like in terms of self-care, pet duties, childcare, meals, breaks, emails, etc.
I like to color-coat my different time chunks by client time/personal/general business.
Leave space in your calendar as non-negotiable break time, and if you need to make sure you follow through in your self-care practices, mark those in your calendar as well. This is KEY if you are using our next time-saving tool of Calendly, so your basic needs are attended to as you're setting up your schedule.
02. Use Calendly as a scheduling assistant
We love Calendly. We’re not sure how businesses can operate without it.
As an entrepreneur, you will be setting up a variety of meetings. You’ll have new client phone calls, parent sessions, networking calls, calls with contractors, friends, etc. Stop wasting your time with a back-and-forth conversation on email, and use Calendly to set up a time efficiently.
After you’ve blocked out your time on Google Calendar or iCal, link your calendars to Calendly. Then, create different event types based on your business needs. Send out links to specific calendars for coordination.
It might take some time to figure out how much time you want to open up on Calendly. This is an ever-evolving process, so pay attention to what feels good and works best for you.
The beauty of Calendly is that it’s easy to update! Change things around if you notice something scheduled that doesn’t feel like a full-body yes on your calendar! Remember, you’re in charge.
03. Get a password protection system
Stop wondering what your passwords are or resetting them when you forget. Get a secure password protection system and never worry about remembering your logins again. The free version of LastPass is great and will save you tons of time!
04. Use Flodesk for your email marketing and & workflows
We love Flodesk. Flodesk is a digital email marketing platform that’s built for creatives. It’s intuitive and easy to use, with clear workflows throughout the platform.
The more we learn about running a business, the more we realize how important having a robust email list is.
If you don’t have an email marketing platform, we recommend setting it up right away. Create a pop-up on your site that collects email addresses and potentially offers people a freebie. From there, you can send out events, updates, sales, and relevant business info to your email list.
This is a perfect way to build your brand and that “know, like, and trust factor.” Your future self will thank you for setting this up. If you’d like more training on growing your email list, Kelsey of Coming Up Roses has an awesome training to check out if you want to learn more on growing your email list!
How to Set Up an Email List for Private Practice Therapists
Step 01: Get Flodesk.
Use this affiliate link to get a year of 50% off! For just $19 a month, you get a beautiful and easy-to-use email marketing platform for all your business needs.
Step 02: Set up workflows.
After you’ve signed up, start to set up your workflows. To develop more personal relationships with your audience, you want to set up your email marketing strategically. It would be a lot of manual work to determine who to send what emails and when. So, instead, Flodesk has the option of automation. In Flodesk, they call these automations “workflows.”
You can automate the newsletter process so you are constantly nurturing and engaging with your audience without actually sitting at the computer and sending out emails. Setting this up once creates a rinse-and-repeat factor that frees up your time and allows you to engage with customers without having live 1:1 contact (i.e., passive income, baby!).
05. Use Google Voice for your business phone & keep the alerts turned off
As a therapist in private practice, you are not an on-call service. You provide a service (50-minute therapy session) for a fee ($140 from the example above). Perhaps you offer 15-minute check-ins if needed (which people can schedule with you using Calendly).
In reality, there is no reason you need to be responding to text messages and phone calls right away. Let clients know this is not your policy from the get-go.
Here’s how to hack Google Voice to save you time and set boundaries:
Get a Google Voice number.
Download the Google Voice app onto your phone.
Turn off call forwarding. You won’t receive any phone calls on your phone. You’ll only be able to text from the app. You'll have to use your computer if you want to make a phone call or receive one.
Turn off alerts on your phone. This way, you only check texts and voicemails when you choose to.
Be boundaried with your time and only respond to messages during work hours!
06. Track your time with Toggl
Since starting PREMADE, we’ve played around with various time-tracking apps. Nothing beats Toggl.
It allows you to track your time either on the computer widget or phone app and is visually appealing. Time tracking shows you where you are spending your time, and where you are potentially wasting it.
Again, time is your currency, so use it wisely.
After tracking your time, pay attention to what tasks take you out of your “zone of genius” and what tasks keep you in your creative flow. See if there is anything you can hire someone to do for you. Remember, you don’t have to do it all.
07. Notion, Notion, Notion
We are going to be writing lots of upcoming posts on Notion. For now, it’s sufficient to say we are obsessed.
Notion is the business task tracker that just makes sense! It has all the capabilities of Asana and Trello, plus more! It’s used in the web & tech world and needs to make its way over to the mental health world.
If you want to learn more about how to use Notion, check out this getting started video.
08. Use an Electronic Health Record (EHR) as your Virtual Assistant
Nowadays, most EHR’s can do many of the tasks you would have had to do on your own. For instance, Simple Practice does the following things: sends out appointment reminders, allows clients to schedule and reschedule appointments online, automatically collects payments and transfers them to your business bank account, stores notes and intake paperwork, generates Superbills…the list goes on and on.
Investing $100 a month in Simple Practice actually allows you to make more money because it frees up hours of your time, which is worth much more than that $100.
Let’s say your weekly task time decreases by 3 hours. In those 3 hours, you could potentially see three more clients. That $100 investment in Simple Practice brought in $560 of revenue.
And it allows you to stay in your zone of genius.
As a business owner, you have to remember that you don’t need to do it all.
Use this link * to get $150 off your first month of Simple Practice.
*NOTE, THIS IS AN AFFILIATE LINK, SO THANK YOU!
To review!
Let’s break it down. Here are our go-to time management tools for entrepreneurs:
Google Calendar or iCal for time blocks
Calendly for all things scheduling
LastPass for password protection
Flodesk for marketing
Google Voice for a business phone number
Toggl for time tracking
Notion for ALL THE THINGS
Simple Practice for EHR
Let us know what we missed! What are your favorite time management tools?