Orthodontic work presents many challenges for doctors looking to grow and balance their effectiveness with time limitations. Improving our work often leads to the development of great systems and leveraging technology. However, the challenge is that technology often magnifies our strengths but also intensifies our inefficiencies.
Three critical steps to amplifying your work are to optimize, automate and delegate. I must emphasize that the order of these three techniques is just as important as what each involves. Many practices experience common challenges since we often default to scaling our work by delegating and outsourcing it before optimizing it. Furthermore, most of us become busy and find someone else to outsource our work.
Delegation is common in orthodontics. We have assistants and work with outside teams to get things off our task lists. Automation also leverages technology to improve output and consistency on routine work. To best amplify your orthodontic work, develop systems founded on effective workflow strategies so you can gain maximum efficiency.
Optimize
Build powerful routines to optimize that work. Optimizing your output helps to set up protocols and efficient workflows that save a tremendous amount of time. It can clear away a large part of repeatable work while gaining time and mental energy to focus on the critical pieces that will improve your effectiveness. Therefore, gain productivity and save time by optimizing what you do.
It is crucial to start optimizing work since your focus needs to be on building efficient systems before you automate and delegate them. Inefficient and ineffective processes magnified through the team and technology only create greater frustration. Examples of optimizing work include creating a winning playbook, batching, time blocking, creating templates, and leveraging productivity apps for mind dumps.
Automate
Automate to augment your time. Once you have optimized your work, you can implement automation tools to use technology instead of adding staff members onto your payroll. Machine automation leverages technology to remove mundane tasks to focus on the important tasks that only we can perform. In other words, we should use technology to enhance human abilities and handle simple, repetitive tasks that take our time away from building rapport and relationships.
We can use recent innovations in machine learning and AI engines to maximize human potential. Building routines and automation of these repetitive tasks can save time in the treatment planning and design process. Productivity apps and software platforms that relieve you of menial tasks are powerful tools. Some examples are tools like IFTTT, Zapier, email parser, automation widgets, and more. Thus, automation is about using technology to get things done.
Delegate
Once we have optimized and automated what we can, outsourcing your work to your team becomes an important part of your practice’s growth. We can delegate tasks to our internal team members, contractors, or virtual assistants. We also hire additional people to amplify our work and buy more time. Remember to consider delegating tasks that are not the best use of your time and not your strong suits. Delegation can be difficult when we like to control the process, but it is critical to magnify your work. Properly delegate work and find yourself doing more of what you love to do vs. what you loathe to do.
