3 productivity boosters

Dentistry is rewarding but it’s also demanding. When you add the weight of running a practice to the physical toll of chair-side work, it’s no wonder that burnout is common in dental practice.

I’ve spent 30+ years thinking about how to increase productivity in a dental practice. The assumption that higher productivity must come at the cost of personal wellbeing is a false one. In reality, the two goals are aligned.

When you streamline your workflows and create systems that support both you and your team you become more productive and less stressed. The following three dental practice productivity tips offer a practical roadmap to achieving exactly that.

1. Delegate and trust your team

A common stress intensifier for dentists is the belief that they must oversee every task in the practice. A friend suffered from this problem. He described the feeling as: “It’s like my staff are walking about carrying single sheets of paper while I’m staggering around with a massive pile of paperwork on my back.”

Feeling you need to check everything leads to micromanagement, bottlenecks and a team that doesn’t develop its capabilities. Delegation is about placing responsibilities with the right people. The rule I had in my practice was that I didn’t do any task that I was able to delegate. That allowed me to spend 100% of my time diagnosing and treating patients.

Train your clinical and front desk staff to operate to their full scope. The most dramatic expression of this is 6-handed dentistry. It’s a workflow that cuts treatment times by 30–40% and reduces end-of-day fatigue by allowing the dentist to focus. Trust your team, and you’ll find that both productivity and morale rise together.

2. Systematise clinical procedures

It never ceases to amaze me how dentists make stuff up on the fly. Let’s say they’re doing a Class II composite; a procedure they would’ve done thousands of times. They’ll sit and dither: “Let’s have the Optibond. No, on second thought let’s have the G Bond.” It shouldn’t be that difficult.

For every procedure, work out the flow and then stick to it 100% of the time: Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, done. It will be a weight off your mind and the DAs will love the fact that you’re predictable. It lets them set up and know every stage of the procedure. Sometimes when I’d do a quadrant of crowns my DAs and I would work for an hour or more without saying a word. We could do that because everything was systematised.

Systemisation also keeps your mind fresh for when something difficult arises such as placing a tricky implant or navigating a tooth with 5 root canals. You haven’t spent your cognitive reserves on decisions that should have been made once, years ago.

3. Block scheduling

There came a point in my career when I realised I didn’t want to do molar endodontics in the afternoon. When I’m tired, a difficult upper molar root filling is a nightmare. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a day when I had two molar root fillings scheduled one after the other at 4.00 pm and 4.45 pm. That event shaped how I scheduled from that point forward.

Complex work such as crown preparations, veneers and endodontics go in the morning. By lunchtime, I have a substantial portion of the day’s revenue in the bag. My afternoon is filled with lighter work such as check-ups, restorations, consultations and crown inserts. The flow from challenging to easy during the day leaves me relaxed.

Block scheduling is about matching your energy to your work. Unfortunately, many dentists schedule based solely on the patient’s availability: “Oh, you want to come at 6.00 pm to get you root filling done? No problem.” By setting boundaries on what you will do and when, the day becomes more manageable.

Summary

For the majority of my practising life I worked four eight-hour days a week, with an hour for lunch and six weeks of holidays a year. In spite of that, my practice was always among the most productive in my community.

That was achieved by using every hour at the chair-side well. Many dentists think the path to a better income runs through longer hours or pushing harder. In my experience it runs through working smarter. A dentist who works intelligently four days a week will outperform a dentist rushing around who works 5½ days.

The goal is the lifestyle that efficiency makes possible. More time at home. More holidays. Finishing on time, every day. Running on time so you have a full hour to recharge your batteries at lunchtime. Efficiency isn’t about squeezing more in. It’s about creating room for the work you love, and for the life outside it.

If you’d like to go deeper, my Efficiency course covers the complete system — and The Productivity Paradox is a useful companion piece that explains why the highest-producing practices are also the least stressful.

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