The 8 Tips To Better Manage Your Time As A Psychotherapist
Psychological professionals provide an essential service to society, and the core of this work, the part in which the added value they provide is most evident, consists of the psychotherapy sessions held with patients.
However, the psychologist’s work is not limited to those minutes of dialogue with a person who needs professional help, since between sessions there are a whole series of responsibilities that, although they seem banal, are still essential: writing and filing documents, manage schedules, maintain confidentiality while avoiding the loss of papers, etc. The type of protocols and routines that the psychotherapist uses to carry out these tasks can make the difference between performing well at work and not doing so.
To achieve maximum performance in each of these blocks of daily work, Psychotherapists need to put into practice a series of useful techniques to better manage their time and successfully fulfill their responsibilities without suffering significant burnout due to workload, or a high opportunity cost due to not being able to dedicate more hours per week to patient care.
How to improve time management at work if you are a psychotherapist?
If you are a psychotherapist and want to know the best tips to achieve, keep reading. Here you will find a summary of the best strategies you can use to improve the management of your work time as a psychologist.
Using an automatic transcriber in each therapy session will allow you to write down everything that has been said during it, to later analyze in depth the most important contents. Although it does not mean that it is totally unnecessary to take notes during the session, it does serve to save a lot of time between one session and the next, since it is enough to look at an automatically generated text to quickly locate the parts with the most relevant information.
2. Apply specialized software
Another tip that you can take into account to better manage your work time as a professional is to use software specialized in automating different functions and tasks of working as a psychotherapist.
Currently There are some applications and programs that can help us automate key processes such as billing and session charges such as eHolo; It is something that will help save time and money.
3. Use the Pomodoro technique
From the field of psychology, various strategies have been studied for decades to improve people’s performance in various areas of their lives, both on a personal, professional or academic level. The Pomodoro technique is one of the most used to avoid distractions at work between sessions, and it is also very useful to improve our performance and productivity during each work day.
This consists, broadly speaking, of maintaining a work rhythm in which let’s work for 25 minutes and rest 5 to regain strength and restore attention span programming alarms linked to a stopwatch.
4. Use cloud software
Using cloud software to be able to work from anywhere with an Internet connection will help you make your work day more flexible, as it allows you to leave your home or workplace during the day. This strategy is increasingly used by professionals from various disciplines to carry out their work outside the usual context.
To remember key moments during your work day, it is advisable to implement a reminder and alarm system from any electronic device. This way you will ensure remember at key moments of those tasks, obligations or appointments important that you can have at any time of the week.
6. Update your digital profiles
Nowadays, it is of great importance for any job to have a professional profile adapted to all types of digital platforms and social networks, so that your services reach the greatest number of people on the internet in the best possible way.
Keeping the information about your services that you provide on your website and social networks updated (to avoid misunderstandings) will allow you to increase your client portfolio thanks to the great dissemination obtained on the Internet.
7. Organize a fixed schedule
Organization is essential in any discipline or work and in the field of psychotherapy professionals must maintain a fixed daily schedule that allows them to complete all the tasks of the day.
That is why it is important to create a schedule with which you can have short breaks approximately every 50 minutes to perform better and not suffer from excess work stress, which in addition to generating discomfort would make you work more slowly.
8. Offer a public agenda
The public agenda is a relatively recent form of organization that more and more psychotherapists are putting into practice in their workplace. This consists of offering an electronic agenda system on the Internet so that clients themselves can schedule their visits directly based on your availability, without having to write or call by phone to do so.
This greatly facilitates the work of psychotherapists, since it is the clients themselves who go to the professional and schedule a visit directly on their own, which represents a significant saving of time.
Get to know eHolo: the best tool for psychologists and psychology centers
EHolo is a useful digital management platform for psychologists, designed especially so that psychotherapy professionals can save time and focus on patient care. Its software is designed to respond to the day-to-day needs of a practice, psychology center or clinic with mental health assistance services, and unifies all the necessary tools to function professionally in this field: automatic billing for psychologists, transcription automatic audio recording, agenda and calendars to organize therapy sessions, reminder system, quick access to clinical history, informed consent and questionnaires, and more.
To learn about all the features of eHolo, visit its website.
