There are a few basic ways to reach a timely completion for routine business actions. They all take discipline and require you to follow basic prioritization concepts. The good news is that you get to set the rules, you just have to follow your own rules! In addition, you can gain insight by noticing where the system is breaking down and taking simple steps to re-formulate.
Here are the three ways to reach completion:
- The obvious one is to actually complete the action!
- The second way is to delegate the completion to someone else.
- The third way is to declare that you are not going to actually complete the action in a formal sense and you are in essence, closing the process.
Actual completion
This means that all necessary actions have been taken and there are no delays or diversions for whatever action piece is next. An example of this is a situation where an insurance carrier requests a status report before releasing payment for patient services. The doctor has to actually construct the report via dictation or through text generating means from the software. The document must be reviewed and signed. Only at this point can the billing manager complete the next step and actually collect the funds.
If this is not done in a timely fashion (or at all), the accounts sit uncollected in the receivables report. If there are enough of these, they take on a life of their own, and clinic collections in general suffer. It can also cause demoralization of the back office staff, because the process is stalled out due to an upstream incomplete cycle.
These should be complete on a routine basis in a reasonable time frame, either daily or weekly, depending on the actual task at hand. If this is not happening on a routine basis, look for one of the following causes:
- Overload: there are too many items being formed daily to be able to respond in a timely fashion. This essentially means that you have outgrown your administrative system.
- Habits: “I’ll do this later.” For our purposes, there is no such thing as later, it really means never. This actually can work in limited circumstances, but as soon as the volume of cycles goes over a threshold, you system grinds to a halt or slows to a trickle.
- Lack of organization: this is the 3-piles method, which guarantees delays and missed time windows. If this exists, the first task is to organize the information, not close the action cycle. Covey calls this “sharpening the saw”.
- Lack of time designation: You should have specific time slots designated during the week for weekly rhythm cycle completion. Do the daily things daily and the weekly things weekly, without mixing them together.
Delegation of tasks
Successful delegation requires written procedures, including timelines and desired end results. We can use the same example posited above for illustration. An example of delegation of the report-writing task would be to assign the portions of the report that do not include medical opinion to the admin staff. The only thing the doctor would be responsible for would be generation of opinion, diagnoses, etc. that is within the scope of his license. If this procedure is not agreed upon and detailed out, it is not likely to happen. Staff should understand that by accepting delegated tasks, they are making themselves more valuable to the office, and should earn at a higher rate for that.
You will know if you do not have successful delegation in your office it you see any of the following items:
- Incomplete files or projects that are not under anyone’s domain “I thought you were handling that.”
- No procedural manuals or written meeting agendas regarding task designation.
- Thinking, “It’s easier for me to do this than to find out if someone else did it.”
- Refusal to collaborate or to work together between two staff members, whether peers or not. This usually represents fear of blame for messy or incomplete cycles.
- You are doing lower skill, lower paid tasks because of the reluctance or refusal of staff to accept a role in completion.
Declaration of completion
This one is a bit paradoxical; can a cycle be closed just by my say-so? The answer is yes, under some circumstances. The rule on this is that the declaration cannot interfere with any next step in a normal process. In the above example, we can’t just say that the report-writing cycle is complete without the actual report, because then we cannot collect our outstanding balances.
This does apply to items like outside projects, reading, some correspondence, and personal projects. A good practice with this is to close that half-read book, put it on the shelf and put a note in your calendar to re-visit it again in 6 months. Then, it will not be nagging at you and draining your energy. {{alert-hmwk}}