Just one thing: Allocating practice owner time productively

Time is one of the most valuable resources for busy practice owners. Between balancing patient care, client communications, and management tasks, it's easy to feel that this finite resource is often in short supply.

A relatively quick assessment of how you allocate your time-taking just 15 minutes-can open a path to identify opportunities to shift responsibilities elsewhere and focus more of your time where it's most valuable.

Begin by identifying the division of time spent between patient and client care, and operations management.

Here's a quick way to start

The first step is to calculate how much of your time is spent on your different responsibilities. This can be done in 15 minutes or less by following these steps:

1. Track the total number of hours worked in a typical week. Make sure to include all hours, whether seeing patients, calling clients, preparing the team's working schedule, or working on other tasks.
2. Categorize these hours into time spent with patients and clients, and time spent on operations/management.
3. Add up the total hours spent on patients/clients and the total spent on operations/management, and determine the percentage of total hours spent on each of those categories. You can use these simple formulas to determine the percentages, and the two results should add up to roughly 100%:

Total hours spent on patients and clients / total work hours X 100
Total hours spent on operations and management tasks / total work hours X 100

As an example, consider a practice owner who works an average of 45 hours per week, with 33 of these hours dedicated to patients and clients, and the remaining 12 hours spent on management tasks. This would equate to 73.3% of this veterinarian's time allocated to caring for patients, with 26.7% on managing operations.

It may be helpful to look at a couple of different weeks to establish a baseline for your practice.

Compare against benchmarks

Once you have your time allocation calculated, you can compare this to industry benchmarks provided in the 2024 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession. Depending on the practice type, veterinarians who own practices reported spending between 21.3% and 23.5% of their time managing operations.

In our example above, the practice owner was spending nearly 27% of their time on management, which could be an indication that there are opportunities to delegate some management tasks to a practice manager or other team members. That would allow the owner to re-allocate this time to patient care, which can result in improved productivity for the practice.

Each practice is unique, and there may be valid reasons why an owner veterinarian's time allocation differs from the benchmarks. This assessment creates an opportunity to evaluate those differences and think about whether other team members could step in for some tasks.

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