Let’s be honest. As a therapist, you really can’t provide occupational therapy intervention in most settings without dealing with the dreaded productivity standards. Depending on the setting, these productivity standards can range from annoying to downright stressful! Take, for example, a relatively relaxed SNF productivity standard of 80%. While at first glance it may seem simple to ensure that you spend 6 hours and 24 minutes of your 8 hour day in direct patient care in order to achieve 80% productivity, it begins to feel much less feasible when you find yourself walking from room to room trying to find a patient on your caseload who is willing to participate in therapy right now and you have two or three evals to write, a couple of progress notes due, and some discharges that need to be finished, not to mention five patient care questions to answer from family, nurses, and doctors. Suddenly, you start to think that 80% productivity is next to impossible.

But while there will most certainly be days when it seems like nothing is going according to plan and you are rushing up to the last second to achieve the required productivity, maintaining productivity on a day-to-day basis does not need to be a constant struggle. By implementing some basic strategies, you can create a daily routine that will result in consistent productivity with less stress and higher job satisfaction.

Be Productive All Day
When you first get to work at 7am, it can be easy to rationalize easing into the day by spending the 10-15 minutes chatting with co-workers about weekend plans. And if you are someone who is consistently achieving far more than the required productivity each day, then by all means take the time for a more relaxing morning. However, if you find yourself struggling with productivity, consider briefly acknowledging co-workers at the start of the day but then waiting to chat over lunch or after clocking out in the afternoon. The more productive you are in the early part of the day, the less behind you will feel when the afternoon rolls around, and you will likely feel much more relaxed and provide a much more consistent quality of care throughout the day as a result.

Use a Template to Streamline Evaluations
By creating a template to use when conducting an eval, you can streamline the documentation process by knowing exactly where in your notes to look for the answer to a question. To be effective, your template should resemble your documentation template as closely as possible and be in a similar order on the page. If your facility does not use a pre-made template for evals, make one for yourself and save it to your computer. This way you can easily copy your template to the blank documentation page and spend less time typing out headings and more time typing the patient information.

Group Patients by Location
If you have two or three patients on caseload who have rooms near each other in the facility, schedule your day so that you go from one of those patients to the next. The less time you spend walking from patient room to patient room, the more productive you can be.

Determine the Best Time to Document
Some people document best early in the morning while others document better in the afternoon. Determine when is the best time for you to document and make that time of day your documentation time. If your facility allows you up to 24 or 48 hours to complete documentation and you document best in the morning, then spend your mornings finishing all of your documentation from the previous day before you ever see a patient. If you have to finish documentation before clocking out for the day, then complete your evals first thing so that you can take time before or after your lunch break to document. You will find that you can document much more quickly and efficiently when you are documenting at the optimal time for you.

Complete Point-of-Service Documentation
Particularly when a progress note is due, completing the documentation while the patient is engaged in the therapy session can be both efficient and beneficial. While it definitely will not work for all patients, if you have a patient who can complete activities with more independence and with less frequent cuing and who does not like to talk to you while engaged in therapy, you can use a laptop or tablet device to document the patient’s progress during the session. The added benefit of this is that if you realize you need to further assess patient progress on a particular area, you can more easily adjust the therapy session to incorporate that assessment instead of having to go back to a patient’s room later.

These are just a few strategies that you can use to assist you in achieving and maintaining productivity standards. If you find that you are still struggling to be productive even after implementing these strategies, consider talking with your co-workers or your manager to determine additional strategies that might work for you. Productivity is important, but the stress of being productive should never dominate and steal your passion for being an occupational therapist.

This article was originally posted in March 2016. It has been modified and updated for this posting.