All mental health professionals know about the heavy toll that winter can take on their clients—and possibly themselves. Seemingly never ending dark days and cold weather can really weigh you down after a while. Thankfully, the days are getting longer, the weather is slowly getting warmer, and the best way to say goodbye to SAD is to do a good spring cleaning of your private practice!
Not only is spring cleaning a great ritual to welcome the new season, it’s also the perfect time to reorganize and streamline your practice. A lot of clutter can build up over the winter, so it’s good to have a period where you can sort through it all and set yourself up for success for the rest of the spring and beyond.
Here are a few ideas on how you can get started with your practice’s spring cleaning:
Clutter Cleanup!
Even though we don’t exactly “hibernate” over the winter, we still tend to become more insular, and that can include our office. Over the winter months, you may have accumulated lots of clutter on and in your desk, like old files, mostly-used office supplies, and other knick-knacks. Well, that stuff should be the first to go! Figure out what you want to keep and get rid of the rest.
Tidy Up the Office
After you get rid of all that accumulated clutter, it could be time to give your entire practice a more thorough cleaning. If you find yourself far too busy to give your practice a deep clean, it could be worth hiring cleaning professionals to make sure everything is spic and span. Be sure that places that aren’t often seen, like under desks, behind file cabinets, and along the tops of shelves, are cleaned thoroughly of all dust and grime. And if you have a team, don’t forget your staff’s common areas! Even a well-maintained office kitchen could use a heavy cleaning every few months!
Minimize the Clutter by Moving to Digital
Once you’ve gotten everything organized and decluttered, it’s the best possible time to make sure that it doesn’t happen again next year. By minimizing your paper use through the use of digital documents stored on Owl Practice servers, you won’t have to waste another couple of days sorting through the mountains of files that built up on your desk over the winter. Plus, you’ll be able to save a ton of money on office paper and ink toner!
Take Stock of Your Practice
Some people say that the best time to take stock of your practice is at the beginning of the year. To maximize your practice’s growth and efficiency and help you reach your goals, we believe that a few “check-in” points throughout the year can be a great idea; one for each season. Spring cleaning is an excellent time to take a look at the previous four+ months to see what worked and what didn’t thus far at your practice.
Clean Up Your Digital Presence
A website that was cutting-edge just a few years ago could be considered hopelessly out-of-date today, particularly if it isn’t mobile-responsive. When cleaning up your digital presence, you want to make sure that your website offers a fantastic user experience, both on desktop and especially on mobile devices. Don’t forget to make sure that all links on the site are functional and that it’s updated on a regular basis.
Migrate Your Practice Management to a Single Service
Dealing with different software and multiple services for your practice management can create huge headaches, especially if they don’t all play well together. Spring cleaning offers you the perfect chance to figure out what’s working and what isn’t in your practice management. An excellent option to make sure that everything is working properly would be to transition your entire practice management to a single system; one that can offer you everything you need, from online appointment scheduling, to invoicing, to clinical notes and personal records. In other words, you could give Owl Practice a try!
Having all of your practice’s systems accessible in one place can greatly increase efficiency and organization at your practice. Not only that, with Owl Practice’s security measures, you can be sure that all of your sensitive data will be secure on Canadian servers and backed up at regular intervals.
The springtime isn’t just a period of new beginnings for nature, it can also act as a period of renewal for your practice. That’s one of the reasons why spring cleaning can be so important. It’s the perfect time to get rid of the old and musty and bring in the new and fresh! If you want to see how Owl can change your practice for the better and make your annual spring cleaning sessions A LOT less stressful, sign up for a free demo today!
As always,
Practice Wisely
