Session Notes Are Eating Your Evenings
Case notes are costing practices their evenings, and their staff, long before anyone notices the diary is the smaller problem.
Case notes are costing practices their evenings, and their staff, long before anyone notices the diary is the smaller problem.
Written up, but not by you The last client of the day gets the notes nobody would want written about them. We look at where the habit starts, what it does to a team by Friday, and what fixes it beyond typing faster.
Your first client of the day gets a paragraph. Full sentences, a bit of colour, something to work with next time.
Your last client of the day gets three words and a full stop. "Same as usual," you write, at 6pm, coat half on.
By Thursday you've no memory of what usual was. Was it the shoulder or the sleep? Honestly, you couldn't say.
Usual is doing a lot of work for a word with no information in it.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
The word usual is a locked box with nothing labelled inside it. Open it in three months and you'll find nothing but the word itself, smirking.
Thirty per cent of people aged 25 to 34 say they're burnt out from work. That's the age most of your associates are.
Nobody counts the hours spent writing up a plantar fasciitis session that took nine minutes to run. Somebody ought to.
You wouldn't let a kettle boil unwatched for forty minutes for one cup of tea. Yet here we are, doing exactly that with paperwork, every evening.
The admin time is the burnout, dressed up as diligence. It rarely gets named as either.
One practitioner, tired on a Tuesday, writes a clipped note. Nobody says anything, because nobody reads anybody else's notes closely enough to notice.
By Friday the whole practice is doing it. Nobody discussed it, nobody agreed to it.
Tiredness spreads exactly like a cold going round a nursery, and nobody's had their jabs.
The standard didn't drop because you lowered it. It slipped on its own, the way the good teapot ends up at the back of the cupboard behind the mugs everyone reaches for.
A practice culture forms by default long before anyone writes it down as policy.
Try this anytime. Time yourself writing up one session, properly, the way you were trained to.
Skip the shorthand version. Write the proper one, with the observations, the plan, the bits a supervisor would genuinely want to see.
Multiply that by however many sessions you ran today. Then look at what's left of your evening, and what's left of you.
Most people doing this exercise for the first time go a bit hushed. It's a useful kind of hush, the sort you get standing in front of an open fridge deciding you're not hungry after all.
Word of mouth brought you most of your clients. A friend, a sister-in-law, a stranger at a barbecue who mentioned your name between the sausages and the potato salad.
None of them know you're writing their file at 9.40pm, on your own sofa, with a biscuit tin balanced on your knee for a desk.
They think you finished at six. They think the job ends when the door does.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Your reputation depends on the version of you they never see, doing the paperwork nobody thanked you for.
Some practices build a template and stick to it for years. It takes real discipline, and a fair bit of tinkering before it settles.
Other practices hand the whole business off to a specialist who does this for a living, properly, as their trade, not a favour squeezed into a Tuesday.
Both are legitimate ways to stop the evening bleed. Neither involves simply typing faster with worse posture.
Nobody markets "I answer emails at midnight" as a selling point. Nobody puts it on the website next to the nice photo of the treatment room.
Yet the diary you're worried about and the note-writing eating your evening are the same problem, wearing two different hats to the same party.
Fix the booking chaos and the notes still pile up behind it. Fix the notes and the diary still runs you ragged.
A practice held together by one person's stamina isn't a system. It's a person, tiring.
Check your notes from three months ago, on a client you've since lost touch with.
Read what you wrote. Try to reconstruct the session properly, the way a supervisor or a solicitor might ask you to.
If you can't, the notes weren't for you at all. They were a gesture towards paperwork, not a record anyone could use.
A note that fails this test hasn't saved you any time. It's postponed the cost, with interest, to a Tuesday you haven't had yet.
Get your evenings back without cutting a single corner on the standards your clients never see. Reclaim your evenings
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