The Private Practice Success Podcast

40. The Ideal Practice Owner Diary

• Gerda Muller • Episode 40

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In episode 40, Gerda dives into one of the most common questions from private practice owners: What should your practice owner diary (or calendar) look like in order to shift from just surviving to thriving?

Drawing on her own love-hate relationship with scheduling, Gerda unpacks the real-life challenges of balancing productivity, boundaries, and freedom as a business owner.

You’ll learn why the “ideal diary” isn’t about cramming in more, but about building a sustainable rhythm that supports your values, your team, and your wellbeing.

Gerda shares her practical framework for designing your week, including the crucial difference between Free Days, Focus Days, and Buffer Days, and how to align your schedule with your business goals - and your life outside of work.

What’s Inside This Episode:

  • How to structure your diary using Free Days, Focus Days, and Buffer Days for maximum productivity and sanity.
  • The art of time-blocking and making every meeting count - so you’re working on what matters most, not just what’s urgent.
  • How to set boundaries around your time (and enforce them confidently) to create a diary that truly works for you.

Who This Episode Is For:

  • Private practice owners who feel overwhelmed by their calendar or struggle to find “balance.”
  • Allied health professionals craving more freedom, structure, and clarity in their workweek.
  • Anyone ready to ditch the hamster wheel and design a diary that supports both business growth and personal wellbeing.

Tune in for a fresh, empowering perspective on what your ideal practice owner diary can look like and walk away with simple, actionable steps to make your schedule work for you - not the other way around!

Want more info on The Ultimate Admin Course?

Email Gerda at gerdam@private-practice-success.com and she’ll send you all the details. 

Want Gerda's Help with your Business?

Gerda helps allied health group practice owners go from overwhelmed, overworked, and underpaid to fully empowered and financially thriving. If this is you, then make today the day you reach out. Complete this super short Triage Form here bit.ly/triageformpps and Gerda will personally reach out to you. 

Here to help you build a practice you can't stop smiling about :)

Connect with Private Practice Success & Gerda here:

Well hello there, spectacular private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 40. Oh, don't you just love a great round number. Episode number 40, so excited to be talking to you for this episode. 

Today is a really awesome topic, because people ask me about this all the time, and that is: What does the Ideal Practice Owner Diary - AKA calendar - look like? What should it have in it? How busy should it be? There are so many questions around it. And I feel like people are consistently struggling with the idea of the ideal practice owner diary, 

It's a Love-Hate Relationship

I'm going to be the first to admit it, that I have a freaking love hate relationship with my calendar. It just is what it is. And you know what? It's always been like that. 

The thing that I know is that I can't function without my calendar, right? So I actually use Google Calendar as my personal calendar of choice. I have all my personal stuff on there. I have my business stuff on there. It's my go-to place. I still do have a hard copy planner. I actually use the Private Practice Success Planner, but I have that electronic version because it's just easy to move things around and shift things around and schedule in recurring meetings. 

So I do have that combination of electronics with hard copy because I'm old school - I like to draw and doodle in my PPS planner. I actually liked putting stickers in there. When I was younger, I loved doing arts and crafts and I think my planner is my adult arts and craft outlet. So I get it.  There is this love-hate relationship.

I had it even as a clinician and I have seen it over the years with the clinicians at my practice because obviously when I was still boots on the ground, I did a lot of the clinical supervision with the clinicians at my practice. I helped them with their caseload management. I help them with their adjustment into private practice and caseload management - time mastery within private practice is a big part of becoming what I like to refer to as private practice fit. Being able to help as many people as possible without burning yourself out requires a lot of skills around time mastery and time management as a private practice clinician. So I get it. 

I also speak to a lot of practice owners that struggle with this, and I speak to a lot of practice owners that tell me their clinicians struggle with this. So think about your own experience as a clinician and also think about the clinicians that you might have at the practice.

So let's talk about that love hate relationship - and tell me whether this rings true for you 

Too Busy Versus Too Quiet

As a clinician, if your diary is too busy, what happens? You freak out. You get stressed. Oh my goodness. Look at all those appointments in my diary. When you are too quiet, you also get stressed. It's like, oh my goodness, why isn't there any work?

If you are a contractor, this means I don't get paid.  If you are an employee clinician and you have a public government type of -  I'm on the gravy train kind of mindset - you might not mind it. You might just go, no, not to worry, I'm getting paid anyway. But if you are actually an employee that understands and has that commercial judgment of knowing that you're working for a private business, you might become stressed too. Because you most probably should be thinking this is not okay. Because if there's no clients in my diary, we aren't making money as a private business - which puts my job in jeopardy. Because if we are not bringing in revenue, I'm going to be out of a job. So that's stressful. 

So, too busy - we’re stressed. Too quiet - we’re stressed. I find it's really hard for people to get that balance, that middle ground of going, Ah, things are as it should be. And the same holds true for a practice owner. When they are too busy - they're stressing. When they're too quiet - they're also stressing, just in a different way. They are having these internal judgements of themself of Oh, I'm not productive enough. Oh, my team's going to think that I didn't do anything and I pay myself a wage and I'm going to look like I'm just cruising over here. And they go down that downward spiral of stressing about that, right? It is like, again, where's that middle ground of going as a practice owner, I can just walk into my day, look at my calendar and go, yeah, this is as it should be. This really is what I want - both for you as a practice owner and for your clinical team - to understand: What is that ideal calendar? What is that ideal diary? 

Now, for the purpose of today, because I work mostly with practice owners, I want to talk to you as the practice owner about your ideal practice owner diary. What should that look like? And I am going to share with you a couple of solutions.

The first and most important part here is that your diary should have a combination of three different types of days - and that is Free Days, Focus Days and Buffer Days. The concept of these three types of days was first coined and created by Dan Sullivan, and I've looked at what Dan says about these different types of days, and I've adjusted that for the world of allied health private practice.

Free Days

So first - and this is the most important one - is your Free Days. 

Like those are the days where you don't do anything. For most people that is Saturdays and Sundays. Now you might be thinking, well, duh. Well no. If you are a group practice owner, you probably know that for you to get Saturdays and Sundays off, you are doing better than 90% of business owners. That's just how it is. 

Most small business owners work Saturdays and Sundays. What do they do? It's catching up. It is that admin paperwork stuff that they didn't get time for. And even if you're not sitting at your desk in your home office working, or on your bed with your laptop, or on the couch with the laptop - you are still thinking about work. Those are not free days, okay? 

So the first goal that I have for you as a practice owner is for you to have your Saturdays and Sundays as true and proper free days to switch off. And once you've achieved that, I want you to find another day in the week. For me that is Fridays. That can also be another free day. 

You know, you can have that work week, Free Day - the Friday in my case - as an emergency day. If something happened in the week and everything went to shit and it's off the rails and you've got some deadlines, you can use it as catch up. But that should be the exception rather than the rule, okay? But ideally, you want to have Free Days. And if currently you feel like you're working seven days a week - choose one day and go, you know what? I am going to do small incremental changes because we know that is what we can start with, and that's the best one to start with in order to be able to sustain it.

Because if you just go, that's it, I'm marking out Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm not touching anything. I'm leaving the laptop at work - you're going to fail. Okay. That's just how it is. Something's going to happen, stuff's going to go to shit, and you're just going to go back to your old routine. 

So we want to do small incremental steps. Choose one day and go, that's the day that I'm just going to be really strict with myself and not touch any work-related things. And I'm going to be mindful of that wave of anxiety that I'm going to have throughout the day. I'm going to be mindful of the thoughts that I'm going to have, but you know what? I'm just going to urge surf - using a clinical term here - through that and get to the other side. And that's what I want to do for the next 4, 5, 6 weeks. And once I have that under control, then I'm going to do the next step. 

All right - so Free Days.

Focus Days

Then you also want to have what's called Focus Days in your diary. 

Now those are days when you are actually focused on money generating activities within your business. Now, depending on the stage of your business - AKA your level of private practice development, whether that's Level 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 - the tasks that you are going to be focusing on will be different, okay. 

So as a Level 1, 2, maybe even Level 3 practice owner, some of your focus days are going to include clinical work - where you are still doing direct clinical work - meaning you are doing direct revenue generating activities.

However, as a business owner, there's other revenue generating activities that you absolutely have to focus on and should be focused on. And as your business grows, the importance of focusing on non clinical generating activities will be increasing. But you need to know what those are so that you can make sure, okay, this is what I need to do as the practice owner. 

Obviously you're going to have team members - whether that's clinicians doing, money generating activities or support staff doing that - you need to know what they are doing. And you need to know what is your responsibility when it comes to that. Is that business development? Is it recruitment? That type of stuff, right?

So that is a Focus Day. So you need to have the days booked in, and then you need to know what those days look like. 

Buffer Days

Then you also need to build in some buffer days. 

That is days work that you spend thinking. Days that you spend strategising, reflecting, doing the paperwork, the admin type stuff. Because unless you are able to divide your working week into those types of days, what you will find is you will get half the amount of work done. Because if you are constantly switching from Focus to Buffer to Free to Focus to Buffer to Free across one day, you will be leaking time, you will be leaking energy, and you will be leaking focus, okay.

So you might feel busy, right? Like, I've got all this stuff booked in. But you're not going to have the output that is required. You're going to feel like you're doing all these inputs, and your diary might even reflect, look at all the shit in my diary that I'm doing, but I don't have the outcomes. And that my friends is what keeps you stuck on the freaking private practice hamster wheel - going around and round in circles, going like, I'm doing all the things, Gerda. I'm working so freaking hard Gerda. But I'm still stuck exactly where I was 12 months ago.  

I can't tell you how many times people reach out to me to work with me - this is a little side note. So when you reach out, I ask you to complete a short triage form to just tell me what you're struggling with. And obviously I've been doing that specific thing for the last five years - that I've had the triage form - and I do keep the triage forms. It's like a platform that we use. And I know people's names. I'm actually good with that - remembering people that reach out to me. 

Believe it or not, people think that they are just a number or just an email - you are not.  When you reach out to me, I actually read each and every one of your triage forms. I don't have a fancy team that does it. I read it. I look at what you tell me you're struggling with. I actually go to the website address you give me - I click on that and go and check out your website. I will go to your bio - I like to put a face to the name. When I'm reading about you, I want to get a feel for your website. I look at how big your team is, what's the type of stuff that you do. 

So I actually spend a lot of time. And I think other people might go, oh, that's a waste of time Gerda. It's not to me - whether you are going to end up working with me or not - I give you that attention and space so that I can really make the best recommendation possible for what I think is going to help you. 

And I have a lot of people that have reached out to me at multiple times over the years. And I would then go back and go, oh, hang on, this person's reached out to me and then I go and look at the triage form that they submitted 12 months, 18 months, 24 months ago - and guess what? The challenges are still exactly the same. Hasn't changed. Exactly the same.  And I don't think they realise it, right? Because they're busy. They've probably even forgotten. Or maybe they go, oh yeah, I've realised I've reached out to Gerda, but you know, it was different then. And it's like, no - it's exactly the same. 

And that really breaks my freaking heart that people are stuck. That they're working so freaking hard to remain in exactly the same space - and they don't even know it. That's the heartbreaking part of it: that they can't see it. 

And every day matters, every week matters, every month that passes matters. And I don't want that for you. And the only way for you to change that is to get really honest and really ruthless about what it is that you need in your business.

Time-Blocking

So once you've looked at that big picture overview of your week - and you've got your Free Day, your Focus Day, and your Buffer Day - then you want to look, let's say at your Buffer Day and your Focus Day specifically. You want to go, What time blocking needs to happen here? What are the functions of the business that I am still responsible for, based on my Level of Private Practice Development that needs attention?

Is that marketing? 

Is it team?

Is it systems? 

Is it operations? 

Is it products? 

Is it customer service? 

What is it that I'm responsible for? 

Then you put in those big-time blocks. And then you want to go, okay - et's say if it's operations - What within operations do I need to do this week? Next week? And the breakdown of that function needs to coincide with what we would call in the PPS Academy, our six-week projects - not just random stuff - that are the projects that I decided is of relevance for this six-week cycle that aligns to my 12-month goals that we need to work on.  Because unless it's in there, guess what? Distraction, shiny object again. If you don't have it in there, you will stay stuck on that hamster wheel. 

So all of these things need to align. There needs to be this golden thread between when we did our Blueprint Planning Session in January and we set our 12-month goals. What is that?  And what do we need to do this six-week cycle to move closer to that? Whatever's in there now needs to be translated into actual actions within the practice owner diary.

And of course, if you have a team - depending on who you have, how many people it is - they need to do exactly the same thing. So this whole diary management that I'm talking to you about today as a practice owner really needs to filter through to your entire leadership and management team. Now, obviously their diaries are going to work a bit differently to your clinical team, right?

So time blocking is really important - but we don't stop at the time blocking. What's in that time needs to be clearly specified so that all you need to do is show up on the day and then get that done. Which is why in The Academy, we run our Practice Pitstop. So when we do that, we are actually choosing what are those projects that we are working on, and what is the stuff that needs to be completed in order to complete a project. And then we pop that into that six week within our diaries.

It's very important not to skip those steps.

Make Every Meeting Count

And then there's a third thing that I really want to encourage you to do - because I do see this as a big culprit when it comes to practice owner diaries - and that is meetings, okay? 

Now, you know, there are people that hate meetings, there are people that love meetings, and there's everything in between. The fact of the matter is this: we are always going to need to do meetings. I don't think you can really do away with it completely - maybe that's a psychologist in me that really believes in the power of communication, that believes in the power of human relationships - but you are always going to have meetings in your diary.

But if you have a meeting in there, you want to make sure that every meeting counts. That is the goal here. You shouldn't have a meeting just for the sake of having a meeting, but let's say you've gone, yeah the meetings that I have in here aligns with my level of private practice development. It aligns with my six week cycles, everything that's in here should be in here. 

Meeting Tip #1: Get Clear on the Desired Outcome

The next thing I really want to ask you to reflect on is the following:

How many times have you actually left a meeting, often what you might call a really important meeting, thinking, Oh, that's a great discussion, but I'm not really sure what we achieved here.

Anyone? If that is you, then you are probably not going into your meetings being clear on a desired outcome that you want to get from it. So you shouldn't be having a meeting unless you know, at the end of this, what is the outcome that I want? That's my number one meeting tip. 

Meeting Tip #2: Conduct a Meeting Audit

How often have you found yourself looking at your diary and going, these meetings are just sucking the life out of me, and it's sucking the time out of my week - where you feel like it doesn't serve any purpose. 

If that is you, I really encourage you to do an audit of the meetings in your diary and go, Am I the right person to be attending this meeting? Am I the right person to be facilitating this meeting? If the answer is no, and there's somebody else that can do it, delegate that shit today.

Meeting Tip #3: Prepare for Every Meeting

How often have you showed up to a meeting feeling totally unprepared? You are there. You're on time. But your mind is still stuck on the task that you've just done previously. 

Again, that is a flag that either you shouldn't be there, or your focus and buffer days weren't sorted properly. Your time blocking wasn't done properly if this is what is happening to you. 

Because honestly, you need to have time to prepare for your meetings so that you can think, what was that outcome that I wanted? And if I want that outcome, what needs to happen? What do we need to talk about? If that's not happening, you need to scrap those meetings.

Okay, so that was three very practical recommendations and I'll just quickly recap those for you: 

Number 1 - Making sure that you've got Free Days, Focus days and Buffer days. 

Number 2 - Time blocking.

Number 3 - Making every meeting count.

Values Alignment & Conflict

Lastly, I want to talk to you about a less practical consideration. 

Because like I said at the start, I have a love-hate relationship with my calendar. And you know why? It's linked to my values. I want you to consider your values in this whole discussion as well. So for me as a business owner, one of my most important values is freedom - that is time freedom, energy freedom, financial freedom. But more than anything, it is time freedom. 

I started my private practice because I wanted time freedom. I already had a daughter that had just started prep, and I started my practice whilst on maternity leave with my second son. So I had a baby and it was really important for me to be able to go to school events to pick my daughter up from school, do school drop offs, all of those things. 

Having that flexibility was so important. And then you start a freaking business - what are you thinking? There goes time freedom out of the window! But you tolerate it because you're going, okay, if I stick through this, I am going to have financial freedom at the end of it. And I'm doing this for my kids because I also want to create a better life for them. 

We were immigrants to this country. All our money when we came, we divided by 10. We were out of savings after three months in this country. We came over on a working visa. We didn't have access to childcare benefits; we didn't have access to Medicare. Everything cost us. So it was really important for us to reestablish ourselves financially. And as parents, when you move your family to a whole new country - and when I say family, it's like you, your husband and your daughter, and everybody else stays in your country of origin - there's a lot of pressure to make it. 

So financial freedom was important, and I'm not going to apologize for that. So you tolerate the impact. And although you started it for freedom, you sacrifice your time because you go, yes, I'm going to work really hard in order to get financial freedom at the end of the day because all of that still supports your family.

And then you get stuck because it's really hard to then get out of something that has become a habit. A habit to work after the kids have gone to bed. A habit of just doing stuff on Saturdays and Sundays. The habit of never switching off because it's so freaking important for you to make this work because you're doing it for your family.

And then because you are a helping professional - for all the clients that you have that have come on board, that's coming through the doors. And then for these amazing clinicians that you have within your practice, and you know that they are the people helping the clients, so it's so important to look after them. And before you know it, you've got no time freedom. 

And then the sad part is - because a lot of practice owners don't see the importance of getting business coaching and consulting, and they don't see the importance of actually investing financially and time-wise into the right business coaching and consulting for them - they run business models that's not profitable, so they don't have the time and they don't have the money. Which again breaks my heart. And then they are stuck and they don't know how to get out of it. 

And then you look at your diary and it's this love hate relationship. Because you look at all that stuff booked in and you go, that's not freaking freedom. Yeah, this is not freedom at all. What is this? And then you might do what I've done and just go, I'm freaking deleting all of this shit out. This is not what I signed up for. And then you've got all these empty spaces in your diary. And then that makes you freaking anxious and you go, I don't know what I'm meant to do today. What am I doing? Oh, I'm going to the beach. I'm just going to lay by the pool, but you can only do that so many times. 

And then you go, this is just making me anxious because there's no structure in my day. And when there's no structure, I can just dilly daddle. It’s okay if you're Richard Branson or you know somebody like that, that's already made it.

The Importance of Structure

If you have a business that you still want to grow and you haven't grown it to where you want it to be, structure actually saves you. So, it's really about embracing that for the majority of us, structures are really helpful.  And this is where I really want you to connect with what level of structure do you need?

Like I've shared with you three practical suggestions, but I really want you to go, how do you apply that for you. For your personality. For your requirements.  Is it too much structure? Is it too little? What do you need in your day to function really well? 

And the same holds true for your clinical team, as a clinician, I hated having. 30-minute breaks between clients. Some people go, oh,  that's amazing. That is just the best day. I can have all this time to switch off between clients. I can just reset myself. And again, I think that's a personality thing, so there's no right or wrong.

But for me, that didn't work. I looked at that and went, that is such a freaking waste of time.  I would rather finish my day early and head home rather than having an extended workday, because time freedom is really important to me. So I taught myself really early on how to run sessions on time - if the appointment is nine o'clock, I don't start three minutes past nine, I start at nine. If it's meant to finish at 9:50. I don't finish at 10, I finish my appointment at 9:50. I use those 10 minutes between appointments really well. That's what they're there for. I use them for what they're there for, and I start the next appointment at 10 o'clock.

I can do a set of sessions in way less time than other people who want 30 minutes between -  that's what worked for me. Structure works. Having that book ends between when an appointment starts, when it ends, and when the next one starts and ends - that structure helped me to become really efficient at time mastery within my clinical sessions. And at the end of the day, my day goes so quickly. I feel so freaking productive, and I go home and I have extra time with my family. 

So again, look at what your practice owner diary might look like. What breaks do you have in there? What works for you? What doesn't work for you? And you might need to tweak this over time. Because at the end of the day, you are the one in control of your diary - nobody else is. I might give you recommendations, but you decide what that looks like and then I'm just going to pop this one in there. 

Setting & Maintaining Boundaries

A lot of practice owners tell me, yes, Gerda, I've done all these things that you told me to do, but then reception goes and books a client when they shouldn't. And that is, especially for practice owners, maybe at level 1, 2, 3, that are still doing clinical work.

And then I ask, why? Why would you just see that client? Well, reception booked them in. It's like -  No, you need to make sure that if somebody else is still involved in your diary, whether that is reception still booking in clinical clients, or maybe it's a VA or an EA that's helping you with other meetings - you need to be really clear on what the boundaries are around other people booking in stuff in your calendar.

So if reception were to book - and this has happened to me by the way. Remember I always tell you whatever you're going through. I've been there because I've been doing this long enough, and I've been there where when I started to reduce my clinical days, I would have set appointment times. And reception sees me as a very flexible person, they know that I love my clinical client work. So it has happened. And it only happened once where they booked somebody outside of my clinical days thinking that Gerda would be fine with it. And I just said, no, I'm not available for clinical work on those days. I need you to call that client back and apologize for giving them the wrong day and reschedule them.  And because I set that boundary and I held the boundary, it never happened again. 

So at the end of the day, we can't blame reception when they do things like that. Each of us is responsible for setting and holding our own boundaries. Yes, it's annoying if somebody crosses your boundary, but it's your boundary. So it's your job to go, no, no, that's not going to happen. Maybe you stepped over it by accident. Maybe you stepped over it with no ill intent. Maybe you stepped over it really wanting to help, wanting to be nice, wanting to give great customer service to that client, but it's not okay.  The boundary is there.

And you know it's my job to set it in a very nice and supportive manner, and I can promise you, you only need to do that once. If you need to do that multiple times with any team member, that is a big red flag for you, and there's something more going on there and you need to address that. But that's a topic for another day. 

Alright, so honestly, the buck stops with you when it comes to the ideal practice owner diary. You get to set it. That's the freedom you have as the business owner and you get to manage it. You get to make sure it's sustainable. You get to set boundaries around it. And guess what? You also get to change it, if it's no longer working for you - it shouldn't be set in stone. And a lot of people go oh, I'm booked out for the next three months. I can't change especially clinical client appointments. It's like, who said that? Like what? Of course you can change your clinical appointment times. It's your clinical appointment time. I'm not saying change it every three weeks, okay. But if you are telling me no, we book our clients until the end of the year, so I can't change my clinical days. No, no. Because the thing is you set the schedule - so you get to change it. This is not something that you can abdicate. It is your job. 

So really reflect on everything that I've shared with you today. And as always, I want you to just take one thing away. But if you take nothing away but the following, and that is: that you are empowered to set the ideal practice on a diary that works for you. And I'm hoping that that diary is one that's going to see you flourish, going to see you not burn out, and not be overwhelmed - but have the time to create this ideal practice that you deserve and desire. 

And it's okay to desire an amazing business, whatever that looks like for you, because you deserve it and you can have it. But it starts with you making the decision around it. Because that's the beauty of business ownership. Yes it's freaking hard, but you are the captain of the ship. You are the person in charge, and that is also the freedom that comes with having your own business. You get to make the decisions. The choice is ultimately up to you.

Alrighty, I’m going to leave this discussion right here for today. There's a lot for you to think about. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, remember that I am here to help you build a practice you can't stop smiling about. 😊

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Gerda Muller

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