Mostly, the job of a dentist is to see the patients in front of them.
When you get a little bit further on, you can help to try to get the patients who come in who are in front of you by helping with marketing, branding and things like that.
Then, when you get a little bit further on, you might have a slightly bigger business, which has more dentists seeing the patients in front of them, where your responsibility partly becomes facilitating, making sure there are enough patients to be seen by the dentists who are there and building a team that allows you to do that.
When you get a little bit further on, less of your responsibility becomes seeing patients and more of your responsibility becomes facilitating all the rest of the things around the people that you have seeing patients, and then you have to self-direct your work.
The difficulty with self-directing your work is that you'll find time which is unscheduled (being used to an appointment book is easy because you just see the patients in front of you).
Then you have the work available to do the work, and then you have to decide what is the work that you have to do.
One of the huge traps to fall into is doing work for work's sake.
Filling up the time to make it feel like you're productive and making a difference without necessarily actually being productive or making any sort of a difference.
When you're done with what you're supposed to be doing, you're allowed to stop. If you're not seeing patients 9 to 5, it's not necessary that your nose is to the grindstone, 9 to 5.
For many dentists moving up and moving away from the 9-to-5 of patients all the time, they begin to understand that that's not necessarily the best, most productive, most rewarding thing they can do with 100% of their work time for the rest of their life.
When the curtain comes up, it can be quite a revelation, but the responsibility to spend your time as wisely as possible still remains.
Blog Post Number - 4646