Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Jun 8, 2026 · 37 min · 10 segments
The "Busy" Trap in Dentistry For Future Dental Practice Owners, a packed schedule feels like success. Yet, a booked day lacking strategic production leads to clinical burnout. Dr. Andrew Clingan and…
Andrew ClinganHostCaitlin EmbreeHost
I scroll through Facebook groups, dental Facebook groups way too often, and I see a lot this time of year where naturally we slow down, right? The first quarter is probably our busiest, and then you hit beginning of the second quarter a- and you're fighting with spring break, and you're fighting with end of school and summer travel, and people are busy, and there's a million other things people wanna spend their money on.
And so you always see this time of year these posts popping up going, "Hey, is anybody else slowing down? I'm noticing this." And, and, like, we as dentists get really nervous because I don't know where this comes from, but we just feel good when we're busy and doing something.
Regardless of whether we're productive or not, we get, like, this sense of calm and feeling looking and going, "Well, the, the schedule's full for the next few weeks without"...
And so that's what I really wanted to talk about today, is the difference between a schedule that's full and a schedule that's a- actually really productive, and how do we protect our schedule, and how do we produce? And when we think about, like, the one thing that we're very different on here at Share Practices is how we view doctor production.
We do not coach people to having to be super producers to have a successful practice.
We have a lot of super producers in our ecosystem, and we have a lot of people who, yeah, my office, we do implants and aligners and all this great stuff, big cosmetic cases.
But what we really coach people to is just being productive with the everyday dentistry, and it's like, how can you do that? And the re- the way you do that is with very intentional scheduling and systems around this sort of thing.
I'm really looking forward to diving in because there's so many different angles we can look at here.
You know, I think one of the first places I wanna start is what is some of the most common schedule killers that, that are...
And we can look at this from how we block the schedule and how we place our appointments in the first place.
And then I think from your perspective, there's a lot that goes into back office operations and making sure you have an assisting team that is well-equipped to not add their own schedule killers.
So I'll just kind of start just with maybe some of the more obvious and the higher level.
Having a protocol for how you want things scheduled in your doctor's schedule in your office I think is important.
And depending on the caliber of your scheduler team, that kind of dictates how much protocol you need, how many rules you need around the schedule.
I remember when I started coaching, I was very anti-block scheduling 'cause I had never done it before as a treatment-
We were taught just how to naturally build a schedule that had a little bit of everything, didn't get in the way of a doctor adding in higher level procedures, productive procedures.
Call it common sense, call it experience, but I had that luxury of every front office team member and every assistant that was touching the schedule.
We had that intuitive understanding of how a schedule should flow for optimum opportunity, right? And then coming into coaching and meeting with so many different front office teams, everyone kind of brings their own experience, either lack of or, or 10 years.
And, and so sometimes we need some guidelines, and guidelines are never a bad thing.
I scroll through Facebook groups, dental Facebook groups way too often, and I see a lot this time of year where naturally we slow down, right? The first quarter is probably our busiest, and then you hit beginning of the second quarter a- and you're fighting with spring break, and you're fighting with end of school and summer travel, and people are busy, and there's a million other things people wanna spend their money on.
And so you always see this time of year these posts popping up going, "Hey, is anybody else slowing down? I'm noticing this." And, and, like, we as dentists get really nervous because I don't know where this comes from, but we just feel good when we're busy and doing something.
Regardless of whether we're productive or not, we get, like, this sense of calm and feeling looking and going, "Well, the, the schedule's full for the next few weeks without"...
And so that's what I really wanted to talk about today, is the difference between a schedule that's full and a schedule that's a- actually really productive, and how do we protect our schedule, and how do we produce? And when we think about, like, the one thing that we're very different on here at Share Practices is how we view doctor production.
We do not coach people to having to be super producers to have a successful practice.
We have a lot of super producers in our ecosystem, and we have a lot of people who, yeah, my office, we do implants and aligners and all this great stuff, big cosmetic cases.
But what we really coach people to is just being productive with the everyday dentistry, and it's like, how can you do that? And the re- the way you do that is with very intentional scheduling and systems around this sort of thing.
I'm really looking forward to diving in because there's so many different angles we can look at here.
You know, I think one of the first places I wanna start is what is some of the most common schedule killers that, that are...
And we can look at this from how we block the schedule and how we place our appointments in the first place.
And then I think from your perspective, there's a lot that goes into back office operations and making sure you have an assisting team that is well-equipped to not add their own schedule killers.
So I'll just kind of start just with maybe some of the more obvious and the higher level.
Having a protocol for how you want things scheduled in your doctor's schedule in your office I think is important.
And depending on the caliber of your scheduler team, that kind of dictates how much protocol you need, how many rules you need around the schedule.
I remember when I started coaching, I was very anti-block scheduling 'cause I had never done it before as a treatment-
We were taught just how to naturally build a schedule that had a little bit of everything, didn't get in the way of a doctor adding in higher level procedures, productive procedures.
Call it common sense, call it experience, but I had that luxury of every front office team member and every assistant that was touching the schedule.
We had that intuitive understanding of how a schedule should flow for optimum opportunity, right? And then coming into coaching and meeting with so many different front office teams, everyone kind of brings their own experience, either lack of or, or 10 years.
And, and so sometimes we need some guidelines, and guidelines are never a bad thing.
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