Paperwork doesn’t just take time. It takes up mental space. In this episode, we’re kicking off a 4-part series to help you reduce paperwork overwhelm by building a simple paperwork planning system that supports your deadlines (and your sanity). You’ll learn how to map out what’s coming, spot your busiest months, and create realistic weekly goals so you’re not carrying every IEP and eval in your head at once.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Do a quick paperwork inventory to identify your biggest stress points
- Audit upcoming IEPs/evals by month to plan ahead with confidence
- Set weekly paperwork goals that reduce decision fatigue and mental load
- Protect focus time using simple schedule boundaries
Try the SLP Now free trial at slpnow.com/pod to access the Paperwork Course + workbook and start building your system.
Paperwork is one of the biggest hidden workloads for school-based SLPs—not just because it takes time, but because it takes up mental space all day long.
If you’ve ever found yourself mentally tracking IEP dates, eval timelines, and progress report deadlines while trying to run therapy sessions… you’re not alone.
A workload approach (instead of just counting caseload numbers) recognizes that school SLP responsibilities include evaluations, documentation, meetings, compliance tasks, and planning—not only direct therapy.
The good news? You don’t need a perfect system to feel more in control. You need a planning system that holds your deadlines for you, so your brain doesn’t have to.
This post will walk you through a simple, practical framework for paperwork planning that helps reduce overwhelm, decision fatigue, and last-minute scramble.
Why Paperwork Feels So Overwhelming (Even When You’re “On Top of It”)
Paperwork doesn’t just cause stress when we miss deadlines. It causes stress when it lives in the background of our thoughts.
You might be managing therapy groups just fine, but still feel like you’re carrying a running mental checklist:
- “I need to write that present levels section…”
- “That eval report is due next week…”
- “Did I send the meeting notice?”
- “Wait, when is that annual review again?”
That kind of constant background tracking creates open loops, which can increase cognitive load and contribute to overwhelm.
And in schools, paperwork demands are real. Research and professional advocacy resources consistently describe administrative compliance and documentation requirements as a top issue in special education workloads.
Step 1: Do a Paperwork Inventory (So You Know What’s Actually Happening)
Before you try to “fix” your paperwork system, start by getting clarity.
Ask yourself:
- Am I meeting deadlines consistently?
- Do I feel confident in the quality of my paperwork?
- How much work am I taking home?
- Which paperwork feels most stressful (IEPs, evals, progress notes, Medicaid billing, etc.)?
This step isn’t about judgment. It’s about identifying where your biggest pressure points are so you can make smart adjustments.
Why This Matters
The most stressful paperwork isn’t always the paperwork that takes the longest. It’s often the paperwork you’re trying to mentally track without a system.
Step 2: Audit Your Schedule (The “Months at a Glance” Approach)
Here’s the strategy that changes everything:
✅ List your upcoming IEPs and evaluations by month
You can do this in a notebook, spreadsheet, planner—whatever works for you.
Your goal is to answer:
How many IEPs and evals do I have due each month?
This “month view” gives you two powerful insights:
- You can predict your busiest months.
- You can plan ahead instead of reacting.
This aligns with a workload approach to school-based services, because we’re not just looking at caseload size, we’re looking at the full set of responsibilities that affect your week.
Step 3: Turn the Year into Weekly Goals (So Your Brain Stops Spinning)
Once you’ve grouped your IEPs and evals by month, you can take it one step further:
✅ Divide the remaining paperwork by weeks left in the school year.
Example:
- 30 IEPs remaining
- 10 weeks left
- ➡️ 30 &pide; 10 = 3 IEPs per week
Now you have a realistic weekly target instead of a vague, stressful feeling of “I have so many reports to do.”
Why Weekly Goals Help
Weekly goals reduce the mental load of constantly reprioritizing.
Instead of thinking about 15 deadlines at once, you focus on:
- “This week’s 3 IEPs”
- “This week’s 1 eval”
And that kind of structure helps cut down on decision fatigue, the constant mental drain of making too many choices all day long.
Decision fatigue is recognized as a real cognitive phenomenon in high-demand helping professions and healthcare-related work settings.
Step 4: Protect Paperwork Blocks (Even If Your Schedule Is Chaotic)
Once you know what you need to do each week, the next step is deciding when it will happen.
This is where planning becomes a relief.
✅ Create protected paperwork blocks.
Here are realistic places to start:
- Before school (quiet, fewer interruptions)
- After school (if mornings aren’t possible)
- Between groups
- One recurring block per day
- One longer block 1–2x per week
Even a 30-minute daily paperwork block can make a difference over time.
“But my days are nonstop.”
If your schedule is currently overloaded, it may not be realistic to instantly stop taking work home.
Instead, start by shifting some paperwork into the workday, then gradually increase that percentage as your system improves.
Step 5: Use Your Data to Advocate (Instead of Just Saying “I’m Drowning”)
When you complete your schedule audit, you’ll have numbers like:
- “I have 18 IEPs and 6 evals due in May.”
- “It takes me 1 hour to complete and IEP and 2.5 hours to complete an evaluation (on average).”
- “That means I have 33 hours of paperwork in May.”
- “This is my schedule. I’ve spent the past few months optimizing (by doing X, Y, and Z). I have 20 hours of paperwork time allocated in May. Can you help me figure out how to complete 33 hours with my current workload/responsibilities?”
That’s powerful, because it moves the conversation from vague overwhelm to measurable workload.
ASHA notes that changes intended to reduce paperwork burden aim to decrease time-consuming administrative tasks that don’t directly benefit the student.
What to Do with This Data
You can use it to:
- request additional support
- request adjusted scheduling
- ask for coverage during high-deadline months
- prioritize your time realistically
What This Planning System Actually Solves (Beyond “Better Time Management”)
Paperwork planning isn’t just about being productive.
It helps you:
✅ reduce mental load
✅ reduce task switching
✅ reduce missed deadlines
✅ improve follow-through
✅ feel calmer during the school week
When your deadlines live in a system (not your brain), you get to show up more fully for therapy—without the constant underlying pressure.
Want Support Setting This Up? (Free Trial + Paperwork Course Workbook)
If you want help walking through these steps with guidance and templates, you can access the SLP Now Paperwork Course + Workbook inside the Academy.
You can try it free (no credit card required) at slpnow.com/pod.
Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast. I am looking forward to kicking off this series all about paperwork. We have a series of four episodes designed to help you reduce your overwhelm around paperwork and to give you some practical tips and strategies to lighten the load. In this first episode, we are kicking off with paperwork planning and how to use a planning system to decrease your overwhelm.
So before we dive into some practical tips and strategies, let's start chatting about how things actually are. A lot of us dread paperwork. We wake up in the middle of the night, Waking up from a nightmare that we forgot to do a certain piece of paperwork or that we're called into a meeting and had no idea the IEP was coming up and all sorts of nightmares, even if we're generally on top of our paperwork.
I find that this has been a common thread across a lot of my SLP friends. Even if we're not having nightmares about paperwork, it's something that we always carry mentally. We're juggling all these deadlines in our heads thinking about doing this for Johnny and this for Isaac, it's a lot of mental load and I can absolutely relate to feeling really behind. especially when I was carrying a triple digit caseload, I never felt caught up. It was incredibly mentally draining I was not very efficient either because I was so stressed about paperwork.
It took me way longer than it should have. I forgot to do certain things and it was just a little bit messy. After refining my process and figuring out what worked and what didn't, I'm excited to share some of that with you. We are going to be chatting about different strategies to decrease those open loops of deadlines, swimming through our head nonstop, help reduce decision fatigue and help you prioritize and make the most of your therapy.
The first step in that process is to do an inventory of your paperwork. Before we fix anything, we need to know what paperwork workload we're dealing with and where the stress is coming from. Some reflection questions to think about.
Are you meeting deadlines? Are you confident in the quality of your paperwork? How much work are you taking home? What type of paperwork causes the most stress? Is it IEPs, evaluations, progress notes? Jot down some answers to help you understand exactly where you're at.
And this isn't about judgment, it's about clarity. So you can decide what you need to prioritize, because we're going to be doing a whole month of strategies. If you're really struggling with the confidence and the quality of your reports, you might want to focus on different strategies than if you are taking work home all the time.
Or if you're really stressed about IEPs, you might focus on those first. Just jot down your initial thoughts. In the SLP Now Academy, we have a paperwork course that includes a workbook with all of these questions and some additional reflection tools, as well as other resources to help you on the paperwork journey.
And you can access that totally free by signing up for a trial. So if you're interested in that, go to slpnow.com/pod. That'll take you to the registration page. You just enter your name and email and a quick password, and then you have access to the Academy course as well as a bunch of other resources.
And you don't have to enter a credit card or anything. If you're, looking for additional support. that's a great place to go. Step two is our schedule audit and the course workbook. the Paperwork Course workbook in the Academy also includes some templates to help you with your audit.
What you want to do is list your upcoming IEPs and evaluations and group them by month. If you're using SLP Now to manage your caseload, most SLPs enter the IEP and evaluation date. When setting up their caseload. you can filter for, show me all the IEPs due in February, March, April, May, etc. Then you can jot down, I have 10 due in February, 15 in March, and so on. This gives you an overview of the rest of the year at a glance. You can use these numbers for a couple different things.
This will help you see which months are going to be busiest. If one month is significantly higher than others, you might want to plan ahead and front load some of your IEPs. If you have 20 IEPs due, in May, maybe you ask for some extra support.
Whether it's asking your administrator for SLP support or decreased therapy time, maybe having an assistant. If that doesn't feel realistic you can also ask for support at home or just lower expectations.
Instead of having a home cooked meal every night, you get some easier meals set up for yourself, so you can plan ahead that way and brainstorm what makes the most sense for you. And then another thing that you can do is if you know how many IEPs you have until the end of the school year, you can divide that by the number of weeks left in the school year too.
Let's say I have 30 more IEPs left and we have 10 weeks of school. I can do 30 divided by 10. That tells me, I should be able to complete about three IEPs a week.It takes me about this amount of time to do that many IEPs. Set aside time in your schedule to make that happen. If you are very overloaded and you're working early mornings, nights, weekends, it might not be realistic to suddenly shift from working extra hours to only doing work at work. Sometimes that can be a really overwhelming goal to set. If you've been taking reports home and working all hours, it might not be realistic to get this done during the school day.
Wherever you can plug in blocks of time to work on paperwork during the school day, that'll be amazing because over time, especially over the course of this series, you'll get faster at your paperwork and you'll be able to get done more in less time.
Eventually those paperwork blocks will be more efficient and you can decrease some of your early morning, evening, and weekend work blocks. If I know that, my workload is really heavy right now I need to figure out a way to make it more manageable. I just told myself, okay, I'm going to get to school a little bit early every day. I am going to use that as my paperwork block before the students come in, before the teachers start knocking on my door. That'll be my focus time.
You can also create focus time for yourself during the school day. Close the door, put up a sign, put on your headphones when you're in the focus zone. Just protect that time for yourself,
Before school, during school, after school, whatever it might be. That is the recommendation in terms of your schedule audit and examples of how you might use that audit to help you make this a little bit easier. By planning ahead of time, it gives you some options. You can try and ask for support or communicate with your admin.
If you share specific numbers, they might be able to offer some potential solutions. They're more likely to help you too, versus if they just check in with you and you're in the middle of a crazy paperwork week and you're like, I'm drowning in paperwork. There's not much they can do to help. The same goes at home if you can put some meals in the freezer so you have some easy go-tos or see if its in the budget to eat out a little bit more .
Planning is deciding when we're going to work on things and not doing everything.
Sometimes we have 15 IEPs due in a month, and we're thinking about all of those But if you set up your system with an audit like, every week doing three IEPs and one evaluation, you can test to make sure that pace will help you meet your deadlines.
You may have to work ahead a little bit or set your goals per month. if you make that decision for yourself ahead of time, like every week I'm going to focus on three IEPs and one evaluation. Then, you know, okay, I only have to think about these four pieces of paperwork instead of trying to think about all of the pieces at once.
That can help reduce anxiety by a lot because it reduces that mental load. Instead of spinning between 10 different IEPs, we're really focused on those three and get them done much faster than if we were trying to split our attention.
Having a system like this holds your deadlines for you and makes planning actually doable. You're not having to reinvent the wheel every week or every month. You know what your goals are, and you have blocks set aside to make them happen. We're gonna talk about even more systems throughout this month to make the most of your time blocks.
This is just our intro episode, but as we go through the series, I'm going to share what this looks like for me and how I set it up and how I'm able to meet my weekly and monthly goals and get work done in a very balanced and calm way. I mentioned the free trial previously, but if paperwork is living rent free in your head, the SLP Now free trial is a safe space to experiment with some different planning and systems and it doesn't have to be a commitment to overhaul everything.
And like I said before, we have a paperwork course that includes a workbook. You can take a quiz at the end for PD hours, but it walks you through some systems and gives you instant access to some tools to help you implement this. Feel free to go check it out at slp now.com/pod and we will see you in the next episode.
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