If you keep taking paperwork home, start with a paperwork schedule audit. Map out every IEP, evaluation, progress note deadline, and billing task you have left this year. Count them by month so you can see your heavy months before they hit. Then set a 15-minute monthly review to check what’s coming and make a game plan. When the load is more than your work hours can hold, that same map gives you data to bring to your administrator.
That’s the short version. Let me walk you through how I do it.
Why So Many SLPs Take Paperwork Home
A lot of us are bringing paperwork home. We’re wrapping up billing, progress notes, IEPs, and evaluations on our evenings, weekends, and school breaks. It’s become very normal.
But it doesn’t have to be. Paperwork should get done at work, and that’s what this paperwork series is all about. Over the next few episodes, I’ll cover billing, progress notes, IEPs, and evaluations one at a time. This first post covers the big picture strategies that help with all of them.
Taking paperwork home is common. It doesn’t have to be your normal.
The Two Types of Paperwork Overwhelm
Paperwork usually isn’t hard because of one task. Billing on its own can be manageable. IEPs are manageable. It gets hard when everything stacks up at once. I think about paperwork overwhelm in two ways: volume and process.
Volume: When Everything Is Due at Once
Volume is when deadlines pile up. You have your therapy sessions. You have meetings. You have IEPs and evaluations and all the testing that goes with them. Oh, and it’s progress note season. And you need to catch up on billing.
None of those things is too much alone. Together, they get really stressful.
Process: When Each Task Takes Too Long
Process is about how long each piece takes. If it takes you a long time to write an IEP, finish progress notes, or do your billing, every task eats more of your day.
I’ve felt both of these for sure. When you’re dealing with volume and process at the same time, paperwork gets really hard.
Volume is how much is due. Process is how long each task takes. It helps to know which one you’re up against, because each one needs a different fix.
What My Triple-Digit Caseload Taught Me
For a while, I had a caseload in the triple digits. I was in my second year as an SLP, so I didn’t have a solid process yet. And the volume just knocked me out. I worked nonstop.
The good news is that I found ways to make it more manageable, even with that many students. I really believe there’s always something we can do to make the workload lighter.
I also want to be honest. I don’t know if it’s realistic to get it all done during work hours with a caseload of 120 students. Sometimes we need to advocate for a more reasonable caseload size and workload. The strategies below can give you some relief in the meantime.
Strategies help. They don’t replace a reasonable caseload.
How to Do a Paperwork Schedule Audit
My biggest strategy for getting ahead of the volume is a schedule audit. You map out your full paperwork load so you can see it all in one place. The start of the school year is a great time to do this, but any time works. Whether it’s August or February, just look at what you have left.
Step 1: Count Your IEPs and Evaluations by Month
Grab your caseload list. Ask yourself, what IEPs do I have due this year? What evaluations do I have?
If your caseload is in SLP Now, you can click the columns to sort by date. Then count. Maybe you have five IEPs in August and 10 in September. Jot that down. Then sort by the evaluation date column and do the same thing.
If your list lives somewhere else, sort it and count. The goal is one number for each month.
Step 2: Add Your Progress Note Deadlines
Next, write down when your progress notes are due. This is a big paperwork timeline, and it lands on top of everything else. Put those dates right next to your IEP and evaluation counts.
Step 3: Factor in Your Billing
Then think about billing. Are you doing it every day? Or are you batching it at the end of the month? Add it to your map so you can see how it fits with everything else.
Step 4: Spot Your Heavy Months
Once it’s all in one place, you can see which months are heavier. Maybe you usually have five IEPs a month, but March has 20. Now you know that ahead of time.
Just being able to see it gives you time to problem solve and plan ahead. That’s the whole point.
You can’t plan for a busy month you don’t see coming. The audit makes it visible.
How to Plan Ahead for Heavy Paperwork Months
Once you know where your heavy months are, you can make a plan for each one. There isn’t one right answer. Pick the strategies that fit your schedule, your school, and your life.
Work Ahead on IEPs
If I know March is going to be a really heavy month, I start front loading. I work ahead on the IEPs leading up to it, so I’m not trying to write all 20 in the same few weeks.
Plan Around Progress Note Season
If progress notes land in a lighter month for IEPs and evaluations, great. If they land in a heavy one, I know I need to plan my workload around it. That might mean asking for help.
Protect Your Paperwork Blocks
Paperwork time on your schedule is easy to give away. During heavy months, guard it. Treat it like any other appointment on your calendar.
Use Larger Groups During the Busiest Weeks
In your busiest weeks, you might make larger groups and have fewer session times, where that works for your students. That frees up time for paperwork when you need it most.
Support Yourself Outside of Work
Not every strategy happens at school. Maybe working ahead isn’t realistic for you. That’s okay.
Maybe on your busier month, you plan to go in a little earlier. You grab a coffee on the way to make it more fun. Or you get help with meal prep that month.
Think about it as a whole person. What do you need to manage a slightly heavier workload for a short stretch of time?
How to Ask Your Administrator for Paperwork Support
Sometimes the plan needs more than you can do on your own. That’s when your audit gets really useful. It gives you real data to bring to your administrator.
Lay it out for them. You might say, “I have this many hours of paperwork time. This is how much I can get done. In these months, I have way more. What help can you offer me?”
Come with a few ideas for extra support during the heaviest times, too. When you show what you can realistically do and the strategies you’re already using, that conversation gets a lot easier.
Your audit doubles as data you can share when you need support.
Set Up a 15-Minute Monthly Paperwork Review
The audit gets you started. A monthly review keeps you on track. I highly recommend it.
Once a month, check in on your schedule audit. Look at what’s coming up next month. Make sure you have what you need to do the things you need to do. Then come up with a game plan.
Use Your Review to Reflect on Your Process
This is also a time to reflect on what’s working and what’s not. Maybe it takes you two hours to finish an IEP, and the SLPs in your district say it takes them one. That’s worth noticing. What could make IEPs easier for you?
Or maybe you’re already the fastest IEP writer around, and you’re still struggling to keep up. That’s useful to know, too. Same with progress notes. If they’re the bane of your existence, your review is the time to ask what could make them easier.
This is where volume and process meet. The audit helps you see the volume. The review helps you spot process problems so you can keep getting better over time.
Put It on Your Calendar
Here’s your action item. Set aside 15 minutes on your calendar. Make it a monthly appointment with yourself. Schedule it for however many months you have left in the school year.
Fifteen minutes a month is enough to stay ahead of what’s coming.
Make Paperwork Easier With a Plan
The goal here is to make paperwork as easy and efficient as possible. You don’t need to type faster or skip lunch. You need a plan, so you’re not racing to keep up.
When you know what’s coming, you get to choose how to handle it. You can work ahead. You can ask for help early. You can set yourself up at home for a busy stretch. That’s what working smarter, not harder, looks like with paperwork.
Start Your Paperwork Schedule Audit This Week
Here’s the recap. Do a schedule audit for the rest of the year. Count your IEPs and evaluations by month, add your progress note deadlines, and factor in billing. Spot your heavy months and plan for them. Then schedule a 15-minute monthly review to check in.
If you’re taking work home right now, we can work on that together. The goal is to get you as close as possible to keeping work at work. In the next posts in this series, I’ll dig into billing, progress notes, IEPs, and evaluations one at a time.
If you’d like your caseload, therapy planning, and materials all in one place, you can try SLP Now free. Start your free trial here.
Transcript
A lot of us are bringing paperwork home, and we're wrapping up billing, progress notes, IEPs, evaluations on our evenings, weekends, school breaks, and it's become very normalized, but it doesn't have to be inevitable or something that we always have to do.
so that's what this series is all about, is making paperwork more manageable so we can get it done at work, which is where it should be happening. And in this series we're going to be talking about billing, progress notes, IEPs, and evaluations, but in this first section, we're just going to focus on overall strategies.
And the problem with paperwork isn't necessarily just the tasks, like billing in and of itself can be manageable, IEPs are manageable. It becomes a struggle when those things start to pile up, when we have all of our therapy sessions and all of these meetings and these IEPs and these evaluations and all the testing we have to do. Oh, and it's progress note season, and we need to catch up on all of our billing.
And so it's when all of these things stack up is when it starts to get really stressful.
There's two types of overwhelm. First is the volume, when those deadlines are stacking up, when all the things are due at the same time, and then the other thing is the process. So this is when if it takes us a really long time to do our IEPs and our progress notes and our billing, and I've experienced both of these for sure.
And when we struggle with the volume and the process at the same time, that can make things really, really stressful and really challenging. I had a caseload in the triple digits for a while, and I was in my second year as an SLP, so I didn't have the most solid process yet.
Also the volume just knocked me out. I worked nonstop. And the good news is that even with that high of a caseload, I found a way to make it more manageable, and I've talked about this a lot before. I think there's always something that we can do to make the workload more manageable, but being able to get it done during work hours. I don't know if it's realistic to make that happen with a caseload of 120 students.
There is a time and a place when we just need to advocate for a more reasonable caseload size and workload. But the strategies can help get us some relief in the meantime. And so that's what we're talking about this month, is finding relief with the paperwork side of things. So what I like to do, I'm gonna just share a couple tips and strategies for paperwork in general to help us get ahead of the volume, and then also touching a little bit on process, but we'll go into process in way more detail when we get into the specific sections on billing and progress notes and IEPs and evaluations.
But first up, one of my biggest strategies to help with the process side of things is to do a schedule audit. So at the beginning of the school year, or whenever you're listening to this, 'cause it's always a good time to start, map out the full paperwork load. Get your caseload list.
What IEPs do you have due this year? What evaluations do you have? If you have your caseload in SLP Now, you can click the columns to sort by date so you can quickly count, okay, I have five IEPs in August, 10 in September, and you can just jot that down, and you can also sort by the evaluation date column.
If you have your list somewhere else, sort and count how many you have. And this gives you an idea. If you've noticed, oh, in March I have 20 IEPs due and I usually only have five, then you know ahead of time that March is a little bit heavier. Then jot down when your progress notes are due, because that's a big paperwork timeline.
And then think about your billing. We'll talk about this more, but are you doing your billing on a daily basis, or are you batching it at the end of the month? What does that look like? And factor that into your paperwork load as well. And once it's all visible, you can see, okay, I have this many this month, and this is when progress notes are.
You can quickly see which months are heavier, and just being able to see it can give you some time to troubleshoot and problem solve and plan ahead. For IEPs, if I know that March is going to be a really, really heavy month, I'm going to start front loading and trying to work ahead on my IEPs leading up to that.
And then if I know I have a ton of progress notes due, if it's a lighter month of IEPs and evaluations, then that's great. If it's not, then I'm gonna have to figure that out and plan my workload accordingly and maybe ask for help. We'll talk about more strategies that you can use in the specific episodes.
Having it all laid out and getting to see what months are heavy, and planning ahead for those can help. And then we can use strategies like protecting our paperwork blocks, making larger groups and having fewer session times in the really, really, really busy weeks.
We can also use strategies at home to help us manage our stress levels. Maybe you decide, "Okay, it's not realistic for me to work ahead on things." Maybe on your busier month, you just plan to go into work a little bit earlier and you get yourself a coffee on the way to work to make it a little bit more fun, or you get help with meal prep, or we can think about it more holistically on what you need as a person to be able to manage a slightly heavier workload for that time period.
But we can also ask for additional support potentially, and having data on, "Okay, this is how much I can realistically get done. These are the strategies that I'm implementing." And then again, calling out the next few episodes to help with the specific strategies. Lay it out for your administrator. "Okay, I have this many hours of paperwork time. This is how many I can get done. In these months, I have way more. What help can you offer me?" And you can offer some suggestions of extra support to help you get through the bigger, heavier paperwork times. Okay, so those are some strategies.
We do our audit ahead of time, and then I highly recommend a monthly review where you just check in on your initial schedule audit and check what's coming up in the next month, and have it be a time to reflect on what's working, what's not working. And this helps you continue to improve.
And if you're like, "Man, it takes me two hours to finish an IEP, and the SLPs in my district say it takes them one hour. What can I do to make IEPs easier for myself and reduce the time?" Or even if you're the fastest IEP writer, but you're still struggling to keep up with the IEPs.
What can I do to make them easier and get them done a little bit more quickly? Or if progress notes are the bane of your existence, trying to think of strategies of, "Okay, what can I implement to make them easier?" The future podcast episodes will give you lots of ideas.
One action item is to schedule a quick block of time on your calendar. Set aside 15 minutes, have it be a monthly appointment with yourself where you do this quick check-in on your paperwork and look at the month ahead and make sure you have what you need to do the things that you need to do and come up with a game plan.
When we're talking about these strategies, we're not just talking about figuring out how to work faster. We just wanna make sure that we have strategies in place to make paperwork as easy as possible and as efficient as possible.
Just starting with a schedule audit for the year, previewing what we have left, whether it's August or January or February. Whenever you're listening to this, just take some time to look at what you have left, in terms of your workload for the year, in terms of billing, progress notes, IEPs, and evaluations.
And then schedule that monthly review to check in for however many months you have left in the school year. If you are taking work home, we can work on reducing that and getting you as close as possible to keeping work at work
So that's a wrap on our intro to paperwork.
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FAQ
How can SLPs stop taking paperwork home?
Start with a paperwork schedule audit. Count your IEPs and evaluations by month, add progress note deadlines, and factor in billing. This shows your heavy months early so you can plan ahead. Then set a 15-minute monthly review to check what's coming and make a game plan.
What is a paperwork schedule audit?
It's a map of your full paperwork load for the school year. You sort your caseload list by IEP and evaluation dates, count how many land in each month, and add progress note and billing timelines. Once it's all in one place, you can see which months will be heavier.
What are the two types of paperwork overwhelm?
The first is volume, when lots of deadlines stack up at the same time. The second is process, when each task takes a long time to finish. Many SLPs deal with both at once, which is what makes paperwork feel so stressful.
What should I do if I can't finish my paperwork during work hours?
Use your schedule audit as data. Show your administrator how many hours of paperwork time you have, how much you can get done, and which months have far more. Then ask what help they can offer, and bring a few ideas for extra support.
