Always Running Overtime in Your Consults? Here’s How to Stop.
Always Running Overtime in Your Consults? Here’s How to Stop.
And why fixing it might be the most important thing you do for your long-term career.
You finish the session five minutes over. Then ten. You’re eating lunch at your desk at 2pm, rushing your notes before the next patient walks in, and driving home with half your brain still in the clinic.
Sound familiar? Here’s the thing - it’s not a time management problem. It’s a boundary problem. And left unchecked, it’s one of the fastest routes to compassion fatigue and burnout.
You only have one container
We tell ourselves we’re fine because we’re holding it together at work. But there’s no separate work tank and home tank. There’s just you - one person with one capacity - and every overtime session, skipped lunch, and patient story you carry home fills it a little more.
When it overflows, it rarely announces itself dramatically. It shows up as irritability, emotional flatness, dreading the diary, or that hollow feeling of giving everything and it never being enough.
There’s a difference between caring for your patients and carrying their problems. Running overtime is often where one quietly becomes the other.
Why we run over - and what it’s really about
Most clinicians who run overtime aren’t disorganised. They care. They don’t want to cut someone off mid-sentence. They feel responsible for making sure the patient leaves with everything they need. They worry that finishing on time means they didn’t do enough.
But finishing on time is part of good clinical care. A practitioner who arrives at each session depleted and rushed is not giving their best - they’re giving what’s left. Your patients deserve the version of you that has capacity, not the one running on fumes from the three sessions before.
Often it’s not the patient keeping you over - it’s what’s happening in your own head. Watch for these:
“I should get through everything today.” The should that breeds guilt when you don’t, and keeps you chasing a standard that doesn’t exist.
“I can’t end the session now.” Re-frame: it’s hard to wrap up when someone is mid-sentence. But it’s a skill - and one worth building.
“I have to finish all my notes before I leave.” Try: I’m choosing to do this because I know tomorrow-me will thank me. That shift from have to to I choose gives the control back.
Noticing which thought is running the session is half the work.
What actually helps
Give a 5-minute verbal warning - say it out loud. “We’ve got about five minutes left, let’s make sure we cover the most important thing.” It’s not rude. It’s professional. Patients appreciate it.
Decide before the session what’s not going in today. You can’t cover everything every time. Pick the one thing most likely to get them a win before the next visit - and let the rest wait.
Create a work-to-home transition ritual. Even five minutes of intentional decompression - a walk, music, silence - changes what you bring through your front door.
Use supervision to process, not just problem-solve. Carrying a complex patient alone is a slow container filler. Talking it through is a release valve.
Plan leave before you need it. Don’t wait until you’re empty. Put it in the calendar now - depleted clinicians are the last to give themselves permission to rest.
The bigger picture
Running overtime is a signal. It’s telling you something about where your boundaries are, what you believe you’re responsible for, and how full your tank is getting.
Finishing on time is not abandoning your patient. It’s sustaining the practitioner they need you to be - session after session, year after year.
You can’t pour from an empty container. But you can protect what’s in it - one session at a time.
Pelvic Physio Mentor · Clinical Practice
If this resonated, it might be worth sitting with the question: which thought is actually running your sessions? We work through exactly this kind of thing inside PPPM - the clinical stuff and the practitioner stuff. Because the two are more connected than we often admit.