28 July 2026 · Practice notes

Measuring the day you actually had

A small practice does not need analytics. It needs four counts kept by hand for a fortnight.

There is a particular kind of meeting in which everyone agrees the practice is busier than it used to be, nobody can say by how much, and the conversation ends with a decision to keep an eye on it. It is possible to leave that loop for the price of a sheet of paper.

Four counts are enough. The time the last appointment of the morning actually started. The number of appointments that were not attended. The number of calls the desk could not answer. The number of items filed the same day rather than the next. Kept for two weeks, on a printed grid by the desk, they answer most of the questions a small practice argues about.

The value is not in any single figure. It is in the pattern. A morning that runs twenty minutes late on Mondays and on time on Thursdays is not a capacity problem; it is a Monday problem, and Monday is a schedule that can be changed. Missed appointments clustered in one appointment type is not a general behaviour issue; it is one booking rule.

The reason to count by hand rather than extract a report is that the counting itself changes what people notice. Someone writing down that the morning ran late begins, within days, to have an opinion about why. A report produced monthly by a system is read once and filed.

Two weeks is also deliberate. Long enough to see a pattern, short enough that nobody has to be persuaded to sustain it. If the exercise is useful it will be repeated in a few months, and the second fortnight is worth more than the first because it has something to be compared against.

The one discipline that matters is not tidying the numbers. A day that went badly is the most informative row on the sheet, and a practice that quietly omits it has spent two weeks proving what it already believed.