The Hours You Work For Free

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work makes a distinction that most therapists already understand intuitively.

Deep work is the cognitively demanding activity that produces real value: the focused clinical attention you bring to a session, a case formulation, a treatment decision.

Shallow work is everything else. Scheduling, confirmation emails, session notes, intake paperwork.

Newport’s argument is that shallow work expands to fill whatever time you give it. Most knowledge workers are drowning in it, and therapists in private practice are no exception.

Every hour you spend on admin is an hour you are not working with a client. You don’t get paid for it, and the work itself is not what you trained for.

Two or three hours a week is a conservative estimate for the average solo practitioner. In terms of your ROI, it means around $15,000 in lost revenue a year.

Some of my clients came to me with a hefty 5 hours a week of admin work, and before we touched anything else, I pushed to automate as many of those tasks as possible. Your sanity matters more than a perfectly formatted note.

The answer Newport gives is to protect your deep work by shrinking the shallow work aggressively. Batch it, shorten it, cut whatever can be cut.

my-cbt is built with this in mind.

Keyboard shortcuts let you move through the portal without reaching for a mouse.

Every shortcut is adjustable. You set them once to match how you actually work.

Dictate your notes

Most laptops and phones now have a microphone key that activates voice-to-text accurately enough for clinical notes. Press the key, speak the note, done. No typing. The note exists in seconds.

Neither of these is a large change on its own. Together, they take a meaningful slice off your weekly shallow work load, which means your deep work hours are less fragmented and less preceded by low-grade administrative stress.

Less time on paperwork is more time on the work you trained to do… or even better: less busy work overall.