Let’s face it – report writing isn’t usually top of the ‘my favourite things’ list for OTs. But unfortunately, the nature of the work in sectors such as the NDIS means that report writing can take up a lot of time. And it’s usually not just a short support letter. For OTs especially, reports can be 20+ pages long and take many hours to complete.

But sometimes we make report writing harder for ourselves than we need to. Sometimes we can make the task of writing those long reports that little bit easier if we take a PEO approach. I’m not talking about using the PEO as a framework to structure our report; I’m talking about considering Person, Environment, and Occupation factors when we’re trying to find the most efficient, productive way to get these reports done!

If report writing is a struggle, keep reading to see if these strategies help.

P = Person factors

What works for one clinician won’t necessarily work for another. The key to success is to think about how you function best when you need to tackle a task that requires a long period of concentration, deep thought processes and having multiple tabs open in your brain and on your computer screen.

Are you someone who takes a long time to get into the zone for deep work? If so, you probably need to block out at last half a day or more in your calendar to get reports done; short one-hour blocks probably won’t be that productive.

Are you someone who can only sit in one place or maintain concentration for an hour or so then you start to struggle? For you, it may work best to schedule an hour at the start of each day (if that’s when you’re most awake!) to chip away at your reports, knowing that you’ll only have to last an hour before you can switch to a different activity.

Or are you somewhere in between? Do you need a decent chunk of time to get into the mood for deep work, but with some scattered breaks? Rather than randomly stopping whenever you get distracted by a notification, you might find the Pomodoro Technique works well for balancing short bursts of concentration with rest, without the temptation of distraction.

If you’re reading thinking – “I’m not actually sure what works for me” – go back to uni days. How did you get through the long written assignments? Of if you never really found a great strategy back then, do an experiment now. Try the different options and at the end, reflect on what worked best.

E = Environment factors

The environment can also play a big role in how well you can concentrate when writing long reports, and again, what works for one clinician could be a nightmare situation for someone else.

Maybe you’re someone who needs complete silence. If so, trying to write reports in a busy shared office will be a disaster. Instead, you might need to negotiate to do report writing on working from home days, or invest in some hard-core noise cancelling headphones and stick a sign that says ‘do not disturb’ on the back of your chair if you’ve got no other option.

You could be the opposite – maybe you need to have some background music, or TV noise, or something else to get in the zone. Think about where you can set yourself up to get this background stimulation during your report writing stints.

Or you could be someone who needs the benefit of body doubling to help with initiating report writing, and to keep it going. It could be as simple as choosing to write reports in your shared office, or if that’s not an option, thinking about other spaces with people working on a laptop – short-term hot-desking office spaces, libraries, or even a café with decent tables and internet may tick this box.

Think about what works and what doesn’t work for you and choose or change the environment to suit.

O = Occupation factors

Finally let’s think about the occupation or activity itself and how it can be tackled in the most productive way.

A well-structured template, where you’re not fighting formatting on every page, can help reduce the overwhelm before you even start. But if getting started on that blank template is the hardest part, consider brain-dumping your thoughts into an AI scribe so you can critique and edit rather than write from scratch.

Think about the order you complete those long reports in and whether you stall on a section for longer than you should. Most clinicians say they don’t necessarily complete the report from start to finish. If there’s an executive summary first, they skip that and actually start with filling in the body of the report, as it helps clarify their reasoning. Others start with the executive summary or recommendations section so they are clear on what they are trying to justify in their reports; this can make it easier to decide what to put in and what to leave out when the end goal is clear.

And maybe there’s parts that are hard and parts that are easy to write. You might decide to start with the easy sections and build momentum from there. Or you may choose to tackle the hardest bit first, knowing that it will get easier as you go.

The key here is to break your report into manageable chunks and decide what will work best for your brain in terms of where to start.

And here's a bonus tip...

A bonus tip that could fit under each of these PEO categories in some way, is to think about how you might be able to use feedback, in particular the timing of that feedback, to boost productivity. If you are lucky enough to have a supervisor available to review your reports – do it! But if you’re a perfectionist who wastes way too much time fussing over the wording in a sentence, or whether to have two columns instead of three in a table, don’t aim for perfect before showing your supervisor. Get it to the stage of a decent first draft, add some comments in the side flagging the parts you’re stuck on, and get the feedback then. You may find you’ll avoid wasting hours worrying about something that’s probably not as important as your brain has tricked you into thinking it is.

If you’re someone who struggles with report writing, hopefully there’s been an ‘a-ha’ moment in there somewhere for you to try. If you struggle with getting through reports and your employer asks, ‘How can we help?’ start with thinking about which of these examples describes you and then tell your manager so they can try to create the setup that works for you.

And if you’d like some more help with those long reports, send me a DM. I can chat through your own approach or a particular report in a supervision session. I can review a report offline and give you detailed written feedback to improve your template or a completed report. Or you can purchase my Functional Capacity Assessment template that comes loaded with extra tips, formatting options and links to helpful resources.

Long reports can be hard work, and yes sometimes they’re not read, but it’s still important we do them well! And for our own sanity, important that we find the most productive way possible to get the job done!

If you found this helpful, make sure you check out the rest of the Your OT Tutor website and subscribe to the mailing list or sign-up for the Learning Library – there are heaps of resources, courses, and CPD opportunities, with more being added regularly.

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