Based on a PracticeCare® podcast conversation, Sabrina Runbeck on Using Your Time Much Better, with Sabrina Runbeck, a former cardiothoracic surgery provider who now helps private practice owners reclaim a full day of work each week.
What does “time freedom” actually mean?
It’s not about having more hours in the day, since that’s not possible. Sabrina Runbeck, a former cardiothoracic surgery provider who now helps practice owners reclaim a full day a week, defines it instead as the ability to do what you want, with who you want, doing what you want — without feeling like time is constantly running out.
The trap most practice owners fall into, she says, is treating time as scarce by default instead of asking a more useful question: what’s actually worth doing with the time you have? Without that answer, no amount of time ever feels like enough.
Why can’t practice owners just do everything well?
Because trying to is what creates the time problem in the first place. Runbeck’s clients are often running multiple locations and hitting real goals, but they’re also chasing every new tool, every interesting idea, every “shiny object” that shows up — without ever asking whether it’s worth the time.
Her rule: you can do everything, but you can’t be the best at everything. The fix starts with defining what success actually looks like — specifically, not in general — because most people default to a vague, borrowed version of it that doesn’t match how they actually want to live.
What is the “freedom compass,” and how does it help decide what to spend time on?
It’s a way of sorting every task into one of four zones: desire, dreadful, disinterest, or distraction. The goal, by an 80/20 split, is to spend 80% of your time in the desire zone — the work that energizes you and produces results. Most of Runbeck’s clients, before working with her, estimate they’re spending 80% to 90% of their time in the dreadful zone instead.
Disinterest is work you’re skilled at but don’t enjoy — she gives the example of a client who spent three-plus hours a week building spreadsheets he was good at but didn’t want to keep doing. Distraction is the shiny-object trap: something that looks appealing but where you have no real skill, so hours disappear just figuring out how to start.
How do you actually calculate what your time is worth?
Take your total compensation and divide it by every hour you actually work — including on-call time, administrative work, everything, not just billable hours. Most people are surprised by how low the real number comes out.
Once you know that number, Runbeck says, it reframes every task. If your time is worth $200 an hour and you’re spending hours a week on something worth $50 an hour to hire out, that’s not a productivity problem — it’s a math problem, and one most practice owners have never actually run.
What’s the “focus funnel,” and how does it help decide what to delegate?
Three questions, run on anything you’re not sure whether to keep doing yourself: delete, delegate, or delay. If a task falls in the dreadful zone, delete it. If it’s something someone else can do, delegate it — which requires being specific about expectations and having the person repeat instructions back, not just nod along.
Delay is for tasks that genuinely need you but don’t need you today. The test Runbeck uses: does this project produce time later, or rob time now for no real payoff? A national conference speaking slot, for example, might look like an opportunity but mostly builds authority rather than the local referral relationships that actually move the needle — worth a quick yes, not a major time investment.
What results do practice owners typically see?
On average, Runbeck’s clients cut about 10 hours a week once they go through the full process — close to a full workday back, every week, on an ongoing basis. Some clients report becoming 20% to 30% more productive after just the first session.
The undervalued part, she says, isn’t the hours themselves. It’s that owners stop pricing their own time at a fraction of what it’s actually worth, because once you know the number, doing $50-an-hour work at a $200-an-hour rate stops making sense.
What’s the biggest obstacle standing between people and getting this time back?
Almost nobody doubts that the system works — most of Runbeck’s clients have heard some version of this advice before and already believe it. What stops them is the list of reasons it’s not the right time: family situations, revenue goals, needing a vacation first.
Her response to all of it is the same: those aren’t reasons to wait, they’re symptoms of the same time constraint the process is meant to fix. Once people actually start, she says, the doubt disappears — it only ever shows up beforehand.
A final note
This isn’t really a time-management story. It’s a permission story — permission to say no to almost everything so you can say yes to the few things that matter. Every private practice owner I know is drowning in some version of “I have to do it all,” and the ones who break out of it aren’t working harder. They’re just finally willing to put a number on their own time and defend it.