If your practice is like so many we hear about, you’re struggling to become more efficient without turning yourself and your staff into robots.

On one hand, you need to save money: Resources are dwindling. Cash flow is topsy-turvy. It seems the only way to survive is to get through each day, each patient visit, each claim, as economically as possible.

But who wants to live life that way? It’s depressing and unrealistic to be rigorous every second. In reality, patients are chatters, medicine is messy, billing is Byzantine, and steely, production-line practice is both icky and impossible. No physician chose medicine in order to process patients like parts in an auto plant. What to do? Compromise: There are ways to get more done without bringing a stop watch to every patient encounter. Here are our five best ideas.

1. Study the process

Start by being the scientist that you are and simply study some of the processes in your practice that seem to bog things down.

Have you ever seen the 1950s movie “Cheaper by the Dozen?” Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, featured in the film and book, took this concept to its extreme in the high rosy days of the late industrial revolution. Frank, for example, studied bricklayers. Watching carefully, he managed to reduce the number of motions required to lay a brick from 18 to about five.

You can apply the same approach to scheduling, billing, or managing refill requests. It’s fine to be a little less obsessive about it than the Gilbreths. Just taking some time to step back and bring awareness to the problem can go a long way.

“People just run in [to work] and start running around,” Judy Capko, author of “Take Back Time: Bringing Time Management to Medicine,” points out. “People need to reflect a little on what went right or wrong in the day so they can avoid the same crises reoccurring. You won’t identify it unless you reflect.”