A sustainable workload is more than just manageable - it's maintainable over time without compromising your mental health, physical well-being, or job performance.
Dr. Michelle Boisvert - July 29, 2025
According to Truth for Teachers, a sustainable workload is one that protects your energy, preserves your time, and allows you to show up consistently, without sacrificing your well-being. These same principles can, and must, be applied to report writing in education and clinical practice. Here’s how sustainable report writing aligns with those hallmarks:
Automate essential content to reduce cognitive load and prevent burnout. Streamlining repeatable sections helps you stay focused on the parts of the report that truly require your clinical insight.
Set boundaries with protected writing blocks during the workday. Reclaim your evenings for rest, family, and life outside of work.
Standardize legal and compliance-based content to minimize redundancy and maintain consistency across reports—avoiding the crash-and-recover cycle of last-minute writing marathons.
For this blog, we are focusing on how the principles of sustainable workloads apply to report writing within three fields: Speech and Language Pathology (SLP), Special Education (SPED) and Psychology, especially at a time when referral rates are increasing and subsequent evaluations demands continue to rise (ASHA, 2024, Berham, 2023).
Why Sustainability Matters in Report Writing
In high-impact professions like speech-language pathology, psychology, and special education, workload sustainability is more than a preference, it is a necessity. Report writing is one of the most time-consuming and cognitively demanding aspects of our work (ASHA, 2024). The sheer amount of time it takes to write reports can quickly become overwhelming (and can often lead to burnout) if we lack systems to manage it.
According to ASHA’s 2024 Schools Survey, a “large amount of paperwork” was ranked as one of the top job-related challenges across most school-based settings (ASHA, 2024).
At the interprofessional, department and district level, it's time to evolve the conversation. Instead of asking, “How quickly can I get report writing done?” we must ask, “How can specific technology make report writing faster without losing my professional expertise and voice?”
The Hidden Costs of Documentation Overload
Without sustainable systems in place to systemize legally required documents, like evaluation reports, professionals risk:
Chronic overtime
Decreased diagnostic accuracy due to overload, stress and fatigue
Reduced job satisfaction and long-term clinician retention
Inequities in service delivery because so much time is spent on report writing
Sustainable workloads and efficiency are not about cutting corners. It's about preserving the mental bandwidth required for the high-level clinical reasoning and interpretation that only trained professionals can provide.
Sustainable Report Writing
Fortunately, the landscape is shifting. A growing number of professionals are adopting tech-enabled strategies that streamline report writing, empower them to showcase their expertise without cognitive drain and create time in their day to achieve a better work-life balance.
Often, professionals want to leverage technology but are not sure of how to go about it. Advice from experts in the field suggests that the first step of sustainable report writing is to identify the report sections that remain largely unchanged across evaluations and use automated-powered templates for those sections. Examples of report sections ideal for automation include:
Reason for referral
Standardized test descriptions
Interpretation phrases
Observational statements
Legal and procedural language
Recommendations phrasing
These types of report sections are perfect for quick transfer to a customizable, automation-powered template and will instantly speed up writing without compromising accuracy or your expert voice.
“Implementing automated workload strategies to streamline report writing has led to subjective improvements in documentation time and clinician satisfaction.”
(Kang & Snarked, 2024)
Customized Automation is a Sustainable Solution
More clinicians are embracing automation-powered documentation to:
Save time on repetitive writing tasks
Minimize errors and copy/paste fatigue
Reduce cognitive overload and improve focus
Preserve their clinical voice, quality and individuality of each report
According to Shanafelt et al. (2021) and the National Academy of Medicine (2019), reducing administrative burden—such as excessive documentation—is critical to improving clinician well-being and supporting long-term workforce engagement. Survey data shows that clinicians who adopt customizable automation tools save an average of 2.5 hours per report (easyReportPRO, 2024), all while maintaining the clinical accuracy, personalization, and professional voice their clients and teams rely on.
Download our free Automation Starter Kit PDF today! Inside, you'll discover practical strategies and insights on leveraging automation to reduce your report writing time and boost accuracy significantly.
How easyReportPRO Supports Sustainable Workflows
Some platforms, like easyReportPRO, are designed specifically for SLPs, Special Educators and Psychologists to write faster, smarter, and more sustainably. Built by clinicians, easyReportPRO offers:
Customized automated-powered templates
The ability for clinicians to add in their own templates and leverage automation tools
Built-in AI prompts and customizable sections
Tools that evolve with area of testing need and field of expertise
“Before easyReportPRO, I spent hours every evening trying to keep up with evaluations. Now, I finish my reports during the school day and actually have time to breathe.
—SLP, Arizona
The Bigger Picture: Wellness & Longevity in Practice
The goal of sustainability isn’t just to write reports faster. It is to:
Reclaim your evenings and weekends
Protect your cognitive energy
Elevate your interpretive work
Extend your career with less risk of burnout
Research confirms that investing in supportive tools and systems is a strategic move for protecting career longevity, clinician well-being, and the overall quality of care delivered (National Academy of Medicine, 2019; Shanafelt et al., 2021). When educators and allied health providers are supported, not stretched, the system becomes stronger—for students, for clients, for teams, and for the professionals who make it all possible.
Citations:
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2024). 2024 Schools Survey: SLP workforce report. https://www.asha.org/siteassets/surveys/2024-schools-survey-slp-workforce.pdf
Barnum, M. (2023, July 11). Number of special education students climbs to near 8 million. K-12 Dive. https://www.k12dive.com/news/number-of-special-education-students-climbs-to-near-8-million/740413/
Hobensack, M., et al. (2022). Burnout in school-based clinicians: The impact of documentation demands. Journal of Educational Health, 13(2), 112–121.
Kang, A., & Snarker, T. (2024). Workflow automation in allied health: Reducing documentation time and increasing satisfaction. Clinical Practice Innovations, 6(1), 55–63.
Shanafelt, T. D., et al. (2021). Executive leadership and physician well-being: Nine organizational strategies. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 96(1), 190–207.
National Academy of Medicine (NAM). (2019). Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being. https://nam.edu/initiatives/clinician-resilience-and-well-being/
Watson, A. (n.d.). How to create a more sustainable teaching workload. Truth for Teachers. Retrieved June 16, 2025, from https://truthforteachers.com/how-to-create-a-more-sustainable-teaching-workload/
About Michelle: Michelle is the co-founder and lead clinical developer of easyReportPRO, a powerful software that helps speech-language pathologists (SLPs) create high-quality diagnostic reports quickly and easily.
Michelle's expertise in telepractice and technology-enabled strategies, combined with her personal experience of burnout and considering leaving the SLP profession, gives her a unique understanding of the challenges SLPs face, especially when it comes to the high workload of writing diagnostic reports. With this blog, Michelle aims to share her knowledge and experience to help SLPs use technology to optimize their report writing process, save time, and achieve a better work-life balance.