“The hours are not enough for training”, “I finish training my clients and the day has passed”, “the weekend is coming and I'm still working instead of resting because the week didn't work”...
These are the typical conditions that many fitness and health professionals tell us on a daily basis. And sometimes we don't realize it, but not having a guide, a routine or a daily work methodology causes us to waste time on tasks that perhaps don't take that long and therefore, the day goes away in the blink of an eye. Let's go on to see, mainly, what it means to be productive in reality.
What is productivity?
We already told you, training too many clients in one day doesn't mean you're a productive person. Really, this is an economic concept and basically what it refers to is measuring production efficiency for each resource used. In other words, to do more in less time and if possible, to do it very well. Productivity is closely linked to efficiency. Being an efficient person means knowing how to perform at the best possible using minimum resources. Transferring this to our daily lives, we have a very, very limited resource... time. The day has 24 hours, of which 6 or 8 hours are hours of sleep, so you have between 16 and 18 hours left to do everything you set out to do during the day (both personal and professional life). What you do with them will determine the results you get.
Poor time management. The most common mistake among fitness and health professionals with their clients.
One of the most common failures in the fitness industry is the fact of spending too much time training clients, developing plans and everything that each client involves (phone calls, answering messages, etc...). All this, with a minimum amount of time to grow the business. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, you must understand that the results of your business will not depend only on the number of clients you manage to train in a day, but on how you will distribute your working hours (which you will have to define as well) to achieve everything you set out to do. There is a law (Pareto's law) that in productivity, says that 80% of a person's success comes from 20% of their effort. In other words, of all the things we do throughout our day, only 20% really matter. The trick is to discover what that 20% is, that is, what are the critical activities that produce 80% of our results. If you apply this law to the organization of your daily work, you will achieve:
- Work smarter and do fewer tasks (you'll achieve productivity)
- You will know how to prioritize
- You will know how to focus on what is really important and necessary for the moment
- You will focus your efforts
- You'll make better decisions, such as what calls to answer or what messages to answer (only 20% of them are really important).
Let's move on to the solutions... The tips!
#1 Use technology to optimize your work
Any professional related to the fitness world, nowadays, needs good organization and time management, so in this first point we are going to recommend that you start leaving aside all those unnecessary resources that you use to manage your business and clients. Excels, words, emails and constant video calls only complicate your life. Start using a software or platform for fitness and health professionals that allows you to have all your work, in one place. This tool will allow you to centralize all the management of your business, in addition to providing your clients with a much more professional service. With it, you can:
- Have all your services and content available to your customers 24/7
- Reach more customers and build loyalty among those who are already part of your team
- Serve each customer in a personalized way without wasting time thanks to that previous planning that you generate and save.
- Generate greater benefits thanks to the possibility of offering other services or products within the platform itself
- Manage your customers' payments and subscription plans in one place and without worrying about having to chase them to charge them, every month.
With all of the above automated, you will achieve
- Have more time to dedicate to creating content for your community in RRSS
- And of course, to have time for yourself and your family or friends.
#2 Define a work methodology
It has been proven that having a work methodology helps you optimize your resources, improve the quality of your work, reduce risks and set priorities.Start by defining your processes. Document everything requisite for the development of a full workday. In other words, it captures in a diagram everything you need to get out in a day for your work both business management and customer service to be optimal. Once you have those processes or daily tasks defined, categorize them according to their importance:
- Urgent and important
- Important but not urgent
- Urgent but not important
- Neither urgent nor important
After:
- Plan them according to their level of importance
- Eliminate the ones that aren't needed right now
- Postpone those that don't depend on anything that day or week
- Or if you have a team, delegate the tasks so that you can fulfill all the proposals and there is nothing left in the air
Optional: You can finish by placing a sub-category for each of your tasks. Label them by placing them if they are professional, personal or relational. The latter refers to your social life, going out with friends, going to see a family member, etc. Because yes, this should be part of your days too. With all this done, it's time to define a schedule
#3 Establish your work schedule
Having categorized and ordered your daily tasks, it's time to capture them over time. If you haven't done this yet, start by defining how many days a week you will work, what days they will be working exactly and above all, limit a time zone. We should not remind you that the maximum allowed by law (at least in Spain) is 8 hours a day for 5 days. We recommend that you choose the days based on those where you have the most clients and volume of work. For example, if you see that on Saturdays you have a lot of customers but on the contrary, on Wednesdays you have only 1 or 2 customers. Well then, set Wednesdays and Sundays as days off and the rest as work days. The hours will also depend on the schedules that your clients have to train with you, but be careful, don't mix them with that time you dedicate to business management issues or creating content for your social networks, this is also important and requires dedication and concentration.
2 last tips to increase your productivity
- Read and keep up to date with everything that's happening in the fitness and health sector. This will not only help you with your personal and professional growth, it will also help you to create quality and valuable content for your community on social networks and to communicate in a more effective way.
- Get up early! Your business and your body will thank you. If you wake up every day around 7:00, you'll have more time not only to dedicate to yourself, but also to organize your day and your spaces (yes, your home and even your work area). You can start your day with breakfast, meditating, or simply relaxing somewhere that brings you calm. At the same time, can you define the tasks of the day and would you be ready to get to work?
4 books you must read
And so far this article on productivity. We hope that it will be super useful for you and, above all, that you start including these tips in the organization of your days today. Running your own fitness business is not an easy task, but you can make it more bearable if you organize yourself and do things right. Go for it!
