We’ve discussed the importance of business management as a whole in the fitness industry, but just as important as managing your own business is time management. Proper time management is crucial for success especially as a trainer, you need to ensure you are allocating the right amount of time actively promoting your own business to ensure positive growth, even more so if you are in the infant stages of growing your business. Not managing your time correctly will inevitably result in a decline regarding your business. Stay on top of your time, however, and you will experience great value for your work. In this blog, we mention a few ways to manage your time better and hopefully improve your business as a whole, enjoy!
Time blocking
This one is an interesting one, it is a method of putting time into set blocks for increased productivity. Now we are not suggesting time blocking to be the best way to manage your time, but we are suggesting you give it a go and learn from it and if anything it will help you view time differently. Essentially proper time management is about productivity and time blocking just helps sort your time into categories based on priority which in turn will increase your productivity, your job is to see what method best suits you. For a more in-depth look at time management, PhD corporate psychologist Patricia Thompson has posted a post on Self-Management vs. Time Management.
Weekly itinerary
This is my personal favorite, as a trainer, you get out what you put in. The number of working hours you put in will determine your success, fact. If you put more hours into your business you will get more out of it, it’s simply a numbers game, let’s say your goal is to take on 3 clients by the end of the month, you work out that to close one client you need to conduct 3 inductions. Now knowing that your odds are 1 in 3, you can do the math to work how many hours you need to spend doing outreach to pick up 3 inductions or how many hours you need to spend on the gym floor picking up inductions. Whatever the math, write it down in a weekly planner, keep your time organized with regards to your working hours. Plan your working week Monday to Friday for example (although we don’t suggest limiting your working week to 5 days if you want to see true success) and then write down the number of hours you spend during the week including tasks such as clients, inductions, outreach, social media etc.
Pomodoro technique
“Its simplicity is deceptive… It eased my anxiety over the passing of time and also made me more efficient; refreshed by breaks, for example, I halved the total time required to fact-check a column.”
This is a relatively new technique but has proven very successful among many, known as the Pomodoro technique (click here for a video demonstration). In simple it involves 25 minutes of specific concentrated work, without distractions, followed by a short 5-minute break interlude. Apparently, this helps increase productivity over time in under half the time, and with this, you can achieve so much more in theory. Now, like with all suggestions, we are just suggesting, you must take the responsibility to practice and assess whether any suggestions work for you and then take what you learn and apply to your own situation.
If you found this post insightful, why not check out some of our previous posts on our blog page or if you are interested in becoming a qualified personal trainer check out our main page for course information and if you have any questions feel free to email us at info@focusfitnessuk.com.
Written by Daniyal Siddiqui.