As a coach, you may find yourself with an endless to-do list as you guide and help others transform their lives. From the stuff you love, like coaching your clients, to the stuff that might not light you up so much, like marketing your business, you may find yourself working more hours than you anticipated just to get through your daily workload. Managing your time well will maximise your productivity and help you feel more focused, leaving you with more energy for the things you love. Planning and sticking to a schedule, being organised and prioritising goals can all help improve your time management and boost your productivity.
Here are 6 tips to help you manage your time more effectively:
1. Setting goals
Set aside time to establish clear goals and give yourself some space to think about the best ways to meet them. Having direct short-term and/or long-term goals will allow you to be particular with what you’re going to do, how and when. Clearly defined goals will help you concentrate your time and attention on the actions best suited to meet them. Reflecting on your goals can help motivate you during times where you may feel overwhelmed. Once you’ve spent some time getting your ‘what’ clearly defined, you may well find it boosts your creativity in terms of moving on to the ‘how’ bit.
2. List and prioritise your tasks
Another way to improve your time management and productivity is through to-do lists. Having to-do lists will help keep you organised and stay on top of your plans and actions. Create daily to-do lists and make a note of 3-5 tasks that you want to complete by the end of the day. Be realistic, refrain from setting too many tasks and overestimating how much you can get done.
With your to-do lists, you can categorise and prioritise your tasks based on urgency and their importance. The Eisenhower matrix or the urgent-important matrix is useful for this. Urgent and important tasks are obviously at the top of the list. Important but not urgent can be scheduled on your calendar. With these tasks, ensure that you have plenty of time to complete them properly and ahead of a deadline to avoid them becoming more urgent. (Planning like this can help avoid the dreaded procrastination). Urgent but not important tasks are those that you could delegate to others wherever possible whilst not urgent and not important tasks should be eliminated altogether in favour of self-care and time for reflection and creativity.
Prioritising your tasks allows you to concentrate first on what matters most.
3. Routine and review
Outlining and setting your daily or weekly tasks in advance at the same time every day or week is another great way to help you manage your time. Whether it’s at the end of the day or first thing in the morning, taking time out to plan your day and/ or week will help create focus and avoid any time-wasting. Along with sticking to a regular routine in terms of your planning, reviewing your day and week can help with your productivity and time management. Reflect on how your day and week have gone according to what you planned to achieve. This will help you determine if you are managing your time wisely and if you need to make any changes.
4. Take Breaks
Some people fall into the habit of not scheduling time for breaks or even working through their breaks to complete tasks. Take time out. When planning your day, ensure you plan for and include time for breaks, which can help significantly with allowing you to feel re-energised and refocused. It also helps break up your workload, allows you to work in manageable chunks and helps you to set small goals to work towards before taking a break. Getting outside in nature as much as possible during break times does wonders for physical, mental and emotional well-being and will help you to function much better in the long term.
5.Undisturbed and uninterrupted work
Reduce distractions so that you can work uninterrupted and be able to focus and dedicate your time completely. Chances are you’ll be able to get tasks done a lot quicker with uninterrupted time to work. You can use ‘do not disturb’ on your devices to avoid distractions and even apply techniques such as the Pomodoro technique to work in intervals and take short breaks. If you’re an avid email checker or social media scroller, stop it! Consider using an app like Clockify, which will really help you stay focused on the task at hand and reduce the temptation to stray onto social media when you should be ticking off your to-do list.
6.Check out Delenta! As an all-in-one platform, Delenta has various features that can help with saving and organising your time. Below are just a couple of ways that Delenta can help:
Our super simple edit and update template-based landing page eliminates the need for creating a costly and time-consuming website. With Delenta you can set up your online presence, create and customise a professional-looking landing page in little to no time, which is an especially brilliant solution for anyone in the early stages of their coaching business.
“Delenta saved me hours and days of work and enabled me to just focus on the most important thing which is building relationships with potential clients and current clients and delivering coaching services” - Matthew Francis
Our My Calendar feature allows coaches to create appointments, set their availability weeks or even months in advance, and be fully flexible to make adjustments whenever necessary. Create a weekly structure and outline your set working hours. Schedule meeting reminders to ensure you are keeping track of upcoming sessions and even utilise our same-day booking feature to avoid any last-minute meetings.
You can also synchronise your Google or Outlook calendar with Delenta and display all Delenta appointments and any events from your calendar in one place, so you can manage your time well and avoid the multi-system overwhelm caused by switching between different platforms.
To learn more about Delenta:Join us for our weekly LIVE Q&A to learn more about Delenta, and how your can be part of our growing coaching community.These sessions are interactive, informative and designed to help you understand what it takes to really grow your online coaching business, and how Delenta can help you save time & money, and grow your business.
