Being a Fitness Professional means a lot more than just being a Fitness Professional. Sure, we need to be experts in our specific field, but having expertise in our narrow niche isn’t enough. In this entrepreneur-dominated field, our needs extend far beyond exercise. We need to be equal parts marketing agent, social media manager, publisher, videographer, psychologist, business development manager, councillor, graphic designer, brand specialist, copywriter, accountant…

Now of course, our priority should be to outsource these roles – to hand our weaknesses off to people for whom they are strengths. Maybe this is an employee or a virtual assistant. And while this is both the most effective and most efficient way of doing business, for many Fitness Professionals, they lack the infrastructure and the finances to make this happen. So, at least initially, our success depends on our ability to effectively manage countless roles.

Our success depends on our ability to work ON the business, not IN the business.

And this is the key. We need to spend time working on the 100 one percenters that make us successful. Our industry is scalable, but only if we devote this time to growth. Without scaling or development, we’re limited in daily income by our hourly rate x 24.

So how can we best maximise our ‘non client time’ to ensure the future growth and development of our empire?

Well, just like exercise, we can break down our productivity into cycles, beginning with ‘big picture’ yearly macrocycles, and ending with ‘small picture’ hourly microcycles.

This is a process we work through with Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients.

Yearly Systemisation: Outcome Goals:

Once you’ve established your core values, you can develop a set of goals that work to support these values. This is best completed at the end of each year, for the following year.

Begin with outcome based goals. These are useful for identifying your destination. They do little to provide directions to arrive at this destination, but at least you know where you want to be heading. They keep you focused. These outcome goals all meet the criteria of being specific, measureable, realistic, action-based and time orientated.

Yearly Systemisation: Process Goals:

Once you’ve established what you want to achieve for the year (you outcome goals), the next step is to determine how you’re going to get there. These are your process goals – the actions you can take to reach the desired destination.

For each outcome based goals, there are many process goals. The more you have, the clearer the steps you need to take. The closer together these steps, the easier each one is. You should work backwards chronologically with these, starting with the outcome goal, and determining how to get there.

The process goals are basically your ‘to do list’ for the year and should be stored in whatever task manager you choose to use, we recommend ‘Todoist’. Todoist allows you to categorise process goals into lists/folders, with each list/folder being one of the outcome goals. Using this task manager, you can tick off process goals as you complete them, and can set both reminders and ‘due dates’ to ensure you remain on track with the steps to reach the outcome goal. You can also assign sub-tasks and notes to each process goal.

Weekly Systemisation:

Every Sunday, spend about 10 minutes organising your thoughts and tasks for the week. If you just let my mind go, it tends to get easily distracted by new ideas and concepts, so this 10 minute block is my way of keeping focus. Identify three main categories that you want to focus on during the week. Yes, other day-to-day tasks will come and go, but the three focuses ensure you always return from ‘working in’ to ‘working on’. Set these three focuses where you will constantly see the,, like on the lock screen of your phone so they’re always visible. The sub tasks for these focuses are already in Todoist.

Daily Systemisation:

Every morning, before you get to work any any of my tasks, identify the three things that you want to accomplish for the day. As an entrepreneur, you mood and happiness may be very dependent on your ability to create and accomplish, so this draws your attention to these achievements. The complexity and magnitude of these tasks is dependent on how much time you can afford to allocate to ‘work on’ (not in) for that day. Again, these daily focuses keep your mind on task and return you to the important things if you lose focus. Quite often, the daily tasks will be things that have come up in the short term that may not necessarily be part of your long term yearly planning. Yet they still align with your goals and are therefore still important.

Hourly Systemisation:

You’ll find a lot of success from using the ‘Pomodoro Technique’. This ‘interval working’ allows you to get an enormous amount of work done in a very short amount of time.

The process to use this technique is:

• Work out how long one of your tasks (within Todoist) will take.
• Convert that to the number of 25 minute blocks it will take.
• Work with 100% focus on the task for 25 minutes.
• Rest for five minutes.
• Repeat until the task is complete (but no longer than four 25 minute blocks).

This hourly systemisation is the absolute ‘micro’ of your productivity system.

Adherence:

This system works exceptionally well. As an entrepreneur, you may find that that your mood and motivation levels oscillate day to day, week to week, month to month. This can cause you to get stressed when your mood and motivation drop, and feel guilty that you are straying from the path. These oscillations are part of the process. The ‘waves’ are a natural part of getting to the destination. Once you realise this, the troughs won’t stress you as much, and you can give yourself permission to be unproductive, underachieving and non-creative. You’ll know that the trough was temporary and the natural pattern of the wave will soon carry you back to where you want to be.

We’ve found great success with this productivity system, though it might not be best for you. Take the elements that resonate and combine them with your own knowledge of self to create your own personal productivity system.