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 early in their career, they lack the infrastructure and the finances to make this happen. So, at least intitially, our success depends on our ability to effectively manage countless roles.
Our success depends on our ability to worrk 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 scaleable, 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 deveopment 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.
So there follows my own thoughts and experiences, and my personal productivity system.
Yearly Systemisation: Outcome Goals:
Once I’ve established my values, I can develop a set of goals that work to support these values. I complete this at the end of each year.
I begin with outcome based goals. These are useful for identifying my destination. They do little to provide directions to arrive at this destination, but at least I know where I want to be heading. They keep me focused. These outcome goals all meet the criteria of being specific, measureable, realistic, action-based and time orientated.
Yearly Systemisation: Process Goals:
Once I’ve established what I want to achieve for the year (my process goals), the next step is to determine how I’m going to get there. These are my process goals – the actions I can take to reach the desired destination.
For each outcome based goals, there are many process goals. The more I have, the clearer the steps I need to take. The closer together these steps, the easier each one is. I work backwards chronologically with these, starting with the outcome goal, and determining how to get there.
My process goals are basically my ‘to do list’ for the year and are stored in the ‘list making’ app I choose to use, ‘Todoist’. Todoist allows me to categorise my process goals into lists/folders, with each list/folder being one of my outcome goals. Using this app, I can tick off process goals as I complete them, and can set both reminders and ‘due dates’ to ensure I remain on track with my steps to reach my outcome goal. I can also assign sub-tasks and notes to each process goal.
Weekly Systemisation:
Every Sunday I spend about 10 minutes organising my thoughts and tasks for the week. If I 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. I identify three main categories that I want to focus on during the week. Yes, other day-to-day tasks will come and go, but the three focuses ensure I always return from ‘working in’ to ‘working on’. I set these three focuses on the lock screen of my phone on a lime green background so they’re always visible. The sub tasks for these focuses are already in Todoist. If I need to add to the list, I do.
Daily Systemisation:
Every morning, before I get to work any any of my tasks, I identify the three things that I want to accomplish for the day. My mood and happiness seems to be very dependent on my ability to create and accomplish, so this draws my attention to these achievements. The complexity and magnitude of these tasks is dependent on how much time I can afford to allocate to ‘work on’ (not in) for that day. Again, these daily focuses keep my mind on task and return me to the important things if I 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 my long term yearly planning. Yet they still align with my goals and are therefore still important.
Hourly Systemisation:
I’ve found a lot of success using the ‘Pomodoro Technique’. This ‘interval working’ allows me to get an enormous amount of work done in a very short amount of time. Basically the process is:
- Work out how long one of my 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 my productivity system.
Adherence:
This system works exceptionally well for me. In the past few years, I’ve noticed that my mood and motivation levels oscillate day to day, week to week, month to month. I used to get stressed when the mood and motivation dropped, and felt guilty that I was straying from the path I wanted to walk. Over the last few years though I’ve realised that these oscillations are part of the process. I understand that these ‘waves’ are a natural part getting to the destination. Once I realised this the troughs didn’t stress me as much, and I gave myself permission to be unproductive, underachieving and non-creative, knowing that the trough was temporary and the natural pattern of the wave would soon carry me back to where I wanted to be. So I don’t follow this productivity system all the time, but I do most of the time. And that’s fine with me.
This productivity system is what I have created and evolved to work best for me. 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.
