Time Management for Personal Trainers (Stop Wasting Hours)

Module 6: Time Management and Productivity. I'm going to start this module by giving you a story/analogy. There is a block of land, and on that block of land is a 2-bedroom cottage, and, you know, it goes, it rents for $150 a night. Now, the thing about this block of land, it's in the middle of Las Vegas. So is that block of land, let's say, you know, you say cottage, what's a cottage worth? I don't know, $500,000 if that, $300,000. It's not worth very much, right, in terms of real estate. But the fact now that it's in the middle of Las Vegas as a cottage, it's not going to make a lot of money, right? It's going to make $150 a night. But if that cottage was to get bulldozed and we were to build a casino on it, that's the best use of that block of land in Las Vegas because that's going to make an awful lot more money than that cottage. Now what I'm getting at here is best use theory. It's always about the best use of your time. It's about the best use of other people's time. And in this case, it's the best use of your resources. And in the example, that block of land, The best use is to build an 11-story casino hotel there because you're going to make a lot more money from it. As it relates to your time, well, time is the only non-renewable asset that we all have. You can spend money, you can waste money, you can ultimately earn that money back. It's not a big deal. If you waste a day, you waste an hour, you waste a week, you waste whatever it is, right? You waste your time. You can never get that time back. It's gone. There are 168 hours in a week. If you dedicate 1 hour to something, you know, it's less than 1% of your week. But again, you're never going to get that hour back. So what we need to do is we need to maximize our time. Now, when you look at your diary, if you are going to be a trainer— and I have seen this, so I'm going to address it— you are going to be a trainer, you need to live by your schedule. If you're in class, I would make you say that again. You need to live by your schedule. There are many different apps and there's many different ways you can do that depending on what platform. If you're an Android user, an iPhone user, a Mac user, a Google user, you can use different things. I'll just tell you what I use and what I recommend. You can use the iCalendar, which comes, you know, standard on your iPhones. But for most people, whether you're a Mac or PC, Google Calendar is going to be probably your best friend in terms of organizing it because Google Calendar syncs across platforms. It's cloud-based. It goes on Macs and it goes Apple, it goes on and your PC, your Samsungs, everything else. So Google Calendar I think is a great application for in terms of managing your routine, your daily data day-to-day. The way to use a scheduler is people get confused with to-do lists, right? To-do lists, they write a bunch of things down and the reason why to-do lists don't work is going to never get scheduled. So you use the to-do list in conjunction with your calendar. Now you need to live out of your calendar, so you need to set up your Google calendar on your computer and on your phone. The app should be accessible. You should be able to— everything, your day-to-day, when you work out, when you see the client, when you're going to drive, when you're going to go get that haircut, when you're going to eat your lunch, your dinner, and when you're going to have a timeout, right? Or play video games, watch TV, go to the movies with your significant other. It should all be there. Professional, personal. You need to live out of your calendar. It's being organized. It's being productive. So the way to do that is to chunk your time, kind of batch your time, look at all the key things that you do and then look at what is income producing. So there's a difference. Like in the beginning, you're going to want to focus on income producing activities. So as a trainer, the number one income producing activity is you training a client. So that's going to be kind of like your number one priority. You want to book up your schedule with as much income producing activity as possible. then you're going to have the secondary, which is the assistance work to the income-producing work. And that's just as important, right? So what that means is that it's going to be like your marketing, you learning sales, you watching this course. Ultimately, it's not directly— you're watching this course, you know, you're not directly getting paid for this course, but you fill your brain with things and knowledge and advice that I'm giving you now, and that's going to help you make more money, be more efficient, and get a better result. So it's going to support you on your journey in giving. So you need to fill your diary with those times. Now the trick is, and what I did for many years as a PT, I made a lot of my, some of these things non-negotiable, right? So one of my non-negotiable things that I just did every day was training. So I would train at 8 o'clock. Later in my career in life, I moved it to 9 o'clock and I've used different times of days that I trained. But when I was PTing for a good probably 10 years, I would train at 8:00 in the morning. So what my schedule looked like was I always had a 7:00, sometimes a 6:00, depending on what time I finished the day before. So I'd have a 7:00, 100% I'd have a 7:00. I would train at 8:00 sharp. I'd allocate 2 hours. So I train from 8:00 to 10:00 and I'd allocate 10:30— sorry, I would allocate 9:30, 9:30 to 10:30 to eat and kind of like calm down after my training. I knew if I pushed it to 10:45, my training— 9:45 rather, I knew that, you know, I just had enough time to eat, get my clothes on, you know, all those kind of things, and then have my session. So, and have my shower and all those kind of things. So you become very aware and you need to be time aware as a trainer. You need because time is money, right? And if you're training a client, you always got to have a watch on you. If you're training a client, the session really does need to start on the hour and needs to finish on the hour to make sure the client gets exactly what they paid for. And be consistent with that. So I know for many years when I was just operating enterprise with no management staff and no admin staff on my own, people would sometimes think me rude or arrogant or very upfront and blunt. And truth be told, I'm all of those things and I don't try and deny it. But more frankly, I was very careful with my time. That's the reason why people took me that way. I don't have a problem with someone calling me those things. It's their perspective of me, not actually who I am, right? What I was doing was I was being protective of my time. I didn't have the time, you know, if my session with that person, if I had someone at 11 and someone's trying to tell me a joke in the office at, you know, 10:50, I'm like, well, I've got to get this email done. I've got to send this email out because this is my allocated time for emails. So the more successful, the more challenges you take on in life, the more aware and conscious you need to be with your time. And again, as I said in the previous videos, it starts now when you're not busy. Right? You're booking in those times, you're doing those reps, you're living by your diary. If you've got a to-do list and you've written down, I need to write an article, put it in your diary. When are you going to write that article? Saturday night at 5 PM? Put it in, schedule. How long do you think it's going to take you? 2 hours? Okay, schedule 2 hours. You want to go for a coffee with a friend? Schedule it. Diaries are very, very, very important. As a trainer, I can't emphasize the value of them enough.