Balanced Out: Balancing Your Time & Schedule As A Trainer
Telling someone else how to balance their time and schedule can be tricky since no one has the same schedule.
As someone who has a hard time focusing on one specific task at a time, I have a difficult time balancing my schedule, let alone tell someone else how to balance theirs. It’s a skill I am continually practicing and trying new ways to make work.
Here’s what I discovered:
It’s about making what’s important become a priority.
Whether something is urgent or important, it makes a difference. Urgent is something that needs to be taken care of right away and important means it is still something that needs to be dealt with. But maybe not as quickly as your urgent tasks.
What Is Important In Your Life?
I had to sit back and think of what was important in my life. My family time came first, so I made sure to set up everything else around those times. Being at home with my husband is important for me and finding the time to balance home and work makes our marriage even stronger.
I then had to figure out how to balance my time when I had clients coming in more often.
As a trainer, we tend to hear the statement, “We work the hours no one else wants to work” a lot. These hours are very early in the morning and later in the evening: Before the rest of the population goes to work and after they get off of work.
This means I have a good gap in the middle of my day to take care of other tasks such as taking my dog out, running errands, doing things at home I am unable to do in the evening when I get off work or to make my own workout time.
My own personal training times are normally placed at the end of my break time or early in the morning before everyone else starts to come into the gym. I’m particular about grouping my clients together to save me time and energy in the long run.
If I have too many gaps between clients during the day, it can start to wear me down because I don’t have anything that I’m putting my energy into, and there’s not enough time to fit in a quick workout.
Keep Work At Work & Stay Focused
Whenever I get off work, I am off work.
So I try not to stay late at work or work when I get home so it doesn’t cut into my family time. As I mentioned earlier, for someone who has a hard time focusing on one thing at a time, this can be difficult.
If I get distracted while doing one task and start another, then it messes me up trying to get back to the first task and it then just messes up my time blocks.
All I can say is stay focused and do one thing at a time. In personal training, there is so much going on around you and in your head.
“Did I take care of this person?”
“Did I do this for that person?”
We have so much we need to be thinking about, so it’s so important to stay focused on what we are doing at that moment in time.
Keep A Daily Planner & Prioritize
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize! I can’t say it enough.
Keep a to-do list or a planner that will help keep your schedule balanced. Basically, it’s about blocking out specific times that work for you, your family, and your schedule. If you have a lot of clients, it’s easy to accidentally schedule them in a time that you had planned for family or your own personal time without even realizing it if it’s not blocked out in your schedule.
Get tasks are done that are urgent and make notes about the rest of the things you need to do. Set up alerts on your phone to make sure that you’re not forgetting the rest of your schedule.