Don’t we tell our athletes to “stay focused” all the time?
It’s easy as coaches to lose track of what’s important. As a coach we tend to wear a lot of hats. We want to be coaches, first and foremost but we’re also psychiatrists, nutritionists, business owners, accountants, web designers, marketers, speakers and probably a ton more.
So how do we stay focused?
I try to group things as much as possible. For example, business items include accounting, sales, marketing and web sites are items and tasks in one group. In another group is coaching, writing blog posts, writing training plans and workouts.
When I get my day started at look at the various tasks and make sure I keep them in their respective lists. I use an application called Trello, for this. It’s a free tool for organizing your life and I love it. I even used it to plan my wedding.
So once I take a look at Trello, I organize things by priority. Usually, in the morning, I’m not having conversations with my athletes yet and so I tend to take care of business type stuff in the morning. I try and get emails answered and any other tasks done by 11am. When I’m done with business stuff, I’ll spend an hour prepping the rest of my day.
After lunch I spend time working with athletes, writing plans, planning for the week of training and anything else related to coaching. Segregating business and coaching has made it so much easier to for me to stay focused on the things I care about.
Business is important and has to be done. Staying disciplined on when you handle these tasks makes all the difference in the world for me. Maybe it can help you too!
How do you stay focused? Post a comment below.