Increasing productivity is key to success in any area of life.
For the personal trainer or fit pro, if you want to be more successful than you ever thought possible, you must be productive, all day, every day.
Many wanna-be entrepreneurs, personal trainers and self-employed business owners sadly confuse ‘busy’ with ‘productive’.
For the 99% of friends and business associates I know, they are great at being ‘busy’, thinking they work hard, but sadly they never really progress, as they confuse being busy with being productive.
As one of my favourite business mentors, Andy Frisella, says, these are the types of people you catch in Starbucks, with their Mac and Frappé then constantly hash-tagging #grind all over Instagram or Facebook.
If you are constantly busy but you’ve not achieved the success you feel your business deserves, may you need to focus on being PRODUCTIVE and not BUSY.
Here are 8 ways to be more productive and achieve far more than you ever thought possible, in less time.
8. Prioritize & Schedule To Increase Productivity
On a daily basis everyone who wants to succeed in this world (whether it be in sport, college, business or life) must prioritize on a daily basis, ranking what’s needed to be done in order of importance.
Always put tasks directly affecting your businesses and overall success above all else (including the Facebook News Feed, I’m afraid).
If you are still building up a client base and feel you are too busy to take on anymore, find a way; when starting out, the focal point of your business is your clients and the experience you obtain from working with them.
Trust me, you can’t put a price on experience.
As a business owner, you MUST know exactly what is critical to the success of your business, every day, and take ACTION.
For years I too confused ‘busy’ with ‘productive’; now I understand the difference and remind myself on a daily basis, I achieve 10x the amount, in half the time!!
Set a daily schedule, goals, actions and get to work. Cut out the BS and zone in on the stuff that will move you and your business forward in a positive direction.
7. Remove Distractions To Increase Productivity
Daily distractions are probably one of the key things preventing you from achieving your dreams in work and business.
The world is full of distractions, especially if you work online or on social media platforms as I do myself. If, like me, you have to spend 1-2 hours on Facebook every day, you must become a master at avoiding distractions.
For everyone reading this, you need to find the determination and motivation to remove everything from your mind that is not 100% fast forwarding you to your current goal.
A great strategy for removing these distractions is zoning out when you are working, removing your phone, social media, the TV, other people (trust me, people like to talk about trash all day, every day) and even the internet altogether, if you don’t need it for the task in hand.
This isn’t just me preaching, either; any successful millionaire will tell you the same. Tim Ferris, one of the world’s leading entrepreneurs writes in depth about this in my favorite book of all time, the 4-hour work week.
GET WIRED IN NOW, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY!
6. Create a Routine To Increase Productivity
Creating a daily routine is extremely helpful and will save you wasting time in the middle.
It gives you a path during the day, step by step you go through all the processes needed to achieve more than you ever expected.
When you achieve more each day, the long-term continued growth and revenue of your business will double, triple or even increase 10-fold.
A routine for personal trainers or online fitness pros is crucial and allows them to quickly handle promotions/sales, clients, scheduling of sessions, social media, content etc.
If you don’t carefully plan and have a routine for all your daily tasks, you will quickly become overwhelmed and zig-zag between each task, wasting a ton of time in-between each task and also at every time you move tasks.
Funnily, Facebook, your mobile or other random jobs such as tidying the house will also ‘appear’ in between this zig-zag like random behavior.
A set routine could be very simple and it’s nothing magical, it just makes you eliminate all the dead time you would waste without one. Here’s an example based on a 9-5 day, as much as I hate the idea of “9 – 5”, it’s an easy example for the purpose of this article:
7am – 7.30am – Wake Up, Breakfast
7.30am – 9am – Gym
9am – 10am – Client Emails
10am – 11am – Client Programs
11am – 1pm – Content / Articles / Guides etc.
1pm – 1.30pm – Lunch and Mobile (return texts/calls).
1.30pm – 5pm – Plan other tasks based on your business.
5. Remove Social Media To Increase Productivity
Social media will both MAKE and BREAK your business, productivity and success.
Depending on how you handle social media and your time, you can use it for the better, to grow your business and brand, or, if you let it control you, it will rule you and ruin your progress.
Don’t get me wrong, one of the biggest aspects of the Fitness Freedom XXXXXX program revolves around Facebook Marketing. As I’ve discussed in many articles on this site, it can easily double or triple your income within a month or two.
(RELATED: Learn more about XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX here.)
With that being said, if you don’t control your social media use and kill time on it all day, every day, it will simply hold you back.
Remove the friends’ aspect of social media out of your business day, save it for after work or rare occasions.
People who spend their time on social media do so because they don’t have dreams, goals or vision like you. Don’t let them ruin your progress and hold you back.
4. Mix It Up To Increase Productivity
Both your work environment and the type of work you do can eventually become monotonous and hold you back.
For example, personal training sessions can sometimes become stale both for client and the instructor. Online fitness pros, staring at the same laptop screen designing client programs, in the same Starbucks can also become very stale, very fast.
When this occurs, your motivation, level of service and business take a sharp nosedive.
When working with clients, you can train them in new locations, take them outside the gym and do a boot-camp workout, use new types of workouts or training methods etc.
For the online trainer, you can and should have a variety of ‘office’ locations, from your house, to the park, Starbucks and even office-share locations.
When working on your laptop, it’s also important to mix up your tasks, which may involve you working on more than 1 more product at a time.
Although I normally emphasize the important of allocating 100% focus onto 1 project, if it’s going to take several days or weeks, you may need mini projects to give you a break in between.
3. Always Brainstorm & Plan To Increase Productivity
Brainstorm and think about all aspects of your business to improve overall productivity and motivation.
Research and plan promotional strategies, incentives, free guides, landmarks, goals, advancements, new projects and so on to continually push yourself and motivate you each day.
If you just have one task pending, then you will take much longer to complete it than if you have a long list of 10 new exciting and lucrative projects waiting for you.
I have a whiteboard (well in truth, my house is covered in whiteboards) with a list of to-do projects and tasks, broken down into short-term tasks for that week or month and then long- and medium-term business goals and projects for the next 12 months.
This way, there’s never any room for time-wasting, not if you are hungry for success and excited to work on all this portrays, that is.
Every successful entrepreneur has multiple whiteboards – it’s the key to success (half joke / half serious). Go buy 1 or more today!
2. Branch Out & Expand To Increase Productivity
As much potential as 1:1 Coaching or Personal training can provide and be an enjoyable and successful career, there’s a lot more you can do when you start to think outside the box.
You have the knowledge that thousands of people would like to have, but, you can’t reach them all.
So what do you do?
A great way to condense this knowledge into a lucrative and also cost-effective manner for the consumer is to create guides, pre-built programs, video series etc.
This further increases your brand awareness and your profits. Best of all, you can use Facebook Adverts to reach 1000s of new clients, make 1000s of dollars and rather than just helping 10-50 people per month, you could help 100s or 1000s (which is hopefully why you are in this job/career to start with).
These can be done easily in an online manner; many of these options are extremely cost effective and easy-to-understand for clients.
As you will likely know, I built a $500,000 business in 6 months with 4 highly advanced and well-designed, low cost guides/programs and online plans.
Hopefully you can see the link to productivity here; if you have more tasks, more drive, motivation and can help more people, you are FORCED to be more productive to get sh*t done!
1. Make a Critical Task List Everyday!
I saved my personal favourite till last.
I learnt this from Tim Ferris and then was further re-enforced in this from several other entrepreneurs and multi-millionaires such as Andy Frisella.
It’s very simple and encompasses many of the aspects discussed above. Basically, you create a 2 – 3 Critical Task List per day, which, no matter what, you will complete.
While this may sound small, it’s SO true that if you take care of the daily tasks, the rest will fall into place.
Just like your diet or exercise regime, you’ve got to be consistent every day.
If this critical task lists helps you DOUBLE your productivity, don’t you think your business would grow twice as fast and you would earn DOUBLE the money?
Of course you would.
I’ve designed my Critical Task List HERE, download it for FREE and print off a copy every day, or, laminate it and use a white board marker to note down your critical tasks for the day, every day, as soon as you wake up!
NOW GO KILL IT!
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