How To Get Things Done!

 If you want to overhaul your own working habits, we’d strongly recommend you follow these steps.

It’s not hard to find ideas to grow your gym online. It IS easy to become overwhelmed, paralyzed. It’s VERY easy to spend a full day in your gym doing things, and make no discernible progress in your business.

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time you give it. And I’ve been there: hundreds of times, I could stay at my gym from 5am until 9pm, training clients and mopping and working out and eating. And driving home, I’d wonder: “Did I actually get anywhere today?” After all, I didn’t open a business to buy myself a job.

Most gym owners get stuck doing the “easy-hard” things: showing up early, staying late, pouring their effort into their clients. And that stops them from doing the “hard-hard” things: selling more to their clients; getting more clients; hiring staff to replace themselves; and making tough changes. But as in workouts, it’s more important to get focused and intense for short periods than to do “easy-hard” stuff for a long time. Here’s how to do it.

1. How To Make Time

Start with the Value Ladder.

Measure where you spend your time for a day. Write down every task you complete and the time it took you to do the work.

Write these tasks in a spreadsheet or on a piece of paper.

Then group similar tasks together. For example, put all of the cleaning and maintenance-related tasks on a new list. This list of related tasks creates a “role” in your business.

Count up the time you spend in each role.

Then assign a value to each role. What would it cost to replace you in that role?

Hire someone (a client, or another staff member) to take over that role. Write down exactly what you want them to do so you don’t have to micro-manage their work.

Then remove yourself from that role for three months. Use the time you’ve just “bought” yourself to work on things that will actually move your business forward.

2. How To Use Time

Ideally, you’d have a distraction-free environment in which to squeeze every second of potential value from your time. But when I was coaching, I didn’t have that. I had to build myself an office–with a door that closed–and go there immediately after training my clients. I’d close the door and stay there to work on my business.

If you don’t have a closing door, go home. Leave. Close the gym. Don’t stick around making small talk or checking Facebook.

Now, create two separate windows of time in your day, if possible: a Focus Window and a Ship Window.

The Focus Window is for doing creative work: writing blog posts, shooting videos, building your platform of authority. It’s not for responding to emails or returning phone messages. In the Founder Phase, use the time to make yourself famous. In the Farmer phase, use the time to make your staff and clients famous.

The Ship Window is for doing your checklist: tracking your numbers, ordering supplies, returning phone calls and answering emails.

Tip: the Ship Window is usually most effective after you workout, but not if your workout is so intense that it leaves you gasping on the floor. You want to get into “Flow State” before this time block, if possible.

But if you can’t create two windows of time, or if you can’t get into Flow State, or if you can only make yourself 30 minutes per day, then use what you have. Alternate Focus and Ship days. Just use the time to move your business forward instead of playing “catch-up”. There will always be catch-up work. Do it later.

3. What To Do With The Time You Have

During your Ship time, your job is to complete the tasks that will move your business forward. Use the Eisenhower Matrix [link: https://www.eisenhower.me/eisenhower-matrix/] to identify your priorities. Then ACT: complete one thing at a time.

Start ticking the items off your “Urgent and Important” list first, and then move to your “Important” list next.

At the end of the day, record what you completed, and how well you performed in your Focus and Ship windows. Like a professional athlete, entrepreneurs must review the game tape if they want to improve.

Remember: you’re not judged by how many hours you put in. Your success will not be determined by your martyrdom. You have to produce. That means spending less time in low-value roles and more time building a business. Because when you open a gym, you become an entrepreneur.

To read more about how to make time, and what to do with it, you can get the book “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief”.

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