Whether you’re a swim school owner, gymnastics coach, or work the front desk at a dance studio, your workday most likely revolves around staff meetings, preparing for classes, responding to families, or a combination of all three. While these activities (and about a bazillion more) are all very important to the success of your facility, they all have the potential to consume a huge part of your workday.

So how can you simplify your workday to increase productivity?

Simplifying your workday doesn’t require an entire life overhaul. Rather, tiny changes to your daily routine and small adjustments to working habits can lead to big steps in increasing how productive you are at work.

6 ways to simplify your workday to increase productivity

Here are 6 tips to simplify your workday that will lead to better productivity. Because everyone loves a good life hack!

Reevaluate your meeting schedule

We’ve all been in that one meeting. You know, the one where people are pretending to take notes but they are really cleaning out their inbox. Maybe it’s just 2020, but I think we’re all at the point where having a meeting just for meeting’s sake isn’t tolerated anymore.

When it comes to meetings, a quick tip is to start with a goal and end with action items. Send agendas to your team in advance of every meeting to allow each attendee time to prepare valuable material to contribute to the conversation. Conversely, try to end each meeting with a to-do list for the group to have completed prior to the next meeting. When all objectives have been achieved, the meeting can conclude and your team can get more time back in their day!

Keep a short to-do list

Believe it or not, there’s actually a way to keep a daily to-do list that doesn’t resemble a handwritten novel. If you’re not a fan of to-do lists, or if you just don’t seem to get your items t-done, try following the 1-3-5 rule.

What’s the 1-3-5 rule? I’m glad you asked. By crafting a list composed of one big task, three medium-sized tasks and five small tasks, your daily to-do list will become a lot less scary and will lead to you completing more work on a daily basis.

Find the right technology

The fewer repetitive tasks you have to do, the more time you’ll have to teach and interact with students at your gymnastics gym, swim school, or dance studio. You just have to have the right technology in place.

Let’s do a little experiment. If you aren’t already using technology such as class management software to simplify your workday, try automating the following tasks for 30 days:

• Track student attendance from within your student database instead of on paper.
• Allow employees the opportunity to track their time worked in the same system you use to process payroll.
• Publish your class schedule to your website and allow families to register 24-7 instead of while at your facility.
• Save your favorite reports so that you can see any outstanding balances, accounts with expired credit cards or track active families with just the click of a button.

These are just a few examples of how having the right technology in place can not only help you simplify your workday while growing your business at the same time.

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Clear your workspace

Anyone ever heard the saying the state of your bed is the state of your head? I can’t be the only person whose mom preached that growing up.

While your desk and bed should be in two completely different places, the same concept applies. So take a few minutes every day to remove the clutter from your desk, leaving only a few essential items. Everything else should be filed away in a drawer or disposed of.

Schedule time to be creative

Whether you’re responsible for long-term strategic planning or creating next week’s lesson plans, one thing’s for sure – thinking takes time and it cannot be rushed. If you feel like you’re constantly racing the clock trying to come up with your next big idea, give yourself a period of time each week to be creative.

I get it. Dedicating a large block of time each week is easier said than done. Whatever time block you set aside for creative thinking, make it a priority by not allowing meetings or other distractions to be scheduled at the same time.

Don’t work every minute of every day

You’d think that the more you work, the more productive you’d be, right? Not necessarily.

When you work all hours of the night, how zoned in are you really? Chances are you get sucked into watching TikTok challenges more than you’d like to admit. (Psst, I’m guilty of it, too!)

Your final hack to simplify your workday is to set a time limit for the number of hours you’ll work. In time you’ll find that you get more work done when you become intentional with the time you’ve set to be productive.

You don’t need to do all of these things to simplify your workday. Remember: quality over quantity. If you can eliminate one area of redundancy, the quality of your workday is going to be positively impacted.

Ready to start simplifying your workday? Try Jackrabbit Class for 30 days and discover a whole new level of productivity.

I want to simplify my workday with Jackrabbit Class!