Time management is an important skill that any business owner must possess, but unfortunately this skill is often overlooked. Let's consider the following scenario to better understand the importance of time-management. It’s 9:00 pm, you’re closing up shop and your members are heading home. Not you though, you’re stuck because you have a long to-do list of admin work left. You can either bite the bullet and get it done or leave it for another day and run the risk of things falling through the cracks. Let’s face it, both options are less than ideal.

You want these tasks to get done but you don’t want to do them and hiring another employee is too expensive, especially if yours is a small business. You could possibly outsource a task or two, but that again would add to your costs.Many small business owners find themselves in this position and don’t realize the real cost of this wasted time. Let’s take a look at some common time-consuming tasks and determine how much time you are actually wasting.

Common Time Wasting Tasks

In the fitness industry there are a few common tasks that eat up a lot of time. As you read through the tasks below make a note of how much time you spend on each task per day.

Attendance tracking/recording

• Manually taking attendance on paper
• Adding attendance data into a spreadsheet
• Tracking members who have used all of their attendances

Chasing down overdue payments

• Figuring out which members owe you money
• Calling members about missed payments

Following up with members

• Checking in with members about their experience with your business
• Asking for reviews
• Announcing schedule changes

Data transfer across systems

(if you are using multiple systems to run your business)

• One system manages your payments and another manages attendance tracking
• Class schedule/booking is separate from email system
• Consulting multiple systems to determine who is an active member

How Much Time

Using the times you recorded above, let’s take a look at how much time is actually being wasted. To make it simpler, let us use 1 hour per day, 5 days a week as the baseline for this example. If you were to spend 1 hour per day on any of these time consuming tasks, that equals:

• 5 hours per week
• 20 hours per month
• 240 hours per year (that is ten whole days!)

What Can You Do With 20 Extra Hours Per Month?

Think about it, effective time management strategies can potentially earn you 20 extra hours per month (at least). Eliminating those annoying, repetitive tasks you hate is a bonus in itself. Any amount of time spent not doing these tasks, is time saved. If you devoted those 20 hours per month on things that generate more revenue, what do you think the outcome would be?

Maybe only spend 10 hours per month and spend the rest with your family or doing things you enjoy outside of your business. What kind of effect would that have on your life? Our guess is that it would be positive.What if we said that the solution to all this was as simple as one software that could handle all these time consuming daily tasks for you and more. Leaving you with more time to focus on other more important tasks and work towards your business goals or even just spend time on yourself.

Clubworx is a fitness management software that will act as your personal assistant and provide you with the opportunity for better time management without having to worry about the back-end admin stuff that small business owners usually waste so much time on. Sure, installing a new software comes with some cost, but think of this as an investment for your business and you will see returns not only in cash, but also in time!

You can then wake up every morning during your work week knowing you'll be spending more time at home than usual and actually focus on your family without the stress of work at the back of your mind every night.