How to Conquer the Dreaded Repeat Task List
Coaches didn't get into coaching to be tied to their desks doing the same thing over and over again in the non-sports part of their job. Here's a hack that'll work for you...
by Mandy Green | Tudor Collegiate Strategies
The human mind doesn’t perform well when given difficult but repetitive tasks.
Think of the cockpit of an airplane or a nurse in the ICU. We tend to miss critical steps which end with errors, omissions and other problems. The depth and breadth of what we know has exceeded our ability to deliver effectively on the knowledge correctly, safely or reliably.
A checklist is the solution, Coach.
When nurses in the ICU created a checklist for what should be done… the average stay in the ICU dropped by more than half. And no doubt you wouldn’t want to fly in a plane with a pilot that didn’t go through his / her pre flight checklist. A checklist at the grocery store can save you thousands, stop impulse purchases, save extra trips which doubles up your impulse buying…
Here are my experiences with checklists.
Checklists bring order to a chaotic mind
Checklists will save you from failure
Checklists will provide you a higher standard of baseline performance (CRITICAL)
Checklists allow you to seamlessly delegate a task to somebody else.
Checklists will dramatically reduce your anxiety as well as help you sleep
Checklists are your helper. If it doesn’t help… the checklist is not correct
What checklists have you created for your recruiting processes and for all of the operational work to ensure your coaching and program thrives? If you’re like the masses, you do not have a single checklist in your entire life right now. And today, it’s time to change that.
I’ll give you a one example. I used to use “The Hotel Guy” to book my hotels when I was a coach. He is free, saved me a ton of time, and was super easy to work with. I noticed at first that we used to send multiple emails back and forth. I created a checklist to ensure I gave him everything he needed on the first email so I could avoid multiple back and forth conversations.
Here is a short clip of the process I created:
Setting up our Fall Hotels
The Hotel Guy
Mark L. Rosoff, CHSP
Telephone: 919.417.3494
Web Site:
http://thehotelguy.org/
Email: markthehotelguy@gmail.com
Email him our fall game schedule so he can see where we are playing.
He will need to know:
The date and estimated time we will be arriving
The date we will be leaving
How many rooms we will need
1 room for head coach-1 king
1 room for male assistant coach-2 queen beds
1 room for female trainer-2 queen beds
1 room for bus driver-king
2 players per room-queen beds
How much we can spend on each room-$90-130.
We always want to try to reserve a conference room to have meetings
We always want a deluxe hot continental breakfast bar / free wifi & bus parking
Once he has all of this information, he will call a lot of the hotels in the towns we will be playing in. He puts everything together and gives me a report that looks something like this with 4-5 different options. He usually highlights the best option for us.
This checklist is simple, quick to go through, and it reduces errors and multiple emails going back and forth.
I can get this task finished quicker, nothing was forgotten, and now I can move onto the next thing to do. I can have my assistant do this to free up my time, too.
This is a different way to work but way more efficient and leverages our time.
I encourage you to do this with all of your repeat tasks, Coach!
If you want to Get over 80 Templates and Checklists to Help you Run your Program More Efficiently and Effectively, email me at mandy@dantudor.com.