Simple strategies to get you out of overwhelm and back in control of yourself, your team and your RTO
9 Final Tips To Get Back An Hour A Day
1. Spend the last 30 minutes of each day finishing today including decluttering and planning tomorrow.
2. Check emails only three times a day.
To help educate your team and your students/clients about how you work, you can add a note to your email signature like mine:
I only check emails three times a day so if it's urgent, please call me.
3. Work out what times during the day you will return phone calls.
For example, you might advise staff or have on your mobile's message bank:
Unless I'm in meetings or presenting, I usually return phone calls between 11am and 12pm, and 2pm and 3pm each day.
This is a great way to educate your team and students/clients about how you work as well as determining what's important versus what's urgent.
4. Every quarter (ie four times a year), take at least one day out of your RTO, preferably in a different location and with an independent facilitator, to strategically review your numbers and key priorities against your annual business plan to determine any adjustments which need to be made, and then reset the focus for the next 90 days.
5. Develop your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), place them on your website and give them to new students, clients and staff.
You'll be amazed at how this can reduce the number of phone calls and emails you receive. Because once again, you're educating clients, students and staff about how your business operates.
6. Develop a What Happens Now document so students/clients know exactly what happens when they start training with you; as well as the stages from enrolment to completion of a short course, unit of competency or full qualification.
So what might be your 'What Happens Now' document/s?
Put yourself in the shoes of a student and develop the 1 page infographic which quickly and easily outlines what will happen and when; as well as what they need to do versus what and when you'll doing things as the RTO.
Again, it not only reduces questions, but it also reduces the time you take answering the same thing, over and over again.
7. Spend 15 minutes a day developing procedures for every position within your RTO.
It might sound like much, but I believe there's a system and everything, you just have to find it.
If you spent 15 minutes a day working on your systems (procedures), that's an 1 ¼ hour you weren't doing last week.
And this is all about getting the knowledge out of your head, and that of your team, into simple documented procedures which everyone can follow.
8 .Declutter your files, both electronic and physical.
9. Use a Bring-Up Folder (1-31 Expanding File) or something similar to store all reminders for that particular day.
This can include details of meetings, student files for follow up calls/emails and bills to pay.
