by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
There are a lot of tasks that we do as coaches every day, week and year in the office, with our teams, and with recruiting. If you want to save time, and want to do it right every time, use a checklist.
For example, setting up a successful campus visit potentially can take a lot of time because there are a lot of details involved.
For those that read Dan’s blogs, you know that you need to plan every possible area of your visit and your interaction with your recruits because they are watching your every move, and making judgement calls along the way as to whether or not to buy what you’re selling. On-campus visits are a pretty big deal, are a lot of work to set up, and can make or break your recruiting efforts.
An easy way to reduce the time it takes to schedule the visit and make sure that everything gets taken care of is to invest a few hours creating a streamline procedure and have everything documented on an on-campus visit checklist.
The reason why checklists are good is simple: it’s easy for us to forget things. When you do something that involves multiple steps, it’s likely that you would forget one or two of them. Using checklists ensures that you won’t forget anything.
Besides helping you do your task correctly every time, here are some other benefits of using a checklist:
- Creating a checklist will allow you to take the thinking out of repetitive tasks. Since you don’t have to remember all the steps you need to take, you can use your brain power for something else.
- You can save time. When you have to think, remember, weigh your options, and agonize over every small task, it takes a lot of time, not to mention mental energy. But when you make decisions in advance, you free up time to focus on other important activities that need to get done.
- You can delegate more easily. If your recruiting coordinator is off recruiting, is ill, takes another job, or whatever, you don’t have to rush around trying to figure out what to do because every step for setting up a perfect on-campus is already outlines and recorded down on your on-campus visit checklist.
Start by writing down the steps you take when planning a visit from the start to the end of the visit. What tasks need to be done? Who is responsible for doing each task?. When do tasks need to be done by?
Here are some other things that you might want to create a checklist for:
- Running a successful practice
- Game-day routines
- Travel procedures
- Camp Produdures
I urge you to evaluate all tasks that you do on a repetitive, routine basis to see if you can dream up ways to do them faster. Identify your regular office, team, or recruiting tasks and break them down into their consistent elements and you’ll probably get some ideas about how to streamline them. Think about how to eliminate the hidden time costs of travel, gathering materials, revising, and cleanup.