Reduce Think Time With Checklists

[trx_quote cite="#" title="Mandy Green"]There are a lot of tasks that we do as coaches every day, week and year in the office, with our teams, staff, and with recruiting. [/trx_quote]

Reduce Think Time With Checklists

There are a lot of tasks that we do as coaches every day, week and year in the office, with our teams, staff, and with recruiting. In an effort to save time and stress in the office, for any task that you have to do over and over, find a way to automate it by using a checklist.
Basically, any time you can set up a system whereby you as a coach can reduce the amount of ‘think time’ you have to spend to complete a task, you will save time and almost guarantee that you will do it right everytime.
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 Tudor’s blogs or read his book How To Have Freaking Awesome Campus Visits, 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 judgment 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 streamlined 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.
Checklist are crucial especially if you have had turnover on your coaching staff or in case the coach who usually organizes the campus visit is not around for whatever reason.
Besides helping you do your tasks 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 out 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 visit is already outlined and recorded down on your on-campus visit checklist. Taking the time to map out each step in the process and document all of the important details will take a lot of work the first time you do it. But because these will be steps you need to take every time you have an on-campus visit, by following a checklist you will save a TON of time in the long run and no important details will be forgotten.

Off the top of my head, here are four other things that you might want to create a checklist for:
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? What is the phone number and email of the people you would want the recruits to meet with? What paperwork do you need completed by the recruits? What compliance paperwork needs to be done? I could go on and on but you get the idea.

• Running a successful practice
• Game-day routines
• Travel procedures
• Camp Procedures

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 and better. Take the time to create a checklist for all of these repetitive tasks and record all of the details involved. You will be amazed at how much time and mental energy you will save when you are working off a checklist instead of trying to accomplish a task off of memory.