[trx_quote cite=”#” title=”Mandy Green”]What gets measured, gets improved.[/trx_quote]
Have Your Best Season Ever! Part 4
Tracking is a really basic and powerful time-management technique—but it’s one which most coaches have used with their teams but have never even tried with themselves.
With soccer, we track shots on goal, shooting percentage, touches, pass completion percentage, # of times in our final 3rd, etc.
Tracking is collecting basic data to get information that will help you to clearly identify what you are doing, compare that to your current results, identify tasks or activities you could do differently, and after a period of implementation, compare the new results against the old.
Without tracking you are doing in the office, with your recruiting, with your energy, you are just shooting in the dark.
The more you observe and track, the more you can fine-tune your routine, decide what to eliminate and what to keep. Obviously, keeping only the best of the best.
What sorts of things can you track that will help you have your best season ever? –
Time Tracking- If so, spend a week logging how you spend your time during the week, activity by committee. Include everything, not just your important tasks. With your logs in hand, ask yourself these questions:
- How aligned is my time use with my top priorities?
- What should I stop doing?
- What do I need to do more of?
- What am I not doing that I need to do?
- How many times were you interrupted?
- When is your energy best during the day?
- Are you multitasking a good majority of the day? (Stats have shown that when you are constantly starting and stopping activities that it can increase the time it takes to finish it by 500%)
- How much time is wasted on low value activities?
- How long is your recruiting process from identification to commitment?
- Are you getting a lot of prospects on your list but not getting much of a response?
- Are recruits falling off or lost after phone calls?
- Are you not getting commitments after on-campus visits?
If you can’t answer those questions with 100% accuracy, don’t worry most coaches can’t.
Another saying that I have heard about measuring or testing is that “1 hour of testing could save you 10.” 10 hours saved for me gets me 10 more hours with my kids or 10 more hours building my program in other ways. It will be well worth it.
There are all kinds of factors you could track to help you in this effort, in any one of them is bound to give you significant information.
After you have all your goals and expectations in place that are driven strictly by the numbers, every person in your program knows exactly what is expected of them on a weekly and monthly basis. There is no more guessing, and all decisions are made based on the numbers.
That is part of the beauty of tracking. It keeps you one step ahead of the game, and often two steps ahead of the competition… because in so many cases, your competition is not doing it.
The most fun starts once you have a period of tracking history, whether it be a month or two or three or more. By then you have numbers and data to use to examine, manipulate and change, but initially you have to start at the very beginning.
