Time management is one of the biggest struggles for nutrition coaches. A passion for helping others doesn’t always come with the knowledge or organization of how to do it. For some, being a nutrition coach can feel like it imbalances your work/life ratio, is overwhelming, and chaotic. The great news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. With a few simple time management tips nutrition coaching can be transformed to a more rewarding experience. Here are 3 tips to improve time management with nutrition coaching:

#1 BLOCK OFF YOUR TIME-ALL OF IT: Take a moment to look at your life and how you want it to look regarding your personal time. Consider the time you want to spend with your family, taking care of day to day tasks, taking care of yourself, and then block that out FIRST! Then start with these:

Nutrition Hours

• Decide how much time you have to spend meeting with clients? Healthy Steps Nutrition (HSN) recommends you choose one four hour block per week and one weekend per month to start.

Marketing

• You should be spending time creating content, posting on social media, and sending emails. Healthy Steps Nutrition provides this as a member benefit, but if you aren’t a client we recommend you block out at least one hour per week.

Client Management

• At HSN we help teach you how to better manage clients with the HSN APP, establish a client journey to understand when to meet with clients, how long meetings are, and how often you should be reaching out to nutrition clients. This averages out to be about an hour of your time per client per month. So be sure to take that into account when blocking your time off for client management. We recommend that you block off at least 15 minutes daily (depending on how many clients you have).

#2 HAVE A PROCESS FOR EVERYTHING: What do you want your clients to experience when working with you? Answer that question and then fill in the blanks- what do you need to do before your meeting, what needs to happen right after? A few examples of things you need to have a written, step by step process for include:

• Lead Nurture

• Sales Meetings

• Initial Consultations

• Follow-up Visits

• Client Check-ins

• Record Keeping

• Marketing

One of the perks of being an HSN client is that we have done this for you including creating the resources to provide to clients.

#3 LEARN TO PRIORITIZE YOUR TASKS: Ask yourself these 3 questions BEFORE taking on a new task:

• Will it help build my business?

• Will it directly benefit my clients or myself?

• Is there time in my planner to add the task?

If you can’t say “YES” to 2 out of 3 questions you should re-evaluate what needs to be done. Don’t get caught in a rabbit hole of doing things that won’t produce results. Protect your time and use it wisely. The #1 thing you need to remember is to be flexible- don’t give up on your time blocking because it didn’t work for the first week. Try it a few weeks and make adjustments as needed. Time blocking will take time to naildown what will work best for you and will change with the seasons of life so be sure to revisit this as needed!

Melinda North, Operations Manager & Senior Mentor