A Day In The Life Of Time Management From A Manager's Perspective

We love our jobs, we love the industry we work in. I mean, you must in order to do the job of salon manager. In order to handle the day to day operations, your priorities need to be everywhere.

Firstly your staff, the daily questions, needs, wants, holiday requests and much more and then the clients, the reason why we come to work everyday. Great customer service is a must. Or possibly your boss, the owner and their expectations. She's been asking me about the quarterly reviews. But wait, inventory.You cant run the salon without a back bar or retail stocked. Come to think of it, I called my rep two days ago and she hasn’t gotten back to me. One of my assistants called off sick again and I need to get on top of recruitment.

Stop for a second and breathe. These are all priorities. You just need to learn how to handle them all and prioritise. Truly the only way to have control over all these situations and more, is to learn time management. Yes, learn time management. It’s a process. Its dedication. It's buying a daily planner or using a google calendar and planning your days out in advance. Planning your entire year out if you can. You simply break down your to-do list by importance. Think about it, as a stylist the entire day is on a schedule. We lived off our books. We knew what was going on and what we had to do every minute of our day. We planned our doctors appointments on our days off. We scheduled our vacations six months, sometimes a year in advance. So as a manager you must learn time management. Schedule your days out as if you were scheduling clients. Life just got a little easier.

It wasn’t until I started scheduling my tasks into priorities that I felt less overwhelmed with my job and if you don’t get to one of your tasks on that day, it’s ok, you reschedule it on your planner for as soon as possible. It’s all part of time management.

When I was first asked to take over the day to day operations of the salon I was working in I knew it would be a lot. I was already doing more than just reception. I was already a manager but this went into more of a Head Manger/COO. What I didn’t expect was for me to lose myself in the process. I became very overwhelmed and unhappy. That is when I was introduced to Valerie. The owner knew the challenges I was facing and she brought in Valerie to coach me on the day to day operations. This lovely French woman with a British accent and her exquisite resume that went on forever told me the first thing we must learn is time management. She would hear me vent with kindness and compassion, give me loads of “you can do this” and then give me the tools I needed to succeed. She is the queen of spreadsheets. Everything was in a sheet or a document. I needed to learn Google and fast. I can go on forever about Valerie and what she has taught me and I will in another story. Having the opportunity and the privilege of having a work coach like Valerie was life changing in many ways. I promise you, if you learn time management,your day to day life in the salon will change for the better. Next step. Let’s delegate!

To find out more about the program I started on all those years ago, follow the link here to the Management to Leadership program or call the team on 0808 175 4572.