Scheduling plays a huge role in our day-to-day lives. Whether you mean to or not, your body naturally regulates functions on a schedule; whether that’s your sleep cycle’s circadian rhythm, or your insatiable hunger at exactly 12 o’clock when you’d otherwise be trying to sleep. Scheduling is built into us, but aside from your physical needs, scheduling is a great way to keep yourself from burning out, an extremely efficient way of freeing up more time, and potentially a life saver.

Health

According to Mental Health UK, burnout is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. It can occur when you experience long-term stress in your job, or when you have worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time. Burnout is all-too common experience across a whole array of working environments. It can be caused by a lack of a clear goal, low-stimulating tasks, tackling excessive to-do-lists, and overcommitting, and it can all creep up on you leading to burnout. Symptoms of burnout include:

• • Feeling tired or drained most of the time
  • Feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated
  • Feeling detached/alone in the world
  • Having a cynical/negative outlook
  • Self-doubt
  • Procrastinating and taking longer to get things done
  • Feeling overwhelmed

Scheduling effectively with tools like CatchApp Bookings can really save you some stress. It’s a common occurance for multiple appointments to start being organised in one day, but keeping on top of who’s available when, what each appointment is about, where each meeting even is can be daunting and stressful. Utilising a tool like CatchApp Bookings means that the stress of scheduling meetings can be minimised, even removed entirely by taking the repetitive parts – the parts that clog your memory up with too much on-the-fly information – out of the equation.

Monetary Value

There’s no doubt about it: scheduling your time is cost effective. Your time spent organising meetings, appointments, services racks up and if you’re not doing it smoothly with a seamless process then you get hitches and bottlenecks that mean you have to squeeze the last few drops of time into the process. In order to work out how your time spent organising converts to money we can look at two aspects of scheduling appointments:

Low-value tasks

When you take a look at the list of tasks, you can pretty easily identify that there are certain tasks like scheduling an appointment, creating a room on Zoom, or planning a commute which all are low-value tasks that busy professionals could probably automate.

These low-value tasks can take around 2-5 minutes each per task.

High-value tasks

On the other hand, there are certain tasks like planning an agenda, preparing materials for the appointment, taking detailed notes, which are high-value tasks, which busy professionals like you must do, but could be doing them poorly because of multi-tasking or lack of time.

These high-value tasks usually take somewhere between 5-20 minutes per task to do.

If you do some quick maths and work it all out, you’ll quickly realise that you could be spending somewhere between 20 minutes to an hour managing activities around a single appointment, but not actually attending the meeting! If you’re doing this almost every day for a few appointments each day, then you’re potentially spending a total of 48 hours worth of time every month scheduling and organising the appointments and not actually attending them.

Take a think about what it would be like if you had an extra 48 hours each month that you could spend working towards meaningful goals in your own business. Scheduling with a water-tight (or time-tight in this case) process means that you are effectively getting that extra 48 hours. Take it and go shoot for the stars!