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Want to be more efficient in 2025? These productivity tips for dog trainers can help you work smarter, not harder. If your workday is frantic and you feel as if you’re constantly chasing your tail, it might be time to look at giving your productivity a bit of a tune up. Here’s how… 

The Productivity Show from Asian Efficiency has what they call the TEA framework. TEA stands for Time, Energy and Attention. By tweaking these three things you can up your productivity, so you feel less stressed and achieve more, with less effort.

So today, we’re going to see how this might work for busy dog trainers by examining three ways you can claw back Time in your busy day.

1. Create templates

I know it sounds counter intuitive to spend time doing something non-vital when you’re short of time but, believe me when I say, a small time investment now can save you hours in the long run!

What is a template?

A template is any pre-created, formatted document that you use again and again to create new documents and materials. If you find yourself constantly starting the same type of document from scratch, that’s a candidate for a template. 

By creating a template with things like the document formatting, colors, layout, brand images — or even the bulk of the text — already set for use, you can save yourself hours of work. 

Tasks to template

1. Emails

Create stock emails for messages you send again and again. This might be class inquiries, sales, onboarding and offboarding emails, reminders and follow-up emails and the email you send when a new blog post is published.

2. Client reports or class notes

If you write client reports or notes, having a template can save hours. There are standard sections that are included in every report so you don’t have to create them from scratch every time. 

3. Social media

Instead of spending hours creating social media posts, create a design template or two in Canva and just swap out the text and images. You can also create templates for YouTube thumbnails and end-cards, so your training videos have a polished look and feel without having to spend hours on each one.

4. Marketing materials

If you use brochures or flyers, create templates for them and swap out the relevant details as you need them.

5. Standard operating procedures

If your business has SOPs, don’t create each document from scratch. Create a template and use that instead.

Templates not only save you time, they also give you a uniform layout, reduce errors, and provide a cohesive brand look. 

Text Expander

While on the subject of templates, did you know you can get a neat tool called Text Expander that’ll auto fill blocks of text for you? Sort of like a mini text template you can insert wherever you need it.

For example, if you write lengthy client reports for behavioral cases, you can have the routine recommendations pre-loaded in the text expander, so you only write them out once — but can use them multiple times. 

To use, you create the text you want (or copy/paste it from an existing document) and allocate a shortcut of a few letters. Then when you want to insert that text, type the shortcut and bingo, the full text appears. You can use Text Expander for any block of text you need to insert into documents repeatedly. 

Use it for…

• Emails
• Reports
• Information packets
• Repeat responses to social media posts and messages
• Links such as your website or scheduling calendar

Text Expander works on both your desktop and mobile devices — just set it up and off you go. And at just over $4 monthly or $40 annually, it might be a good investment to save you hours.

2. Batch tasks

Did you know that multi-tasking, or task switching, is eating up your time and reducing your efficiency? We all like to think we can jump from one thing to another without dropping the ball, but research shows that it takes time for our brains to catch up with this task hopping. Depending on the tasks, their complexity and how fluent you are at doing them, you could be losing minutes or hours of your day by bouncing from one thing to another.

Instead, why not batch your tasks? By allocating a specific time to do particular tasks you cut down on the task switching and associated time loss. 

For example, Melissa always does financial tasks such as invoicing, bill payments, and book keeping on a Tuesday during her “FreshBooks book keeping office hours” session with Heritage Business Services. 

By doing this it’s easy for her to keep track of what’s been done and what’s not — and answer questions such as “Have you sent the invoice for X?” or “Has my bill been paid yet?” Because Melissa knows all financial tasks get done on a Tuesday she can answer “yes,” or “no, it’ll be done Tuesday.”

Tasks to batch

1. Answering emails

Instead of constantly breaking off to check and answer emails, set aside a specific time once or twice a day.

2. Client reports

Depending on how many you have, either write them once a day or weekly.

3. Social media creation

Sit down and create enough posts for a month, or even two, in one go. If you’ve also created templates this can speed up your content creation drastically.

4. Blog writing

You might not be able to write multiple blog posts in one go but how about doing the brainstorming, planning and outlines in one session each month? 

5. Accounting

Take a leaf out of Melissa’s book and get all your accounting tasks out of the way in one weekly session. That way you don’t have to open your accounting software more than once… and it’s off your mind for the rest of the week. Bliss.

Batching tasks not only increases your efficiency, it can also help your creative juices flow more easily too. It’s amazing how often when we’re doing creative tasks like writing blog posts or coming up with social media posts, one idea can lead to another — imagine how good it’d feel to have six related blog posts all planned and outlined? Or all your social posts created, uploaded, and scheduled? 

3. Automate

The last way to cut your time use is by automating tasks. In any business there are tasks that must be done regularly: daily, weekly, or monthly. Many of these can be automated with a little bit of tech help. Look for things in your business where if “A” happens then “B” needs to happen next — and consider if it’s possible to automate those things. Quite simply, if it can be automated, get it automated! 

For example, Melissa has automations set up in her business bank account! Whenever money comes into her account (Reserves in Novo) money is automatically transferred to separate accounts to stay in alignment with the Profit First method. This not only saves her time but ensures her finances stay on track for her goals.

Tasks to automate

1. Email marketing

If you’re using an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp or Convertkit, most have functionality for you to set up automations. You can use automations for email marketing, email follow-ups, reminders, onboarding and offboarding clients, or the usual welcome sequence.

2. Social media posts

Once you’ve created your posts, schedule them to automatically appear when you want without you having to do a thing.

3. Scheduling

Use scheduling software so you don’t have to be constantly checking your planner. If you allow clients to self-book, this can save you hours of back-and-forth by phone or email. 

4. Class registration

Use booking software to allow people to sign up for your classes without needing you to do anything.

5. Customer inquiries

For answering common questions and information you may be able to use a chatbot on your website or social media platform.

6. Accounting

Some accounting software will allow you to automate things such as bill payments, payroll, and invoicing.

Investing in time-saving hacks like these might be a bit painful when you set them up. There is, after all, an initial time investment needed. But for a relatively small effort now you can reap the rewards in hours saved over the coming years. And who wouldn’t like more hours in their day?