Being a childcare director involves ample responsibility and millions of tiny tasks. Directors must ensure that teachers care for children while overseeing an entire business operation. The life of a childcare director is hectic, and finding time to get everything done can feel impossible.
Reading up on tips to manage your time better can aid in streamlining tasks, sharing the load, and making repetitive tasks more efficient. Here are some ways childcare directors can manage their time better.
Time Management Tips for Childcare Directors
Managing childcare center operations, hiring and training staff, accounting, and all the other tasks associated with operating a business can be challenging. Here’s how to improve your time management and get more done in less time.
- Delegate to Staff Effectively
Many business owners struggle with task delegation because everything is important, and they want to personally ensure it all gets done. But delegating tasks you can let go of will remove some responsibility while still ensuring that everything gets done to run a great center. Being able to delegate starts with hiring high-quality staff and teachers you can trust with a task. Effective delegation is a great aid in maximizing your time to the point where you can do double what you could on your own.
- Plan Your Day
The night before each work day, plan your day ahead for five minutes. Review the items on your to-do list and set realistic expectations for what you’ll accomplish the following day. Then schedule out when you’ll complete those tasks. The morning drop-off and the late afternoon pickup times tend to be busy, with little likelihood that you’ll accomplish much. But in the middle of the day, you can set aside time here and there to accomplish your to-do list. You can even block the time on your calendar and let your teachers and staff know that this is your work time that should only be interrupted if absolutely necessary. When planning your day, ensure that you’re realistic about what you can accomplish. If you overschedule yourself, you won’t feel accomplished, and you’ll end your day feeling bogged down by your responsibilities.
- Prioritize Must-do Tasks First
As you build out your to-do list, mark the must-do tasks or the tasks of the greatest importance. These are likely tasks you don’t want to delegate to other staff members unless you have to. Some examples of crucial to-do list items include those related to compliance, licensing, or billing. Less critical tasks can take the backseat while you accomplish the ones of greatest importance.
- Take Regular Breaks
With so much to do, it can be tempting to just put your head down and work all day long and perhaps even into the evening. But failing to take breaks will likely lower your productivity and increase stress. Plan 10-15-minute breaks into your workday between tasks so you can refresh your mind frequently. This will increase your productivity even though it means less time devoted to work each day. But refreshing your body and mind is essential to managing stress and accomplishing all you have to in a day.
Using a Childcare App for Increased Efficiency
One way to add more time back into a busy childcare director’s day is by using the best childcare app and technology to streamline workflows. Here are some functions that childcare software can simplify.
Billing
Accounting and billing are some of childcare directors’ most time-consuming activities. You want to ensure the numbers are accurate and that parents are paying their bills on time to avoid bad debt and cash flow issues.
iCare Software offers outstanding childcare billing features, including competitive credit card processing fees rates to put more money into your bottom line. You can automate everything thanks to the sophisticated Rate Chart Modeler. This flexible tool allows you to set your rates, including special rates for things like a sibling discount.
Staffing and Payroll
Another major task that administrators complete regularly is staffing. Staffing must be based on attendance, which means putting this information in the same system to make it simple and fast.
View expected attendance in iCare Software to optimize staffing so that you can cover your ratios while keeping expenses in line. And because staff can input when they arrive only once they are on-site, you’ll also reduce staffing expenses because they can’t clock in from their home or down the street if they are running late.
Automatically run payroll based on the clock in and out times to reduce the burden of all the tasks you must accomplish each week.
Communication
Responding to parent inquiries can be extremely time-consuming. If you can automate some of those messages with information you’re already collecting, you can ease the burden of parent communication. They might want to know how their child is doing or what activities they are engaging in. Learning about developmental milestones is also important to parents.
Using childcare management software, you can send parents a daily recap and any notes teachers have input about a child, including developmental milestones. This is a great way for parents to talk to children about their day and share the learning experience with them.
Lesson Planning
Lesson planning that integrates with your childcare software makes it simpler to share amongst teachers to prepare for the day and ensure children engage in daily activities. Teachers can input the lesson plans, and administrators can review and approve them to prepare.
The more you collaborate on things, the less burden it will place on you to get the work done.
Parent-teacher Conferences
Preparing for parent-teacher conferences often falls on the teachers and not the administrators. But administrators want to ensure these crucial check-ins with parents go well and share relevant information with parents to keep them happy with the care you are providing.
Childcare apps allow for simple parent-teacher conferences, even if you have to pull one together at a moment’s notice because a parent has a question or wants to talk about their child’s development.
See how iCare helps childcare directors manage their time with ease by scheduling a free demo of the software.