The CoachAccountable Blog

One of the things technology is generally useful for is to automate a lot of grunt work and thus free up time for people, and CoachAccountable is no different in this regard.

Since the launch of the site redesign back in April, I’ve had a signature website “Coming Soon” notice on an illustrative video about how CoachAccountable helps to scale up one’s coaching practice.  “Soon” for things like this is a standard lie in the web world, and alas amid all the travel I took nearly 3 months to finally get that video together (in my defense, I was traveling through all of Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Italy during that time).

But I knew I’d get to it eventually.  I cooked up the script for it in haste back in mid-April, during the 36 hour window I had prior to my appointment at a proper sound studio to do the recordings.  With proper narration all done it was but a matter of time before I could animate it, and whilst living in Crete I found that time.

Anecdotes surrounding its creation aside, the video gives a nice illustration of the difficulty of scaling up one-to-one coaching, and how CoachAccountable can help.

Coach more people in the same amount of hours, or the same amount of people in fewer hours.  I think it’s a juicy win.

Enjoy!

Literally since the 5th day after CoachAccountable’s public release back at the end of last August, I’ve received slow yet steady stream of inquiries regarding the ability to house multiple coaches under a single account.  The specific needs and desires expressed in each of these inquiries have varied, but all point to a real need for coaching software to manage things at a team (or organizational) level with administrative oversight.

My response in private emails or telephone conversations has been to allude to a forthcoming “Enterprise Edition” of CoachAccountable, but first things first: there is to perfect the supporting structures for the fundamental building block in all this, the coach-client relationship.

Things are close enough now to that point that it makes sense for me to publicly announce the plan for supporting teams of coaches at the organizational level.

If you’re interested in CoachAccountable for teams, check it out.

Similar to the tweaks to make Actions better, I’ve added a few bits to improve Appointment scheduling as well.

Exceptions to scheduling availability

As coach you can set up your typical availability for your clients to schedule themselves into your calendar, but what about the occasional day or week off?  Sure, appointments scheduled by clients are just pending requests, subject to your approval, but missing was a way to block off bits of time before requests for not-actually-available dates were made.

Now you can add as many exceptions to your upcoming availability as necessary, and CoachAccountable will subtract those out from the scheduling options presented to your clients:

To make sure that you’ve got everything setup correctly regarding your availability (and exceptions thereto), you can now preview the options that your clients will see when they go in to schedule themselves:

See the options available for a given  appointment just as your client would.

Time zone coordination in scheduling

When scheduling an appointment with a client in a different time zone, a coach can see immediately what a given appointment time will be in that client’s time zone.  Most handy to avoid confusion to the tune of “is that in your time zone, or mine?”

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

Scheduling a regular sequence of appointments

Often times you have a regular weekly call with a given client.  If you know it’s going to be the same for several weeks to come, you can now schedule a sequence with just a few clicks:

Just a click and the option to schedule a regular series appears.

And there you have it!  Just a few improvements to make appointment scheduling easier for you.

I’ve added a number of improvements to Actions lately, touching on each of ease-of-use, better collaborative communication, and more visually satisfying.

Scheduling for clients in different time zones.

Throughout CoachAccountable, times are generally in the eye of the beholder.  Meaning, for example, that if you as coach specify an action do be done at 7:00pm, that’s in your time zone, and CoachAccountable will convert it to your client’s time zone as needed.

Now, when the client’s time zone is different from yours, CoachAccountable provides you with a real-time display of what time time is implied for your client:

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

» Continue reading “Making Actions Better”