I’ll be completely honest – nobody ever taught me how to put together a lesson or training plan. Shit, my very first private lesson client the boss gave me the intake form and contract and said ” good luck. fake it ’till you make it if you need to”.
For the longest time I would show up at a lesson with a rough idea in my head of what I was going to do. It usually worked out just fine, and got better with each lesson. But everything was still mostly in my head.
I’ve been trying to do better at being prepared with a plan. You can go back a few posts to see my struggles with notes and note taking – basically anything paper – and trying to keep it digital but easy to access.
I don’t have any kind of app like DogBiz Pro to keep ally my client information together. Everything is in Google Drive folders. So I put together a simple pdf document that I can access on any of my devices. The form is stored in Google Drive with offline access enabled. If I edit it without a connection the document is updated once I am back online.
To create the pdf I used the online app PDFescape. It’s free and easy to use, but your files are deleted after a certain amount of time.
There are fields for attendees, notes for me, things to catch up on – with checkboxes, to-do list – with checkboxes, and then notes for the overall session.
For the session notes I use the Otter.ai app on my phone to record while fresh in my mind. It’s recorded, transcribed (which can be edited), and can be exported to a text or pdf file. I copy/paste the text into my session notes to keep everything organized.
The pdf file is below. Feel free to copy the idea for your own use.