How to organize coaching plans

In a hurry? Here's the short version: You can use Sheetbend to organize your existing coaching knowledge base into easily reusable building blocks. Sign up for a free account to give it a try.

One of the things I really love about Sheetbend is that it can be used to organize any kind of instructional materials. Even so, one of the things that has surprised me are the kinds of instruction that I never thought of when I was building it. We've had people sign up for the system that are using it for activities ranging from teaching Pilates courses to organizing dragon boat training sessions. It turns out that Sheetbend is great for people that need to organize coaching materials.

So if you have found this site while looking for better ways to organize your coaching materials, then this post is for you! Keep reading for the details.

How do I know if Sheetbend will help me?

If you have ever asked yourself questions like, "Why do I have to write this training plan again?" or "How do I get my ideas out of all these Word docs?" then Sheetbend might be just the tool you are looking for.

You might have tried different training plan templates or training plan generators. If you are reading this post, then I'll bet you found those tools to be insufficient for your needs.

Sheetbend solves these problems because it helps you free individual ideas or chunks of bigger plans from the documents they are probably currently trapped in. You can then tweak each small piece individually and then organize them into different arrangements as needed.

What do you mean by "topics"?

For example, if you are a Pilates instructor, you might create a new Sheetbend topic for each of the activities that you commonly use in your classes. You can then move those topics around and save them to different maps for the different classes you teach. This screenshot shows a simple example:

Here's a simple example of how Sheetbend could be used to organize a Pilates class.

Of course, if your individual units of instruction are different, then you'd have different topics. The important thing is to stop thinking of your ideas in terms of the documents you are used to printing up to take to class, and to start thinking of them as the smaller pieces that make up those documents. Then you can write each piece once and use it multiple places.

Isn't this just a "second brain"?

You might have heard the phrase "building a second brain," which is the idea of capturing everything you know in a personal knowledge base so you never lose a good idea. Coaches might call this their "coaching knowledge base."

Tools like Notion or Obsidian are popular for this. But many coaches and instructors who try those tools run into the same problem: their notes are still trapped in what is essentially a document. For example, a running coach might capture interval training progressions in a long Notion page, and two months later they are scrolling and hunting through all of their notes, looking for the specific idea that they know they've already written.

Sheetbend takes a different approach: instead of saving notes, you save topics, which are essentially just the smallest useful unit of what you know. That makes the difference when it comes time to build a new plan. You're not hunting through documents; you're composing from pieces. With Sheetbend you can organize training materials from your existing knowledge base in just a few minutes.

How long will it take to set this all up?

I've tried to use existing tools to help me take a topic-based approach to my own teaching materials. With every single one of those tools, I've hit a wall in terms of the getting started and getting over the learning curve. That's why Sheetbend gives you the option of using just a teensy bit of AI to help turn those existing documents into topics. You can upload your existing Word documents and have Anthropic's Claude try to find individual ideas and save them in your topics library. Claude does not re-write your content, other than to suggest names for each topic.

Of course, you can always change the topic names, and adjust how they are divided before they are saved in your library. And you can always edit your topics or write new ones directly in Sheetbend. I designed it with an emphasis on flexibility and ease of use.

How much does it cost?

You can get the full functionality of topic-based authoring for your coaching content for free, for up to 50 topics. All you need to sign up is an email address.

For over 50 topics, and to save your library to your hard drive rather than relying on your browser's storage, you will need to sign up for a paid plan, which costs $15 per month or $144 per year.