The Myth of a Full Book

Since I just wrote about calculating booked-ness (if I can spell it, it’s a word!) I figured this would be a good time to write this post too.

There’s no such thing as a full book.

OK ... maybe some of y’all out there are super organized and have managed to pull it off. But it’s a rare feat. For most of us, we are never 100% booked.

Oh sure, sometimes we find ourselves 115% booked, but never 100%.

The thing is, there’s always 15 minutes or half an hour between clients here and there. You might always have 10 minutes of spare time on the book before your first client because you have to wait for her to drop the kids off at school before she gets to the salon. Or 15 minutes at 5 p.m. while you wait for that client to arrive after work. Then there’s the “I booked an hour and half for your backfill” clients who show up and want “just a fill,” which only takes an hour.

Sure, you can calculate those little free moments any way you want. You can assure yourself that that extra half hour for “just a fill” instead of the backfill is a blessing that allows for a coffee run or a chance to check e-mail. You can look at it like it wasn’t really unbooked time in the schedule because you did have a client there and just because it took less time than expected doesn’t make it down time! But, really, if you’d known about it in advance you could have put a polish change or a repair in that spot.

Then there are the weeks when there just isn’t enough time to book a full service in any of those little 10- to 30-minute breaks, so you stay a little later or come in at a time when you’re normally not available for clients. Then you look at your schedule and think “Wow! I’m over booked!”

But the pure math tells you that even though you worked two hours of “overtime,” you were only 98% booked.

[schlump] I hate math.

It’s so disheartening to work so hard to get “fully booked” only to realize that it never really happens.