Imagine the scene: you’re getting your afternoon cup of tea from the kitchen and fancy a biscuit. But instead of reaching for the biscuit tin, you get out the mixing bowl, turn on the oven, measure out a tiny portion of butter, flour and sugar. Maybe a few chocolate chips. You cook one individual biscuit to satisfy your desire.
Does that seem like an efficient use of time?
We have always used batching when it comes to home cooking biscuits. We’ll cook a dozen, twenty, or more in one go, so that we don’t have to go through all the effort of setting up and production every time we want a biscuit. It’s great to use batching in your work life too.
I am passionate about batching
In the work environment, batching means doing one job repeatedly at one time rather than doing that job multiple times over the course of a day/week/month.
This is beneficial for several reasons:
- You only set up, open the right programs and gather your materials once
- You can concentrate and really focus on the task – often doing better work
- Saves you time
- You don’t have to remind yourself of the last time you did it to ensure you’re starting at the right place
- You can create sets or stories in marketing materials that are released over time
Have you noticed that it sometimes takes a little while to get ‘into’ a task, to really understand what you’re doing, where the materials are, get the right tabs open, into the flow? Studies show it takes us on average 15 minutes to get into this flow. So, if you only do a job for 20 minutes, you’re only really effective for 5 minutes of it.
Imagine a job takes you 20 minutes and you do it every day. If you batched it, it may only take 40 minutes to do the job for the whole week, saving you an hour every week. That adds up!
Which jobs could I batch?
Examples of great tasks where you can use batching:
- Replying to emails
- Social media posts
- Email marketing/ newsletters
- Creating marketing materials, e.g. videos, blogs
- Processing expenses
- Invoicing
- Chasing payments
- Research on your industry
If you start using batching in your business, and even home life, I guarantee you will save yourself time and probably improve the quality of your work too.
Which jobs do you think you’d like to try batching?
Do you batch anything already? Let me know in the comments below!
To learn other productivity techniques like batching, take a look at my Productivity Programme or read some other articles:
- 4 reasons to make a weekly plan
- How to maximise your time
- Why your brain will thank you for making a to do list
- GDPR compliance and marketing for small businesses
- Why should you invest time in organising your emails?
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