*This post is an expanded excerpt from the FREE 7-day course Productivity For Creative Thinkers. You can sign up for free here.
Do you ever find yourself at the end of a long day, wondering what in the actual heck you got done? Or you find yourself exhausted, having completed what feels like a zillion tasks and you’re still not done, so you finish working way too late, still feeling guilty about your lack of progress? I’ve been there too! Sometimes it seems no matter how much effort you put in, you can’t seem to clear your to-do list. When I started looking into my own productivity more deeply, I realised that I wasted SO MUCH TIME flitting between tasks, trying to get it all done in my business every day.
But I’m great at multi-tasking!
We all know that multi-tasking is a myth (right? Right?!) - humans are not able to work simultaneously on tasks - what is actually happening when we ‘multi-task’ is that our brain is switching *very* quickly between the tasks, and only ever focussing on one thing at a time. So when we’re doing multiple things at once, our brains are flying around like little hummingbirds, trying to keep up. It’s exhausting, especially for long periods of time. Not to mention the constant switching means that you’re never really fully present on a task.
The problem with task switching
Another thing that will trip up even the most motivated, focussed person is task switching. Multi-tasking is a form of task switching, but we can also task switch on a more macro level. When you’re working on a regular day, if you open an email, answer it, write an article, edit the photos for the article, check your email and answer a few more, prepare an Instagram caption, take a picture for the Instagram post, browse Instagram, and then do some hashtag research, you’re task switching all over the place!
Every time that you shift your attention from one thing to another, and from one kind of working (writing) to another (taking photos), there’s a period of catch-up time involved, while your brain switches gears. Sometimes it’s quick and you’ll barely notice the ‘changeover’, and other times it can take 30 minutes to ‘get in the zone’ of the new task. Imagine you’re switching tasks 8 times in a day, that could be up to 3-4 hours of time that you’re spending playing catch-up and refocussing. That’s an insane amount of wasted time, right?
So, is there another way to work?
Enter batching - it’s main purpose as a productivity hack is to “batch” similar tasks together, so that you can reduce or eliminate task switching in your day. If batching sounds exhausting to you, don’t worry! There are no hard and fast rules in my book when it comes to batching. Bringing awareness to your work habits and starting to group your tasks into themes will get you started on the batching process, and from there you can work out the best way to batch according to your personal way of working, energy levels and focus. Batch to make your life easier and flowier, not harder and more tiring!
Batching tasks is a more efficient use of your time, because you get into a state of flow doing one task, instead of stopping and starting different tasks constantly.
When you get into a batching routine, you’ll skyrocket your productivity and easily double, triple or even 10x your output.
(in the same amount of time or less than you are currently spending on the same tasks)
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General batching tips
Compress your time
Look at a larger time-frames than ‘daily’ when you’re dividing your work into "batches". You want to think about your work in ‘weekly’ or even ‘monthly’ time-frames. So instead of writing an Instagram caption, editing a photo, researching hashtags, posting, and doing some interaction on your account every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3pm, you could spend a half day once a month editing your photos, writing your captions, and planning hashtags for the following month. You would then schedule all of these into an app that automates your posting using your schedule.
Further splitting that half day down, you might spend 2 hours writing captions, 1 hour editing photos, 30 minutes on hashtags, and 30 minutes on scheduling. (Disclaimer - personally, I need more time than this to create 12 Instagram posts - the amount of time you set aside will depend on how you personally work)
For my more visual friends, here’s another way of looking at this:
Change from this way of working:
Every Monday
Post 1: Take and/or edit photo
Post 1: Write caption
Post 1: Research hashtags
Post 1: Post and do some community interaction
Every Wednesday:
Post 2: Take and/or edit photo
Post 2: Write caption
Etc.
To this way of working:
First Monday of each month:
Edit photos: 12 posts
Write captions: 12 posts
Research hashtags: 12 posts
Posting schedule: 12 posts
Be realistic with your time
Be realistic about how long a task takes. If you don’t have any data (i.e. You haven’t time-tracked before to know how long something takes), my golden rule is to estimate how long something will take and triple it. So if you think "that'll only take 20 minutes", allow 1 hour in your schedule planning. You can adjust these 'guesstimates' as you go, the more you repeat a task, the clearer you will get on how long it takes (especially if you track how long the task takes using an app like toggl.)
Plan and tag your tasks
Use a tagging system to develop your batching plan. This could be using a colour code for your tasks, using an emoji or icon at the beginning of each task, or using a code like “HW” for housework, and “WR” for writing. In doing this, when you're blocking out your time, you can see at a glance how much time you're spending in each area, and what themes your day holds. It will also help you group “like” items at a glance, and balance your days with tasks that mesh well together. For example, if you know you feel mentally exhausted after writing for 4 hours, you can organise your day with writing in the A.M., followed by something less mentally intensive, like housework, in the P.M.
If you’re ready to start batching in your business (you’re ready, I know!), follow along with the plan below to get started.
Prepare Your Batching Plan
List out your weekly tasks
Write out a list of your tasks that you need to add to your calendar for the week. I like to include my 'personal' as well as 'work' items so that I make time for my self-care and give it as much importance as the tasks I schedule for my business.
Example list:
Client 1 project
Client 2 project
Client 3 project
Social Media Marketing
Blog Post
Email Newsletter
Exercise
Meditation
Meal Planning
Quality time with partner/friends/family
Fun/Enjoyment
Research and Learning
Once you have the list of tasks written out, try to break down larger tasks into smaller steps too, for example:
Client 1 [Motion graphics project]:
Research and pre-production, design mockups, character design, background design, animation, reviews, rendering, etc.
Blog post:
Research, brainstorm ideas, gather links, create outline, write first draft, design supplementary materials, edit and finesse post, design post layout, prepare social media posts, etc.
Get familiar with how much time you spend on each area or task each week, and start to explore how you can tweak your schedule to suit your desirable reality, by focussing your time on the areas that matter most to you.
Start batching with one task
Some people batch their whole lives, but I personally find that a bit inflexible for how I work. There are certain repetitive tasks that I do though, which make sense for me to batch. To get started with batching, look at your list and pull out one item that you do regularly. It might be content creation, like a blog post, YouTube video recording, Podcast recording, or something else you do often, like preparing posts for social media. You can even batch food prep in your kitchen! We're gonna condense your timeline and more than double your effectiveness in your chosen task!
Break your chosen item into smaller pieces and group them into similar categories. For example - Recording a YouTube video:
Outline video idea [planning]
Write out rough script/prompts [planning]
Set up camera and lighting [setup]
Record video [recording]
Create graphics/cutaways for video [post-production]
Edit video [post-production]
Add sound fx and music [post-production]
Create opener/closing graphics and promos [post production]
Promotion on social media, to audience in email etc. [marketing]
Re-purpose for IGTV [post-production]
Once again, categorise tasks in a way that makes sense to you - maybe you’d rather group all graphic and promo creation as it’s own task and keep editing and sound in post-production.
Time to get batch-y
Remember, the purpose of batching is to group similar tasks into a group, so that you can be more efficient with your work and energy, with less distractions.
For the examples below, we're going to use a blogger/content creator. You can apply the idea to anything, though. Remember, you're simply grouping similar tasks together, and creating some flow in your work, rather than a stop-start task-switching pattern.
If this is for your side hustle, or you're working on personal projects, batching will save you SO MUCH time in the hours outside of your full-time job/client work too!
Decide how often you want to do your task
e.g. You want to publish one blog post every week, and you only want to work on blog post creation once a month.
In this case, you would need to create 4 blog posts, once a month.
The beauty of batching is that you can build flexibility and a buffer into your schedule too.
Ideally you'd want to build in a buffer into your creation plan, so you should actually aim for 5-6 blog posts created, once a month. That way if you can't create 4 blog posts on your next batch creation day for some reason, you have some wiggle room to postpone it, or prioritise other things if needed, without falling behind.
Adding a buffer in, you would aim to create 6 blog posts, once a month.
Consider how much time you need to write a blog post. Is it 1.5 hours per post? You want to write 6 posts?
Set aside 2 days a month for batching your monthly blog post creation.
What prep work do you need to do?
It's unlikely that you can jump right into writing a blog post, or creating other content. There's reading, research, gathering references, sourcing images, creating an outline...
Set aside some pre-production time to brainstorm, research, and create an outline for your pieces of content. Let's say it takes you about 1 hour per post, and you're going to plan out 6 posts.
Set aside 6 hours a month for blog post prep work.
What post-production work do you need to do?
If you're a blogger, you know the work isn't done when you hit publish on a post. You need to get your post out there! This might include creating graphics for social media, writing captions, finding hashtags, scheduling posts for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
Once again, plan out how long each task takes you, and batch them out. Best practice would be doing all of your graphics in one batch, writing your captions in another batch, doing scheduling in a 3rd batch, etc. Choose what feels natural and easy for you.
You should also repurpose this content as much as possible, so you can drag + drop Pinterest graphic elements into an Instagram Story graphic template, and re-use parts of captions across multiple channels. Same goes for hashtags and SEO keywords.
To save time, when I'm creating content, I like to highlight phrases or note down ideas, keywords, and other text that will work for social media captions into a seperate document, so that I can draw on these for this process.
Set aside 1-2 days for blog post promotion (depending how much content you're making!)
Here's a rough visual plan for blog-and-social-content batching week:
If you're interested in how much you can promote or re-purpose one piece of content, you could use a single blog post to create:
5-10+ Pinterest posts (different, but relevant, graphics and text)
5 Instagram posts (exploring small ideas/sections from your larger blog post, or asking questions/providing prompts about the post content to your audience)
5 Instagram story pieces (might be more than one 'frame' for each 'piece')
3-5 Facebook posts (pulling out different parts of the post, asking questions, or expanding on the content provided in the post)
10-20 Twitter posts with different wording and a link to the blog post
1-2 livestreams or trainings on Instagram or Facebook
1-2 email newsletters to your mailing list (this could be included with exclusive content for your mailing list, or as a curated list of resources that links to your blog posts once a month)
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Notes on batching
Depending on your content, these tasks might need more or less time (even if you're a blogger like in the example), or you might want to do more or less post-production, for example. Adjust this rough example to suit your needs.
If you struggle to get through the amount of work you've allocated for your batching session, spread it out over more time, or do a little less, more often. There's no right or wrong way to batch! The name of the game is flow, efficiency and removing distractions. Test it out and see what works best for you. Don’t force yourself to commit to a full week of content creation once a month if you work better with shorter periods of focus. Maybe one post a week is easier for you, and you’d prefer to spend one day a week creating that content instead. Whatever works for you is the best way for you to work, forget what everyone else tells you that you SHOULD be doing.
With the above example, you've got a full week of content creation, every month. slowly building your buffer so that in 8 months, you'll potentially have 4 months of content prepared in advance! Using batching is an awesome way to 2x, 5x or even 10x your output, as you get into the zone of creation, you remove other distractions, condense your workflow, and blast through the work while you're in that sweet state of flow. Having content prepared with a buffer also removes the stress and rush from content creation (or meal prep, or whatever it is that you’re batching).
Make sure that you protect your batching days from other work, because mixing in other tasks will dilute the power of batching.
Batching works best when you set your intentions clearly, and hold yourself accountable to your commitment. Schedule your batch days out in advance (in this example I would have a dedicated content creation week every month), starting with a 3 month outlook. Your priorities and business needs change throughout the year, so working in seasons of 90 days, you can react, re-adjust and re-align your plans regularly.
Share your ideas about what you can batch in your business in the comments, or hit me up on Instagram! I love hearing ideas about how you maximize your time.
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