A Simple Tool To Get More Done In Less Time

As business owners, many of us are running our businesses solo and as such, the one thing we all wish we had more of is time. But here’s the thing, we only ever get 24 hours in the day and whilst you might be tempted to spend more hours in front of the computer to achieve the success you dream of in your business, personally, as a mother of two little ones, I’m all for working smarter instead of harder.

Introducing Batching

One tool that I’ve used in my business and seen great results from is batching.

Batching is a known productivity tool that sees you creating space in your schedule to work on a number of related tasks at one time. So for example you might have heard of batching your social media posts or batching your blog post writing and doing a whole chunk of them in one go rather than sitting down to create a social media post every day or write a new blog post every week.

You might be wondering how this saves you time because surely whether you do them together or do them individually, you need the same amount of time. Wrong. What many people overlook is the time and energy we spend starting and switching tasks. When we do things on an ad hoc or individual basis we actually waste valuable time and energy getting into and out of the task.

So if we were to take website updates as an example, when we don’t batch those, we might instead tinker with our website on a random basis whenever the urge arises, this might then take us longer than if we set aside time to do all of our web updates in one go.

Getting in the zone (or feeling in flow)

We actually spend valuable energy and focus switching between tasks that could be used to get into the zone or feeling in flow with our work. We all know what it feels like to be in a flow state with a task, we forget about time, we barely look up from our desk, we might even forget to eat, so absorbed are we by the task at hand. It takes time to reach that state. We have to work on a task for a while before we can reach it. So, it follows that if we are constantly switching tasks, we may find that we rarely get in the zone with our work.

Monthly Batch Days

One thing you could do is dedicate one day a month to doing a set of similar tasks. You might pick a theme for the day and work on that over the course of the day.

Examples of themes include batching content (blog posts and newsletters), batching website updates to copy and design, batching the creation of social media posts and batching product updates.

One of things I often batch is pulling together launch materials or creating a new product. Rather than have time in my diary dedicated to those things once a week, I prefer to go deep and spend a day or half-day doing all of that work together.

Rather than rely on my own willpower to stick to whatever I’ve planned for my monthly batching day (or deep work time as I prefer to call it), I like to attend Cabin Intensives run by the wonderful Daniela H. Hofmann. These are monthly half-day coworking events run online. I find working on a specific project or batching a set of similar tasks with a group of like-minded people, gives me an additional boost of accountability.

What about you? I would love to hear from you in the comments below any other areas in your business that you think could work for a batch session or day.

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