As entrepreneurs, 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 a little one, I’m all for working smarter instead of harder.
Introducing Batching
One tool that I’ve started to play around with recently 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 expend 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 times 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
With this in mind, I’ve started to use batching in my business and dedicate at least one day a month to doing a set of similar tasks. My idea (which I can’t take full credit for – I saw it first on Paper & Oats) is to host monthly batch days with specific themes, so that you can join me in my batching efforts. I’ll pick a theme for the day (and share how I am tackling that particular theme) and we would then work on that together over the course of the day. If the theme isn’t relevant to you, then you’re free to work on something that is. We’ll share our progress with each other over the course of the day on social media and on my business Facebook Page using the hashtag #businessbatchday so that we can easily see who else is taking part and give each other support, encourage and, if requested, feedback.
I’ll also hop on Facebook Live to share my strategies for making the most of Batch Day.
Batching Themes
Themes that I currently have in mind 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. 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 day.
The next Batch Day I’ll be hosting is on Wednesday 12th September, to be kept informed and to also get a free batching log template to get prepared simply click the link below. Don’t worry if you can’t be with us for the whole day, you can join for any or all of it!
GET YOUR FREE BATCHING LOG TEMPLATE HERE
Free Download
Instead of offering you a freebie and then making you pay for it with your email address, to get immediate, no email required, access to this lovely Batching Template, simply click here.
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