Learning to batch my tasks became a gift for me. With all the life admin, we sometimes wish we could wave a magic wand and transform our time. Being organised and productive is in my DNA. My day-job demands it. It would come so easily to me, and then I got sick. In a few weeks I went from having the memory of an elephant to not remembering who I just spoke to. I could recall crazy amounts of detail, rarely needed to write anything down, and could balance my diary and that of my boss in my head, and then suddenly I was struggling to remember my own phone number.
It wasn’t the typical “memory fades as you get older” nor had I just had a baby with hormones pumping round my body designed to make me forget everything except for keeping a small person alive. For me, this was an extremely frustrating symptom of my illness, and the biggest clue that something was wrong. I feared if I couldn’t get this under control I’d no longer be able to do my job.
Productivity is about energy. You know yourself that on days you feel on fire you seem to blast through your tasks, and on the days your fire is more of a damp squib getting off the sofa can feel difficult. Every day we face a lot to contend with physically and mentally. Again, my illness meant I didn’t have a lot of energy to haul out of bed in the morning, let alone be productive, and I needed to find a solution.
What I tried before batching
It started with a list. As much as I could keep details in my brain, I’ve always loved writing lists and planning. So I first resorted to writing everything down. I started carrying a pack of post-its and a pen with me everywhere in case someone asked me for something on the way to the office kitchen (I had to note down what they wanted and who asked! – mortifying). It soon became overwhelming having a long list of things to get done, with some tasks duplicated or triplicated because I’d forget I’d already written it down and couldn’t see it in the ridiculous list. The problem with the list, it was a nuisance to carry.
It was 2009 and I’d just changed from my much-loved flip phone to an iPhone 3GS. My first smart phone, and the only iPhone I would own – I went Android after that. Apple claimed it would change my life and I spent bloody ages creating a digital version of my to-do list. Didn’t work for me. Turned out, as handy as it was being so small and light to carry, it’s more overwhelming for me to have to scroll a small screen. It still is. I’ve tried many apps over the years since and same problem.
What did work? Batching. Not that I knew that at the time. Back then, it was just post-its and a few mugs for me.
How batching works
Batching is grouping like-for-like tasks together, such as doing all online banking in one go instead of several times a week. Therefore, making you more productive and reducing the time spent. Batching can be applied to pretty much anything.
Task switching, or moving from one task to another and then another or back to an earlier one, can cause your brain to play catch-up. You know how you’re in the middle of something, on a roll, and then someone or something interrupts you? A study by Dr Gloria Mark found we get interrupted roughly every 75 seconds, and it’s an average of 25 minutes to get back into a task.
I know for me, at the height of my illness, I could lose track of what I was doing whilst doing it, so to have been interrupted was awful. I wouldn’t get back to what I was doing for hours until I remembered what it was I doing. Plus, I was always double-checking myself if I’d done it. Batching works because of ease, attention, and momentum.
Ease: both easier, and less work. Doing your online banking in one go, meal prep, planning your clothes for the week (yes, I’m one of those). Anything to reduce the amount of attention you need to give daily decisions. It was liberating knowing I already knew what I’d be wearing to work and no longer stood in front of the wardrobe with “nothing to wear”. I also became fairly minimalist and wore the same few outfits, but that’s another story. All about reducing decision fatigue.
Attention: this is where task-switching comes into play. Think of an attention-rich task, such as driving. How many times have you driven a journey you know extremely well and realised you were further along than you thought. Or how a new journey takes so much longer to get there than back – attention. A motorway requires more attention as you have a lot more cars at a faster speed.
Momentum: When I first started with Life in Align, I would write the plan, write, and everything else, the article for each week in the week it was published. Seemed easy enough, through lockdown I wasn’t going anywhere so I had plenty of time. Then restrictions eased, surgery loomed on the horizon and suddenly there seemed to be less time. I realised I spent only a couple minutes more in Canva creating several images, than when creating one each week. One website, different context.
Task switching, whether you notice it or not, slows down your brain.
How to batch
This was a life-saver for me. Pick a theme for your days and do the relevant stuff in those days.
For me in the early days I had greatly simplified my life:
Monday – money
Tuesday – clean downstairs
Wednesday – general admin days
Thursday – clean upstairs
Friday – rest
Saturday – rest
Sunday – rest
Those post-its came out to play again, along with a mug for each day. As I was moving through my day I’d make a note of items on a post-it and when back in the room with the mugs (batching again…) I’d sort through each note and pop it into the relevant mug and forget about it until the correct day. Yes, sometimes the post-its would be duplicated, but that’s ok. I was only looking through a mug-full, not a huge long list, and that was much less overwhelming.
Daily worked well for me, but for you it might work better as morning and afternoon. A friend of mine batches her emails into the first hour of the morning, her work into the rest of the morning, and calls in the afternoons. She never takes calls in the morning. You might prefer to do all your housework in one day.
You might prefer to batch in weeks. If I didn’t have a day-job, I would definitely spend one week per month getting all of the next month’s content done.
Be ok with it not being perfect. It’s not black and white, as with everything I say – it’s unique for you.
I have since learned to love Trello for business tasks, but only after I added the calendar function and synced to my Google calendar, so instead of searching Trello I look straight at the calendar. Ultimately, I’ll always love paper.
Let your brain stay in one lane at a time and you’ll focus better. Give it a try, adjust as you go. For me it became creating some time for me, reducing the stress, and a way to take back some of the control amidst the chaos of life and illness.
Download my free workbook to guide you through how to batch your own admin.
