by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
Pull out your to-do list for tomorrow. Before you hit the ground running when you show up in the office, I want you to take a few more minutes on your to-do list for a little more strategic planning. I want you to apply a quick and really easy time management technique that will amazingly save you a lot of time and brain power as you work through the day.
One of the problems with To-Do Lists is that they tend to lump everything you need to do together into one big long list without any order or structure. Starting at the top of the list and working your way down is not always the best way to get things done. As you get more and more things to do, your To-Do list becomes bigger and more chaotic, and pretty soon you get lost in all of the details.
A good way to organize your to-do lists is to batch tasks together.
Batch processing is the grouping of similar tasks that require similar resources in order to streamline their completion. Batching is simply a form of time management that allows a person to maximize concentration and decrease distraction. As a result, it increases your productivity, creativity, and mental sharpness, while decreasing fatigue, procrastination, and stress.
Batching is very simple and extremely effective.
For example, you could batch meetings. Have you ever had a meeting at 3pm and subsequently achieved nothing all day? Meetings usually involve changing locations and, critically, breaking the flow of your work. Your best option is to batch meetings into one morning or afternoon per week. That way, you zip through them all and have 4.5 days of uninterrupted productivity for the rest of the week.
If you can’t do this, then schedule meetings at the start or end of the day, leaving the majority of the day clear for work.
This same principle can be applied to anything you have to do weekly that is considered a time suck, such as running errands or making doctors’ appointments. Batch them all together on the same day and get them one right after the other instead of doing 1 a day 5 days a week. Doing all of these in the same day will really save you a ton of time throughout the week.
For a typical day in the office you can group your to-do lists tasks into team tasks, recruiting, administrative, and personal tasks. Or you could batch all your calls, your recruiting emails, or completing all your paperwork at the same time.
By working this way, it allows you to develop speed and skill at each activity. It’s much easier to do related tasks one after another rather than interspersing them with un-related tasks.