OPTED Magazine

Believe it or not, even a 50 item to do list can be completed efficiently in one day if you’re willing to do a little advance planning.  The secret to squeezing out extra minutes from your schedule and quickly moving through your to do list is to batch your tasks effectively.

Batching tasks involves stringing together like tasks in a row that involve a similar type of action, so that retracing your steps multiple times in one day or shifting your momentum from one medium to the other is minimized as much as possible.  For example, it wouldn’t make much sense to drive to the grocery store and wait until 3 hours later to drop off your dry cleaning next door to the grocery store and make the same trip twice.  Even if it requires an extra 10 minutes before you make the grocery store trip to gather your clothing, it’s a more effective use of your time.

Here are some tasks that work better grouped together, and will save you time throughout your day:

• Phone calls — I don’t particularly like phone calls; I’m an electronic message lover and would prefer to communicate by email and Twitter not only for efficiency, but also because I have a written record of my correspondance.  But some things require a phone call, and whenever I can, I string calls together.  I usually pick a half hour block of my day to do them one after another, and for time management, it’s usually with a hands-free set as I commute to or from work.  There aren’t many other things that can be done driving home from work to maximize your time, but phone calls are one of them.
• Email — I love email, too much.  Even if I’ve work through all my emails and gotten my inbox to zero, I’m an “email refresher” and can sometimes stall, waiting for work to come to me.  This typically happens as a result of zero inbox.  However, I made a change recently to batch my email sessions, and it’s not only saved me time, but made me more efficient.  I used to wake up in the morning and check work email, but instead I wait until I arrive at the office, immediately read and process all my email, and get to work.  Sometimes, emails require new projects or tasks and I inevitably have tasks that don’t generate from email.  I take a substantial break from email until after lunch, working through all non email tasks, and I check email again after lunch when a few things have built up.
• Errands — this was mentioned above and deserves another mention and potential strategy that might work for you.  I have made Sunday errands a part of my weekly routine and it seems to work well to get the majority of my errands done in one day a week.  Since the coupons and ads come out on Saturday, I prepare in advance for grocery shopping for the next week and any other purchases, drop off dry cleaning, drop off items at the post office, and fill up my car.  If anything else comes up during the week, I plan ahead the night before and after work, take care of errands on the way home.  There’s nothing worse than getting home after a long day and realizing you have something to take care of and have to leave the house again!
• Tivo — television is an interesting situation, because as much as I love to sit back and devote my eyes to the screen, I’m a big TV multi tasker.  I usually bring craft projects, magazines, or small house projects to our coffee table and do two things at once.  But more often than not, I have very little time during the week to watch TV, so my favorite shows go right to Tivo, recorded for later.  I find that watching them all at once can be both a fun “date night” with a bowl of popcorn, or a good time to blow through a number of episodes (commercial free) and complete things on my list that are multi-task worthy!

The basic premise for batching tasks is that when you switch from one situation to another (running errands, phone, email, etc) you lose a few minutes of time setting up for the next task.  Whether it’s packing up to leave the house or logging on to a computer program, it saves time to reduce the amount of times during the day that you switch gears.

I only listed a few examples in this post about when batching tasks can be a good idea.  Can you think of others?  What do you think about this strategy?

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