On your desk lies a stack of miscellaneous papers, some are forms to fill out, others reports to scan. Your computer monitor is surrounded by a sunflower of yellow post-it notes: stuff to google, people to call, errands to run. And the morning tide of email and voicemail is coming.
If you start attacking these tasks at random, you’ll have a frazzled day and you won’t finish. But, with a little clever re-arranging, you can get all this work done and have time to spare. To do this you need to borrow an old trick from the world of computers: batch processing.
Back when computers were room-sized, expensive and slow, researchers couldn’t afford to use them inefficiently. Rather than have the computer work on different tasks as they randomly came in, the computer collected similar tasks into batches. When a batch got large enough, then the computer would tackle all the similar tasks at once. This was the most time-efficient use of the computer’s scarce resources.
If you want to use your time most efficiently, you should do the same thing. In the example of your desk given above, the first thing you should do is sort your tasks into batches. Make separate piles for the forms, reports, Internet-related post-its errands and phone calls. Only then, pick a batch to work through.
If you’re filling out from and suddenly remember a phone call you need to make, drop a note in the ‘phone call’ pile, but don’t stop filling out the form. Keep plowing through those forms until they’re done. Then pick a new batch to start work on.
As a rule, you should let similar tasks build up until there are enough of them to do, rather than trying to tackle everything as it comes in. It’s much easier to grind through all the jobs of one type before moving on to the next. By using batch processing in this way you don’t lose time switching your brain from one kind of job to another. This is similar to the benefits derived from monotasking vs multitasking).
Many kinds of work are perfect for batch processing, such as mail, both electronic and snail. When letters come in, throw them into a box and take care of them once a week. It’s the rare letter that can’t wait a few days to get responded to. Check your email as infrequently as possible and only tackle it in batches.
People are also batchable. If there is an individual that you communicate with frequently, keep a list of things that you want to discuss with them. It’s more efficient to batch questions and harass them all at once rather than interrupting them throughout the day. Making someone, your boss or your spouse, into batchable work may seem cold-hearted, but it shows the other person that you respect their time.
Limit yourself to checking your social networks every other day (or as long as you can reasonably go) and then deal with all those invitations, wall posts and notifications at once. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can get through them.
Essentially, anything that has a large number of items to deal with, each of which may only take a small amount of time to do is a prime candidate for batching. Start collecting and batching tasks today and see how much more you can get done.
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Header photograph by flygraphix
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