Ep. 095: How to "Batch" Better & Get More Done

If you're a long-time listener you've definitely heard me talk about "batching" before. It's like the sister to mono-tasking, as opposed to multi-tasking. However, some people struggle to batch their work in a way that works for them.

That's why in this episode I'm going to share my best strategies for making the most of your time and energetic capacity. Because whether you have unlimited time to work or only 10 hours a week, I don't want you to feel like you're always playing "catch up" in your business.
Batching is such a powerful way to be consistent in your business, and consistent workflows produce consistent results without so much effort.

LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED TODAY:

• Your Rebellious Success: https://erikatebbensconsulting.com/rebellious-success

• Want to read a transcript of this episode? Click here!

  Welcome to the Sell It sister podcast. A couple of weeks ago, I had an episode, a slightly longer episode, all about consistency, uh, and you know, what, what, how I view consistency, like what I think it really is versus, um, how I think that it had is sometimes portrayed in, uh, the online business community and how it has really, uh, been so, so, so vital to the success of my business and.

  I mentioned in the episode and I've mentioned in many other episodes, um, how I do batching or, you know, I, that, that I do batching and batching enables me to have this like outward, uh, presence that is very consistent to anyone who is watching or listening or paying any attention to my business and my brand at all, but allows me to maintain a really sustainable.

  You know, on average 25 hour work weeks for myself. So I figured that it was high time that I spoke on how I view batching, what I do when I'm talking about batching and how you can really take advantage of batching for yourself in your business, because much like consistency, um, and some of the. The teaching or teachings or notions or anything that are out there around consistency.

  I also think that there are some misconceptions around batching. And so I want to share with you a system that I have developed over many years of honestly, just really having to get good at utilizing smaller. Uh, chunks of time. If you go back, there's an episode, um, in April of 20, 20, all on power hours.

  So if you are like really resonate with this episode, I would suggest going back and listening to that one as well. Uh, but this was really born out of when my son was younger and I was homeschooling and I had a separate business and I really had to. Utilize these tiny windows of time to get essential things done for, for my business.

  I think batching is really powerful. So I'm super excited to share this with you. Uh, so first, first and foremost, again, um, the episode, a couple of episodes back about consistency, highly, highly, highly recommend that, especially if you have felt like. I am always on this hamster wheel, or I really struggle with consistency or I have really.

  You know, limited hours that I can work or, um, I have, you know, different, different reasons why I might have like lower energy capacity or lower focus. And because in that episode, I really get into all of that. And how, um, no matter what the circumstance is, there is a sustainable Barry like humane way to be consistent in your marketing.

  So in the stuff that potential. Customers and clients see without you having to have these just jam packed days with a very rigid schedule where you're, you know, doing the same 20 things every day. It's not that at all. In fact it's something totally, totally different. Um, and I'm actually going to, uh, talk a little bit about like, it's, it's kind of interesting that I'm doing this link.

  It's very meta that I'm doing this episode on batching because today I'm actually batching. Podcast episodes. I'm going to touch on, um, a little bit of that as a real example, as I, as I go through this. So too often, um, I think a lot of times when we think of batching, we're like, okay, I have a, you know, let's just say like it's a three hour period to work, right.

  At three or four hour period to work. Um, maybe even last spent. You have this chunk of time and you're like, I am going to brainstorm. I'm going to strategize. I'm going to, uh, you know, ideate on what I want to do and I'm going to create, or produce that thing in that same time slot. Really though, these.

  Tasks are like two different skills for your, your brain to do like the planning and the creating are actually separate. Now there's nothing that says that let's say you do have a longer chunk of time. Let's say it's four or five, six hours. Right. There's nothing that inherently says, like you couldn't use the first part of that to ideate and plan and all of that.

  And the second part to create you. Absolutely. Absolutely. Can. Especially, if that feels really good for you, like when it's fresh to do that, I know for me, it kind of feels exhausting when I have to do that. So as I said, I'm going to use this podcast as an example. So last week, what I did was I went in and I wrote up the show notes and the talking points.

  Previously, uh, in the platform where I keep all of that, um, where my, my VA can see it and everything like, it's just, I I'm currently using notion, but you could even use a Google doc if you want to. Um, and so I, I did that. I wanted to get the ideas out of my head and I wanted to let them kind of like sit and simmer, um, over the weekend because I knew then.

  My plan was on Monday. I was going to go through and I was going to record them all. And that way, if any other thoughts came up, as the days passed between, um, you know, strategizing and recording, then I could be sure to include those. Right. So I didn't, I didn't try to, to put both in one day. So these were actually separate chunks of time.

  So in one batching chunk of time, I, uh, outlined everything I needed for the March episodes of this podcast. And then I scheduled in my next batching time to record the episodes. So if you have something that is, you know, you may not have a podcast. So that example won't. Uh, necessarily fit. Exactly. But I am going to give a separate example in just a little bit, but if you have something that you feel like, Oh my gosh, I can never keep up with the cycle of this.

  Like maybe it's emailing your list right. Or posting on social media and you don't necessarily have to do something that is like for a month's worth of content at once. Like you absolutely do not have to do that. But one thing that you could do is let's say you email your list once a week. You could have one batching chunk of time.

  Where maybe you map out just some ideas of what you want those weekly emails to focus on. Even if you don't necessarily know all of the content that's going to be in them. If you have a specific like call to action, something that is time bound that you want to direct them to, or maybe it's an evergreen thing, but you want to focus on like promoting that or reminding people that it exists and then your content is going to.

  Reflect, what that call to action is like you could just spend one chunk of time of batching time where you're outlining your, uh, the framework of your emails for the month. And then you could have a time where maybe it's once every other week where you write two emails at once you write and schedule two emails at once, because that is a great way to.

  Not be having to do the same exact task every week. Now, if you have, if you were like on a roll and you had enough time and you really don't mind like sitting and writing four emails at a time, you could absolutely just. You know, write out all four emails in one in one clip and then schedule them. I know people who do that as well, but again, this is a really, this is a really personalized thing.

  And you can also, um, you know, like try things out, use it as like a little experiment. Right. You might think, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be super like super go-getter and I'm going to try to do all four, but you might realize like, Oh my gosh, that just wiped me out. Right. I kind of think of it like. Like meal prep, right.

  For a week. Some people are like, you know, they spend a Sunday and they spend many, many hours on a Sunday and they are doing like suffer breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a whole week for their whole family. And they just are getting it done and they love it. And that, that totally works for them. And for other people, their meal prep might literally look just like.

  Cleaning and chopping vegetables. So they're ready to go. So they're not having to do that, you know, revisit that process every single night, right. One is not better than the other one is not more correct than the other. It's just finding what is going to work and be sustainable for you. And in that same analogy, there are some people who, uh, meal prep during the week and then.

  You go to the grocery store on Saturday and then they cook on Sunday. There are some people who do the whole kit and caboodle all in one day. Again, it just figure out what works for you. Also, the next thing I want to touch on is have a flexible schedule of when you do which things and track how long it takes.

  So for instance, for me with the podcast is. I really like to buy the first week of a month. I really like to have. All of the episodes for that month, um, recorded and ready to go. Uh, cause then I can get it off to my VA and she then takes over the rest of the workflow. Uh, the, like she hasn't always, I haven't always had a VA that helps me with that back in the day when I first started this podcast, I would do the entire workflow myself, but that would be a separate day.

  Right. So I'd have a recording day and then I'd have another day that I would do the rest of the workflows for the podcast. But for me, it's relatively easy for me, for me to talk. Like I don't script the episodes or anything, so I just make some. Notes for myself. And then I record them. So it's relatively easy for me to batch record, uh, you know, several podcast episodes in a row.

  Versus if I was writing blog posts, I would not be able to do like a month of blog posts in, in one day I would just be really, really exhausted. And I would say, you know, when you are doing it, we are not always the best at interpreting how long things will take. So just. Set a timer and then just objectives really, uh, do that task and see how long it takes.

  So don't necessarily be like rushing or put any pressure on yourself, just observe it because then you will know. Oh, okay. It takes me about, you know, this long to, um, write and format. Two emails, right? Because then, you know, going forward, if you're batching though, you know, two emails at a time, you know how much time you need for it, you know, when to schedule it in.

  So even if your preferred day of the week to do that is like every other Monday, right? Maybe you have a week where it's a holiday and you're, you know, you're not working or you just don't feel well then, you know, okay. If I have to shift it to Tuesday or sometime later in the week, how long do I need a chunk of time so that I can still get that workflow done?

  Maybe it's 90 minutes. Great. Look for when you have that time later in the week, and then you can do it then, um, And then next. So again, kind of going back to the first point I make it made is that, um, you want to, when you know, like when you're going to do it, right. So for instance, I already knew that.

  Today I would be recording three podcast episodes. So I needed to make a time in my schedule for that. And then I needed to work backwards to, um, prep, uh, so that I could maximize the time to stay in flow, which is why I made some time last week. To do the outlines, right? Because then that way, when it's my chunk of times record the podcast episodes, I can sit down, I can get my equipment out and I can just go, I can just start recording.

  And I have everything right there and I'm not going to get tripped up in the middle of this batching time because I don't have all the necessary things that I need. Uh, a good example of this would be. A product based business. Right? So if you, if you're selling products and you're shipping out products, this would be something like having a shipping station ready to go with everything.

  Even if you don't like, just imagine for a minute, have a table, like you'd have a table where you would have your label printer, you would have a scale. You would have packing supplies. You would have, you know, if you include stickers or you wrap your stuff in tissue paper, you would have it all right there because.

  Well, that is not something that you necessarily like other than just refilling supplies. Like once it's done, it's, it's kind of set up and it's good to go. That allows you to then if you, if you're batching shipping out orders, you can say, okay, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I ship out orders. I've tracked, you know, An average order takes me X amount of minutes to do it.

  So let's say, you know, let's say it's 10 minutes and you know, you have 10 orders. Okay. You know, 10 times 10. A hundred, like, I'm going to need a hundred minutes here. Right? Uh, approximately hopefully you wouldn't get distracted by, you know, other stuff in your home, but at the very least, like, then even if you know that, you know, maybe you have little kids at home and you're prone, uh, to have them come in and distract you.

  Maybe if you're like, okay, I need a minimum of a hundred minutes, but I'm just going to like round up to give myself some extra buffer or if you're doing. It, you know, if you have some childcare during certain times, you can say, okay, I know that like, I need to use, you know, in this chunk of time where I have childcare, I'm going to need at least a hundred minutes to.

  Uh, pack all these orders for shipping, right? So that's just a way that you can, you're not having to stop in the middle and get tape or go grab more tissue paper or more, whatever. You just have it prepped and you're ready to go. Um, same thing would be, you know, if you're writing blog posts, if you are, um, scheduling social media, like have, have a gallery of images that are all ready.

  To go that are, you know, created and prepped and ready, and then you can just upload them. And then if you're batching the captions, you're not having to do like images and captions at the same time. Right. You could do batch the images in one batch during session and batch the captions and then schedule them in the next, uh, and.

  Then also set aside time to create and group like tasks. So this is the example I said, I was, I was going to give later and it's filming reels. So I want to really showcase what this looks like. I've already touched on it a little bit, the grouping, the like tasks, you know, like the, the outlining podcast episodes or blog posts, um, versus sitting down to record them, things like that.

  But let's just imagine that you are like, I am going to start doing reels. Right. But they they're a little bit more time consuming than just like a static, you know, selfie image or something with a caption. Right. So here is a way that batching, uh, can work for me in relation to reels. So in one chunk of time, I would get all of the audios and jot down the.

  Ideas. So that would mean going through, you know, what are the audio, the saved audio files that I have, and then whether it's a notebook or a platform on my computer, I would have those ideas for what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to have them set and ready to go. Now, if it was one where I'm not using, um, a background sound and I'm just talking, obviously I wouldn't need the audio for that, but I still want to have the ideas down.

  And then, uh, get any clothing or props that you need if it's that kind of a real that you're making, not saying that you need to do any real psych this, but let's say you are, you would want to have that all ready. So I actually actually did this like several weekends ago. I usually don't work on the weekends, but I had all this energy and inspiration.

  I was going to do a bunch of reels and I had already, um, the day before I had the, um, ideas and the audio is all prepped. And then, because I was batching them, I didn't want to look the exact same in every single one. So I got out different like hats, different glasses, um, different like jackets and accessories.

  Right. So I, I pulled out all of those and I just set them aside. Then what I did was I filmed all of them. This actually didn't take that long because none of the ones I do are like super complicated or anything like that. Um, but I, it was just easier while I had all the props out and I had the energy and everything.

  I just recorded a whole bunch. Um, and then I saved them too. The drafts. Right? So the last time I did this, I actually didn't put any, um, like text overlays. I didn't do anything like that. I literally just. Uh, recorded it with the audio and I saved it to drafts. And then you can Mark your calendar for when each is coming out.

  So this would be like a different, um, like you wouldn't necessarily need to do that the same day. Like you could have just one day to, uh, brainstorm what the real will be. Excuse me another day to film the reels and then, um, another day to prep and schedule them. So you can Mark your calendar for when they're coming out.

  You could go back into your drafts and you could do any, um, text overlays that you need on them. Um, at that point, like if you, if you're doing like closed captioning or you're laying over any other texts or you're doing both, you could do them then. And then you could also prep any hashtag groupings that you would want on them and any captions and any, uh, calls to action, whether that's to a free thing or a paid thing, or just to like respond to the comments, anything like that.

  So this could really be like, you, you it'd be super ambitious and be like, I'm going to do this whole thing in one day. Right. I'm going to. Brainstorm the audios and the ideas I'm going to get anything I need. I'm going to film them. I'm going to edit. I'm going to, um, schedule I'm like, I'm going to just do all of that.

  I actually, now that I'm seeing this aloud, I don't know if you can schedule a reel, but even if you can't now, maybe we'll be able to in the future. This would also pertain if you're like, yeah, I don't, I don't do rails, whatever, if let's say that you make graphics for your social media account and that takes awhile, you could do the same.

  Batching workflow. You could have one day where you decide what those, uh, graphics are going to be, that you want to create. You could have another day where you're just creating them. And then you could have a third day, you know, or batching chunk of batching time, where you are, uh, putting in the captions and the hashtags and scheduling them to go out.

  So. All different ways that you can do this, but I think it's really good to have that high level overview of all the steps, or if it's your first time going through something and you don't know what all the steps will be, jot the steps down as you go. Cause sometimes there are things in a workflow that just seems so second nature to us, but they're actually like two separate steps or processes.

  And so it's good to just jot those down as we're doing them. Because again, then the next time we know, even if. Even if we know that that full workflow takes a certain amount of time. If we have a smaller chunk of time, we can kind of look and go, okay, why can't do the full workflow right now in this batching chunk of time, but I can do, you know, steps one through four, and then I can do steps five through eight, maybe tomorrow.

  And then lastly, um, make sure that you're doing certain tasks when your brain has the most focus for that task. If you, if you can. Um, for instance, if, uh, you know, if it's easier for you to write anything in the morning, like if your, if your brain is just more fresh and focused, and that is your time when you.

  Would be, um, more able to, to write or clearly articulate your thoughts in a written format. Save that time for emails, blog, posts, captions, anything like that? And then if you're like, you know, I can do kind of random tasks when my brain isn't as fresh, like formatting or scheduling those emails or blog posts, or, uh, let's say, you know, social media posts, something like that.

  You could do that later in the day. So if, especially, if you don't have these longer chunks of time where you can work uninterrupted, Instead of focus on different pockets of time and how you're going to best utilize those pockets of time. Cause I know that there have been times where even against my own better judgment, I'm like, Oh, I have to get podcasts episodes done.

  And um, I'm just going to do them like at the end of the day. And inevitably what happens is. I hate them. It's hard for me to get my thoughts out really. Clearly. I realize things later that I'm like, I don't love, I end up having to go back and rerecord anyways. Like it's, it's, it's truly not worth it. It ends up being way more of a hassle then if I just pushed it out a day and did it, first thing, um, in the morning when I am, when I am more fresh.

  So again, there's, you know, just because you. No somebody else who does it a different way, and they have a ton of success with it. It doesn't mean that they are more right than you. It just means that they like, you know, they're, they're built differently. Their brain works differently. They have a different schedule, uh, could be a million other variables, right?

  So a lot of this just like creating a good weekly workflow or anything, it really comes down to trying new things. And then observing the process, noting what worked really well. Um, what maybe didn't work, what you would want to change next time. And then just really, um, refining this process because I have found for myself, like, even just going back to the example of reels, I haven't, um, I haven't really made other than with the exception of one, that was just kind of like a silly one.

  And I was inspired to do it, uh, at the end of the day, one day. Um, I haven't done, I haven't recorded any new reels during like my prime working. Hours since that one Saturday, several weekends ago where I did a whole bunch and what's really nice is today I'm going to go into my drafts and look at what I have.

  And I already have, you know, several bits of content that I can put out that I don't have to task, switch, and then feel like, okay, now I got to get like the motivation to film a real right now. And. And try to be like funny or interesting. Like, no, I may not have the energy for that, um, today, but I can still get that content out.

  And so for me, that really is the power of batching. It's like batching, and as it helps you leverage, uh, like a consistent marketing presence in your business, because it means that I, when I want to. Put out a real, I don't have to also like when, when that's on the, on the docket for the week, like, Oh, this is going to be, you know, the content I'm putting out this week.

  I don't have to hope that on that day that I have like the time and the energy and the motivation and the focus to create a fresh real, instead I leveraged the time when I already was feeling. Fresh and excited and creative to make a whole bunch, but I can still leverage that, you know, past Erica who was like, Super gung ho on that one Saturday, I can now harness some of that past creative energy to put out good content now, but it's going to really like nurture my audience and attract new people and things like that.

  Um, but it's, I don't have to do it. There's not as much like lift in order to, to make it happen. So, if you have any questions about any of this, I would, I would love to hear them. I would love to be able to help you. Uh, the place you can find me most often is on Instagram at Erica Tobin's consulting. And I love to hear from my listeners.

  So screenshot this on whatever podcast app you're listening to, and then go post in your stories. Tell me one big aha or takeaway, or if you already do batching, I would love to hear how you do it and what you do it for. And then tag me over there at Erica Tevin consulting and as always happy selling.