time management skillHave you ever heard of the effective time management skill of batching?

This particular time management skill was foreign to me too, but when I explain it to you, you will realize you probably have done it – to an extent anyway.

The concept comes from baking a batch of cookies. Think about it: you would never decide to make a batch of cookies and then bake them one at a time. That would be foolish. It would waste your time, your resources, and would result in extreme frustration because it would be taking you so long to accomplish your goal of 24 freshly-baked cookies.

Everything takes time – especially in online marketing. Just think how much time you waste waiting for that video to load or for the next site to come up.

Frustrating!

Batching is simply grouping like tasks together to help you be more efficient and effective.

For instance, instead of going to respond to a comment on your blog as soon as it comes in, designate your “responding time” to be at a given time – say, early evening. Then when the time comes, you go and respond to ALL the comments on all your blogs.

You “batched” them together.

When you need to record some new videos, do them all in one sitting.

When you want to optimize your blog posts, plan to do the whole week of blog posts at one sitting. You can utilize the “schedule” feature to spread out when they will be published.

When you batch your tasks, you get into a certain flow and you can really crank out the work making you much more effective.

Your mind settles into that groove and you can get a much deeper connection to what you are doing.

One of my favorite trainers, Ann Sieg, believes in effective time management and she capitalizes on batching her tasks. She answers a daily question that her members on the training site submit, but she batches a whole week’s worth at one sitting on a Friday. Then they are all done for the next week.

Batching is brilliant really.

One thing I do in my business is write a personal thank you for every order that I see come through. I batch these weekly thank yous on Friday or Saturday and do a whole week’s worth. I have a set “testimony” that I use for each email which changes every month, but then I add in personal comments to that particular client.

In your offline life, you can batch things like paying bills, preparing birthday cards for the month, making phone calls, and of course, running errands. It is imperative that you learn to focus your time for the best productivity.

Batching is one of the most effective time management skills that is fairly easy to implement.

Have you tried batching before? Or were you doing it without even realizing it? Let me know what is working for you in the comments below.

Here is a great time management skill for you to implement.