[00:00:00] Leah: In my mind, time blocking and batching go hand in hand. So I love that I’m talking about these two back to back. If time blocking is putting different tasks Inside your calendar in order, batching is making sure that the right tasks are together so that you are using your time the most effective way possible.

[00:00:23] Leah: It’s about grouping similar action items together and doing them all at once instead of one at a time. This is most obvious when we talk about things like newsletter creation, podcast creation, content creation, but it’s also relevant even in things in our home and all over our daily life. You wouldn’t run errands and say, you know what, I’m going to go all the way across town to one side, then I’m going to go all the way to the other side, and then I’m going to go back across town.

[00:00:53] Leah: to get back to where I had just been. You would say, no, I’m going to hit the two stores I need to that are over on one side of the town, then I’ll cross over to the other side of the town, finish the other place, and then head home. That’s what batching is. Batching is about looking and saying, what things can I group together so that I don’t have to go back and forth, back and forth.

[00:01:11] Leah: So instead of looking at your newsletter and saying, oh, I create my newsletter. Every week on Monday, because I need to send it out on Tuesday. You would block out a Monday and say, okay, Mon, first Monday of the month, I am blocking out multiple hours and I’m gonna try to do all four newsletters for the entire month.

[00:01:32] Leah: You’re batching them together. Then you get to get into the zone once and just go 

[00:01:37] Leah: now, it’s not just about batching work things. We can also batch home things. One of my favorites is when you double or triple a recipe. You just essentially batched dinner because now you can freeze two of those dinners and now you know that I sat down. Well, you didn’t sit you stood but you made dinner once and you were able to freeze two others So that on a busy night down the road, you’ve got dinner ready Batching is simply about tackling tasks at the same time.

[00:02:13] Leah: This way you avoid that constant switching gears and you just increase your efficiency. It’s like meal prepping for your week. You do it once and it pays off all week long. So here’s who I feel batching can really help. Those who feel like they’re always just a little bit behind, or maybe a lot behind.

[00:02:31] Leah: If you know you’re going to take time off, batching is amazing. Anyone who wants to have a vacation without working through their vacation, you batch as much as you can before you go. I do this when I’m coming up on holidays, when I’m coming up on summer break. If I, Was, you know, thinking about maternity leave, which I’m not, but any of those things, those are real amazing opportunities to front stack or batch a bunch of your work so that you don’t have to worry about it when you’re, say, enjoying the holidays, actually enjoying the holidays or your maternity leave or that incredible vacation, whatever, whatever it might be for you.

[00:03:13] Leah: Here’s why it works. It keeps you in the zone and it gets you ahead of deadlines. And oh, there is so much power that comes when you are ahead of deadlines. I mean, you just feel so confident. You just feel like, I am amazing. And let’s be honest, when we are behind. We feel terrible. It is a horrible feeling.

[00:03:35] Leah: So batch, get yourself ahead and then work to stay ahead. Now, here’s how to fail at batching. Number one thing is just not breaking the outcome into small enough tasks. So you say, okay, I’m going to batch the podcast instead of I’m batching researching. Now I’m batching recording. Now I’m batching, say, editing.

[00:04:00] Leah: Now I’m batching show notes. If we take too much all at once, it becomes overwhelming, and of course we’re going to want to avoid it. We’re going to just be like, Nope, just kidding. Don’t want to. Go away. But if we break it down small enough, we can be really successful. Also, you’re going to need to find your personal sweet spot. Maybe when you’re sitting down to do newsletters, that is your jam. And you really can write four at once and you’re golden. Maybe you can even write more. But maybe when you’re trying to create video, that’s a lot harder for you.

[00:04:31] Leah: And you can really only do two. two at a time before it just becomes too overwhelming. So make sure you are figuring out what your sweet spot is for the amount you can batch and just know it might start smaller. And then as you continue to batch, as you stay consistent, you’re going to get better and better at this.

[00:04:51] Leah: It’s the same with all of these techniques. Time blocking in the beginning, you’re terrible at it because you’re really bad at guessing how long things will take. But the more and more you do it, the better you get. Batching in the beginning. You’re terrible at it because you’re slow and you get overwhelmed and so you allow distraction to creep in and you think you can get way more done than you actually can, but with consistency we get better and better and we’re able to do less but better to get more done in less time to feel more on top of things and more confident and just more aware of what things actually take and it makes all the difference.

[00:05:29] Leah: All right, that is batching. Let’s keep going.