What is Task Batching?

A great way to improve productivity is through Task Batching. What is Task Batching? Task batching is focusing on a group of tasks and doing them together. When you say “I am running errands.” Are you doing all your errands all at once or are you going grocery shopping one day, to the bank another day, and then going to the dry cleaners on another? You might as well do these errands all at once, right? This is Task batching. 

There are several tasks I Task batch like writing my blog, my newsletter, and my social media content. Batching allows me to block off time and just focus on related tasks. Task batching saves me time by doing it all at once all in, instead of doing things halfway in random spurts. 

Here is how I batch my social media:

1. I take out my content planner by Kat Gaskin. You can check it out here.
2. I go to that month’s calendar and add any holidays I want to post about. Not sure what holidays are that month? Follow me on Instagram @simplifiedvaservices where I post the holidays every month– October’s holidays will be getting posted today.
3. I add in any important days such as a launch I’m planning, birthday, etc. 
4. I use the content from my content calendar to finish filling the leftover blank spaces. (Stuck on content? You can purchase your personalized content calendar here.)
5. Now here is the fun part; time to start writing my content for the week.
6. Once all of the content is written, I add hashtags that are relevant to my posts.
7. I then go to Canva and/or Pixistock and find photos to go with my content
8. The final step, posting the content! I post in real-time manually, so I have my content/hashtags all in Google Drive then I download the photos I need for the week from the Canva app to my phone. However, if you use a scheduler then go ahead and schedule out your posts.

Viola! I now have social media content, hashtags, and photos for the week. Believe it or not this only takes me one hour. However, if I didn’t batch my social media and I tried to do a post a day with hashtags and photos it would easily take me 30 minutes a day or more. If I did that it would be 2.5 hours. So in short, time batching saves me at least 5 hours. 

Toogl for time tracking

I also like to track my time because sometimes we overestimate or underestimate just how long something takes to do. Take time this week to track your activities and see if you are taking the amount of time you think you are. You can do this using Toggl, which is a great productivity tool that lets you see where your time has gone, or an old school timer around the house. 

I love using Toggle to track everything I do when I’m working on my computer. At the end of the week, I download a report to see where my time went. I am always amazed at how much time I took on one task that maybe I could have spent doing something else. Wow, did I really spend an hour surfing Facebook? I then use this report to find ways to reduce my time on meaningless tasks the following week.

So let me know, do you task batch your work or track your time? If so, do you find it helpful?

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