How ‘Batch Producing’ Can Boost Your Focus & Productivity Every Single Day
By: Jari Roomer
Tags: Self Improvement, Self, Productivity, Work, Success

How often do routine tasks such as phone calls, emails, posting on social media (for business), administrative work, and responding to comments interrupt your flow and hijack your time? For most people, it’s a lot. So much, in fact, that the most important tasks and projects suffer from it.

If the most important things don’t get done consistently or in a time-efficient way, you’ll not make as much progress or impact as you could make. Over the long-term, this decrease in productivity will impact the state of your career or the health of your business — and not in a positive way.

All in all, to be highly productive, you must never let the ‘busywork’ get in the way of the most important tasks. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” That’s where the ‘batch production’ technique comes in.

Batch Production Is Just Like Doing Your Laundry

One way to efficiently get these lesser important tasks out of the way is by ‘batch producing’ them. With batch production, you essentially lump a few similar tasks together and tackle them all in one effective go instead of doing them scattered throughout your day.

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You can compare this to doing your laundry. You wouldn’t do your laundry each time you have a new pair of dirty socks.

Instead, over the period of a few days, you collect your dirty laundry and ‘batch produce’ it all in one go. This way, you don’t have to do your laundry multiple times per day (which would be crazy).

Yet, this is what most of us do with routine and low-value tasks such as email, answering comments, administrative work, or making phone calls. We scatter them throughout our day, which distracts us from completing the mission-critical tasks that make a real impact. We, metaphorically, do our laundry multiple times per day.

Instead, schedule fixed batch production moments in which you tackle similar type of tasks. For example, you might schedule a block of 30 minutes to go through all of the emails of the day instead of keeping the email tab open and replying scattered throughout your day.

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You might schedule a block of 15 minutes to respond to all of the comments you received on your (business) social media accounts instead of scattered throughout the day.

And you might schedule a block of one hour in which you make a few important phone calls instead of multiple times throughout your day.

This way, you protect your flow, focus, and time for the most important tasks — which should always be the main priority of your day. Personally, I schedule batch production moments at the end of my workday, when I’ve already finished my most important tasks.

Applying Batch Production To Your Most Important Tasks

Not only can batch production be applied to lower value tasks, but it can actually be used for highly valuable tasks as well. For example, if you’re a YouTuber and your goal is to upload five videos per week, you might pick one or two days to shoot enough videos for one or two weeks.

Essentially, you use this one day to batch produce so you don’t have to shoot a video every single day — which would require you to be in the right mindset, have peak energy levels, and be sharp and creative every single day.

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The same goes for writing on Medium, for example. If you want to publish five articles per week, you might want to batch produce your writing all in one or two days, and then edit the articles another one or two days. This way, you don’t have to be in a creative, focused, and productive mindset every single day — something which is practically impossible.

By applying the batch production technique to your most important tasks, you have the benefit of producing your work in one flow.

You’re already in a peak state, you’re already productive, so better maximize this flow and get enough done for the whole week or even month. This takes some of the pressure off from having to create and produce every single day.

You could even apply this technique to your health by batch producing a few healthy meals in advance. You’re already in a healthy mindset. You’re already cooking. Better prep some meals in advance so you make it easier for your future self.

Now Do It

Change only comes from taking action. Therefore, I highly recommend you try out the batch production technique yourself. Either apply it on the most distracting tasks (email, administrative work, phone calls, social media) or to your most important tasks.

To Your Personal Growth,

Jari Roomer

Founder Personal Growth Lab