Every month our Alumni Community has a different business focus. While this has many benefits for the community, the practical work involved is that each month I need to find/create a worksheet, and find several related articles that juice the conversation. I also need to create a conversation thread on the Community Forum, and create the backlinks for it.
Let me tell you something: how you handle tasks like this will define how big your business can get. It will tell you how much you can handle and how much space you have for creative thinking.
The least effective way to handle this is reactively.
“Reactive” means “OMG, it’s the end of April! I’ve got to choose the Business Focus, create the worksheet, find the articles.”
Inevitably this ends up handled at the last minute, often after your assistant is no longer available (if you have an assistant), and you end up doing everything yourself. Stressful. Not fun.
Then, relieved to have it done, you forget about it until next month, when you do it again at the last minute.
The next best effective way to handle this is slightly pro-actively.
Having learned your lesson, you start to schedule it in your calendar or other task/to-do system. You realize early in the month that you need to get that darn business focus done, so you do, two to three weeks ahead of time. Nice.
If you have an assistant, you hand it off to him or her, and he or she gets it uploaded and handled for you. Not so stressful.
Yet, after a few months of this, it gets tiring. You start to feel like you’re on a gerbil wheel.
The most effective way is to do it in a batch.
Batching your tasks takes a lot of discipline and focus. Why? Because there’s a LOT going on in your business, stuff that needs to be handled right now.
And batching takes time. Instead of spending just 30 minutes pulling together the minimum needed to get by, you schedule half a day, maybe more. Half a day? What are you doing for a full four hours?
You are getting all 12 months of this task done. You are saving them in Evernote, or another note storage system, all in HTML for easy uploading. You have the associated pdfs already uploaded to the server.
It’s done. Each month for twelve months all you do is upload what you need. Easy.
Even easier if you have an assistant or a team in place, and you can just hand everything over to him or her.
This May Seem Obvious. But Are You Doing It?
As I said, it seems obvious, but until you do it a few times, it’s hard to get the discipline in place to follow through. It’s all too easy to let your schedule be overrun by urgent deadlines.
However, if you can hold the line. If your heart can stand strong against the urgencies of the moment, and you batch as much as you can, you’ll notice something strange. A peacefulness, a sweetness to your life.
The number of urgent matters will have decreased significantly. You’ll find yourself with long stretches of creative time.
Even better, your creative oomph won’t be taken up handling these regular tasks. Instead, your creativity will go towards proactive, nourishing, business developing activities.
Do you batch? Or does it give you conniptions to try to batch? What’s your experience? Leave a comment on the blog.
Here are a few related articles and other resources to check out:
16 Responses
exactly! this is how I survive social media, once a week I have a date with myself to search for beautiful inspiration in myself and my favorite books & blogs. I schedule my findings with Hootsuite and I feel free for the rest of the week. sometimes I even come up with material for 2 weeks! Because once the inspiration is flowing there’s no limit 🙂 I think that’s one of the success reasons of the batch method.
I should definitely implement this into more of my biz, thx for making it so obvious !
Nele
Nele- I’m so glad you are batching your social media already! And yes, there’s plenty of other places to implement batching as well.
Mark,
As always, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one having issues with this. I’ve recently realized that I’ve got to batch my newsletters articles and blog posts. I’m always doing it in “real time” and it makes the entire process so stressful. I end up dreading it. It’s just a matter of having the discipline to dedicate some time to doing it.
Now if you want to write an article on that…. 😉
@Cathy – You are not the only one, Cathy. 🙂 The discipline involves putting it on your calendar, and not letting anything else overrun it. It also requires a realistic view of what it takes. For me it might take keeping a list of article ideas that I capture “in the moment.” Then, using a structure like I have in Heart-Centered Article Writing, identifying the different components of each article in note form.
Once you have those, it’s possible to sit down and crank them out, already knowing what you’re going to write. 🙂
Thanks, Mark.
I personally would like a steady IV drip (weird image, so sue me) of your thoughts on systems. I learn a ton every time I get a dose.
You are so good for me and my baseline scattershot approach to systems.
Keep ’em coming!
Love and light,
Sue
@Sue – not such a weird image for this former paramedic. 🙂 I’ll keep ’em coming.
Mark,
Thank you for this! It’s been my intention for a while, to do exactly this: set up a bunch of facebook posts, blog posts, and newsletter articles ahead of time, thus avoiding the last-minute scramble I often end up with. I’ve had a really hard time doing this — both feeling like I don’t have time, and then once I get started there’s some resistance, oddly, to the feeling of getting ahead. Something to look at there!
My biggest ah-ha from your article: I need to do this batching (good verb!) *before* I take on the next great idea I have to move my practice forward. Because that’s what makes room me to take on another marketing activity, or more clients, or a writing project, without getting behind and panicky about the day-to-day of my business. (::light bulb!::)
I’m with Sue: keep the systems ideas coming! They’re really, really helpful.
Marilyn
@Marilyn- Exactly- before! And yes, it can feel strange finally have some space open… 🙂
I think you have hit the nail on the head as for what I need to do. Instead of batching and working on one set of tasks at a time, I tend to get distracted, and honestly I don’t get a lot done.
I’m going to try and implement what you suggest and hopefully I will be able to report back with positive results.
Great reminder for everyone. because of many distraction we don’t get a lot
done.You offered us so many interesting ideas and thoughts, that I have to think a little bit about this stuff.
I am not naturally inclined towards discipline, organization, and structure, but since online marketing has become a huge part of my business, batching has saved my life. I create and schedule blog posts and my conversation calendar a month in advance.
Thanks for this!
Great points Mark! I’ve danced with this issue over the years and while there are some things that are great to do ahead, sometimes it feels important to be producing, then distributing creative content (like newsletter or workshop themes) in real time when the energy is fresh and I’m responding to current requests from my clients. It certainly seems to be one of those elusive balancing acts where there is much to learn.
I’ve always done things one at a time, finishing more important and urgent things first, and setting priorities. Although I’ve done accomplishing tasks by doing them in batches, it’s not something I usually gravitate into when doing things. This is a neat idea that might work with me, hopefully, better.
A man after my own heart Mark! Batching is one of the core productivity tools I teach, and something I practice always. It’s one of the secrets to super productive people.
I’ve also written about it and you can read more here if you’re interested. http://numbersarelife.com/2010/09/batching-efficient/
Batching is definitely one of the best ways to make it easy to finish a lot of tasks. I found out that if you do things by batch, you get to familiarize yourself with that certain task and do it more efficiently compared to doing a lot of different small tasks all at once.
This is so true that it hurts. The truth usually does. I spend way more time on urgent than I would like. Batching is a great way to break things into sweet manageable pieces. I keep putting off doing it. One day!