Hey guys, here to mention a quick (maybe? perhaps?) time management technique that I've been consciously applying for the past couple months to the beat of hours of time saved per week. It's called Batching, and I'm betting you already use it to some extent.
Since I'm from Maryland, I'm going to explain it through the example of catching crabs. The delicious kind you dip in Old Bay, not the kind that makes you scratch down there. When I was growing up, during summers we would drive to the beach and my dad would set up a metal crab trap with some raw chicken as bait (see Exhibit A above), and throw it into the canal. Now it's waiting time. Question: If two vehicles of equal size are traveling at a velocity of 50 mph toward each other... how often are you going to check the trap? Each time you check, there may or may not be any crabs; if there are, you dump them into the bucket and head home. If there aren't, you take the bucket and head home. No matter how many crabs are in the trap (equal to or above 0), it usually takes more or less the same amount of time. Why? Because most of it involves stopping what you're doing, putting on some pants, walking outside to the canal, pulling up the trap and inspecting it, putting it back in and walking back. If you're going to check it every 10 minutes you might as well set up camp right there, but if you don't check it all day the bait will disappear without you knowing or the crabs could escape.
In this situation, most people develop a routine so they're not checking too often or too little, right? However, this routine fails way too often to extend to more everyday tasks, the type that are made so convenient by proximity and technology that you don't notice a large chunk of your time adding up. That's time that could be going toward your goals, high-order priorities, top-secret missions, etc. but is instead disintegrating in the face of "have to" tasks.
The worst culprit: e-mail.
Checking email is a habit engrained into our society. We wake up, we check email. We're about to leave for work, we check email. We arrive at work, we check email. And what happens when we check email? We get Facebook and Google+ notifications, so we go to our web browsers and make a comment, then find an interesting article that someone posted. Well reading one article never drowned a baby, so pop open another tab and read it, and oooh a link to a video on YouTube. Man that was awesome, you guys gotta check this out - share it with some friends, batabing bataboom. We've been awake for less than 2 hours and we've already spent over 45 minutes "just checking email." It's a distraction, and yet because we depend on it for work, school, family, and friends it feels justifiable. We'll often check it at least every hour, and if you have a notification system it's even worse! You know as soon as something comes in, and no matter what you're in the middle of, no matter what it's distracting you from, email suddenly becomes PRIORITY NUMBER ONE. It could be the mayor asking us to save another drowning baby!
So what I've gone and done is batched my email checking time to: once per day. That's right, you just heard a part of the internet explode. Gone are the days of waiting for email notifications and going straight for the inbox as soon as the bell goes off. What are we, dogs in an experiment by some dude named Pavlov? And when I do check email, since I know it's the only time I'll do it that day I'm much much more likely to actually respond then and there rather than put it off. I also strategically created the habit of checking as soon as I get back from work, sometimes with a little bit of timeboxing sprinkles to save even more time. While it's tempting to check first thing in the morning, managing to avoid this has been a hidden secret to increased productivity at the beginning of the day.
If you want, you can limit your email checking even more, like once per week. This is especially true if you own a business (!), which I learned thanks to The 4-Hour Workweek, by being smart about your communication methods and giving responsibility to your
Many people will recognize "Batching" as a technique not only associated with time batching for one task between longer intervals, but as task batching to tackle several similar tasks at the same time. You can combine both time batching and task batching to do simple things such as waiting until you have a few errands before going out and doing them in one go, or waiting to go to the post office until you have a few letters/boxes you want to send, or making all of your phone calls at once. That sort of thing. You want to put stuff off as long as possible, and then do a lot at once. I've applied batching to things like:
- Checking post mail (once or twice a week)
- Balancing my check book (once every 2 weeks)
- Adding to my address book (once a month)
- Washing dishes (once every 3 days, so it takes about as long as a TV show episode, which I listen to and use as a timebox while washing)
- Writing my Japan experiences (twice a week, based on the limits of my horrible memory)
- Other cleaning and organizing
Batching works especially fantastically if you have a digital task manager (like Remember the Milk) that can handle recurring tasks. Or if you can work it into your daily routine it will be an even stronger tool. You can set up your batching schedule and don't even have to think about it.
The moral of the story: don't waste your time doing something multiple times, if you can get the same or better results doing it less often. Get the stuff you have to do out of the way so you can focus on what you want to do.
Syk3 out!
You should be an executive coach or HR Manager; this is a good technique to have in general as well as within the corporate world. I wanted to comment because I find myself doing some form of ‘batching’ every day, however it is all relative and dependent on your environment.
ReplyDeleteCurrently, I work at a job where I get more than 100 emails on average per day, along with a slew of IMs, Phone Calls, and Text messages. My hip is well messaged from my phone constantly vibrating. On top of that, I’m constantly running to and from meetings and having to switch gears, so being able to adapt to a situation on an as-needed basis is necessary.
If you receive 100 emails a day, and waited till the end of the day to read them all, you would have to add several hours to your overall work day, especially if you already have tasks assigned to you to be completed that day. A lot of what goes into batching and bleeds over into another time management skill, is the ability to filter out the ‘noise’ from the actual major / critical tasks which must be accomplished and subsequently prioritizing these tasks to complete them in an efficient manner.
As a Project Manager, you need to read those ‘100’ emails still; however, you can glance and just ‘review’ most of them briefly so you stay current and up-to-date. High priority tasks should be addressed and take presence over an email from your Facebook. An executive manager at my company, for instance, receives 800 emails a day and manages multiple projects under the auspices of a Program Manager. In order for an executive to stay ‘on top’ on what is going on, he requires his team to provide a monthly report, a briefing of the major tasks accomplished, what needs to be accomplished still, and finally risks involved with the specific project. He reads maybe 6 – 10 of these at the end of every month, rather than keeping tabs on those 800 emails a day, he focuses on what is important.
In this case, a Program manager uses a combination of both ‘batching’ and ‘prioritization’ to determine what is necessary and to stay current and up-to-date with the project’s activities.
My point: Batching is a great skill to have especially in your private life, but you need to use it with a combination of other time management skills in order to get real results in the corporate / business world.
You're absolutely right.
ReplyDeleteI skipped a crucial step in explaining not just batching but some of the other time management techniques as well: there does need to be a system of deletion, removal, and elimination in place first (aka "prioritizing").
I suppose my main objective here is to wake people up to the fact that they use email and other daily tasks in this way. Even before downsizing the amount of email and how much gets read, you can already be thinking about how often you're checking. Once a day works for me. But my work does not require email very often (many Japanese don't even have a computer email.. seriously), so someone who works with email a lot is going to have trouble on that schedule pre-purge. Perhaps setting certain times might work (for ex. 3 times a day), especially if they're finding themselves without as much time to focus on other projects.
Email is sort of a foot-in-the-door approach. Once you're in, well, you might as well check Facebook (if that even comes into your account) or other things of vague, general importance that get flagged under the same "email checking" category rather than being prioritized based on who it's from and such. That's another thing that timeboxing helps with - if you limit your session window, let's say to 30 mins, and you don't know if you can finish it all in time, that in itself will help you narrow down and focus on the important.
Let's go back to the prioritizing for a second. A lot of this can be solved by looking at the Pareto principle (aka the 80/20 rule). It's the idea that 20% of your work yields 80% of the profit. Or 80% of the time you spend is only worth 20% of the value of that time. Right off the bat 80% is just crap. Your core customers that are giving you 80% of your income are only 20% of all the customers you deal with. Maybe the reason I've held off on explaining this before is that it's difficult to use as an actual applicable technique, which seems to be the theme of my time management blogs here. People have their own values and ways of prioritizing exactly where that 20% of gold lies.
You could always use the Goal Calendar I posted about as a way of deciding exactly what you want and going for it, but I understand that doesn't work so great with ordinary everyday work. haha Anyway, hope this helps. Thanks for your comment. I highly recommend you check out The 4-Hour Workweek book!
Sorry, I just got around to reading your post.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading! We will discuss this in Guam next month over beer, Saki, or some kind of plum wine.