If You Haven’t Tried Time Batching, You’ll Be Shocked At How Quickly It Improves Your Productivity And Happiness - Forbes

For most of us, it can be tough to string together 30 minutes (or more) to concentrate on one type of work or project. Whether we're fighting our own distractedness or interruptions from others, stringing together tens of minutes for deep concentration can feel like a futile endeavor. But with a time management trick called time batching, we can reduce a great deal of mental exhaustion and achieve significantly greater levels of productivity.

Getting continuous time to concentrate doesn't just make us more productive; it also drastically improves our mental wellness. Based on the tens of thousands who've taken the online quiz "How Do Your Time Management Skills Stack Up?" we know that about 71% of people report frequent interruptions when they're working. And even more striking is that the people who can block out interruptions are about 52% more likely to end their workday feeling like "today was a really successful day."

It's not just interruptions we need to stop; we also need to reduce the switching costs incurred by jumping from one type of work to another.

In a study called "Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching," University of Michigan researchers found that people lost significant time when they switched from one task to another. And the more complicated the tasks, the more time was lost. 

There are two mental processes that take place when we switch tasks; goal shifting and rule activation. Goal shifting is thinking, for example, "I want to do this new task now instead of that other task." Rule activation is turning off our mental rules for the first task and activating the rules for the new task. While these executive control processes seem like they would happen quickly, and they do, over the course of a day, they can be exhausting. The researchers found that all this mental switching could cost 20-40% of a person's potential efficiency.

This brings us to the technique of time batching. In essence, what we need to do is group together mentally and intellectually similar tasks and then block out a period of time (even if it's only 20 minutes) to focus only on those items.

Imagine that I spend a few days tracking my time, and I learn that I can roughly sort all of my work tasks into six major buckets:

• Deep thinking (thinking about new research studies, writing books and articles, etc.)
• Learning new skills (education, learning a new statistics application, etc.)
• Client interactions and giving presentations
• Administrative work (returning emails, managing budgets, talking to accountants, etc.)
• Internal interactions (one-on-one conversations with my staff, leading staff meetings, etc.)
• Statistics, analysis, and anything data related

Each of those buckets contains work that requires a similar type of thinking. In my deep thinking bucket, I'm doing work that requires creativity, brainstorming, innovating and curiosity. By contrast, in my statistics & data bucket, I'm using my math brain and poring over every single decimal point.

What I want to avoid is scheduling my work such that I'm forced to hop back and forth between different buckets of work. The thinking rules I employ for writing an article are radically different from the rules I use to review an internal budget or conduct a staff meeting. The more I jump between those activities, the more mental energy I'll have to expend in order to get into the right frame of mind for the job. And the more I switch between buckets, the more mistakes I'm likely to make.

We can even take this a step further. If I track my time for a week, I could discover that I'm far happier and more productive doing my deep thinking very early in the morning or at the end of the day (or whenever). Once I know where I perform deep thinking most effectively, I'll want to schedule a few blocks of time throughout the week during which my calendar shows that I'm busy and I can concentrate without interruptions.

Ideally, I'd like to have those blocks of time last for at least an hour or two, but even 30-minutes of deep thinking could generate significant results. The same thing applies to any of the other buckets. For example, I know that I'm less able to do deep thinking right after lunch. But I'm very effective at talking to clients or my staff during that time. So whenever I have a choice of meeting times, I'm going to try to schedule client and internal meetings during the early afternoon. If I have a little extra time after those meetings, I'm going to keep doing work in the same bucket to avoid mental switching costs.

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February 17, 2021 at 08:30PM
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If You Haven’t Tried Time Batching, You’ll Be Shocked At How Quickly It Improves Your Productivity And Happiness - Forbes
"time" - Google News
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