Time Management is all about how to organise your time effectively. But it’s overtaught, overdone and I feel, unneccessary. What should be taught is how to choose the right thing to be doing, not just doing many things, important and urgent. Ultimately, there is a limit as to how much you can organise and how many techniques you can go through to manage your time better. What we should learn is elimination - how to eliminate that which doesn’t serve us.

One thing I would encourage you to do is batching. Do you know where most people’s time is wasted? It’s during the moments when they’re umming and ahhing about what task to do next - it’s the time during task-switching and getting distracted between tasks.

The best way to overcome this is by batching. I mean, let’s look at laundry. The average person doesn’t do their laundry if there’s just 7 clothing items. He/she will wait till there is a considerable amount of clothes that need washing before doing it. They’ve “batched” the tasks together. Batching involves letting similar tasks accumulate and then performing then at limited times.

Let’s take a look at a personal example with email.

I used to be an email freak! For me, email was like crack! No matter how productive I am and how many times in a week I get compliments on how well I work, I was an email freak. Especially with the send/receive button on my laptop’s Outlook Express. The number of times I could hit the button in a day was in its hundreds.

For the last two months, not only did I change that, but I changed it drastically. I only check email once a day, twice at most during busy periods. Changing the way I handle email has been the single biggest turning point in getting more than 300% productivity increase - and trust me, I can work as fast as the top 10 people in the world!

Even though, when I open my email once a day, I get over 100 new emails, I only deal with those most important right away. Emails I can’t deal with will wait until a time in the month where I allocate a special power hour to clear the inbox.

By living this new email lifestyle I’ve cultivated over the last seven weeks, I’ve got a lot of emails from customers, clients and friends asking why they haven’t received replies faster like they used to.

To combat that, I’m trying something new. I’m setting up an autoresponder email that those emailing you will get right away to let them know that you may not reply right away, and it could be up to a week or so till you reply, and that if immediate help is required, they should call my phone. And that’s what I’ve done.

But back to the main point about batching… make a list of things you’re doing quite repetitively in your daily life and see how you can batch them!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure to subscribe to the feed!