Want my step-by-step process for time batching that gives me an entire month of time back in my year? Keep reading!
Back when I was working for a Fortune 500 company, I quickly learned the importance of using routines when it came to tackling my responsibilities. Being fresh out of college at my first big girl job was overwhelming in itself, and the company I had just recently joined was in a state of transition as well, so everything felt ehhh..let’s just say intense.
The company had a monthly cadence for the role that I was in, where we were responsible for different tasks each week of the month. This. was. huge. in helping me to learn how to prioritize and manage my tasks. I knew exactly what to work on each week and everything else kind of went to the back burner because it would be handled eventually.
how to set up your time batching routines
How does this come into practice today, 8 years later as a full-time work-from-home mom? Great question, I would love to tell you (Elyse Myers, anyone?).
I start by looking at a task that feels really overwhelming to me – just for example, we’ll use content creation. This can be blog posts, social media content, email newsletters, Youtube videos, anything that requires a lot of time to create up front. The first step is breaking the larger task down into smaller ones. A blog post, for example, has 8 steps in my world:
Coming up with an idea about what I’ll be writing about
Researching the idea to come up with keywords, a title, and points to hit in the post
Creating a brief outline to make sure everything is included and flows in a way that makes sense
Actually writing the post
Editing the post and adding tags
Finding any pictures or external content that need to go into the post or be linked to
Posting or scheduling the blog
Creating and scheduling pins and social media posts that link back to the blog post
Then I can combine these steps into broader “themes”:
Steps 1-3 become “content planning”
4-6 become “content creation”
7 and 8 become “content scheduling”
You can do this with anytask that seems insurmountable. Anything can be broken down into smaller steps and it makes a world of difference in actually getting it done.
applying to monthly business routines
So how does this apply to my monthly business routines? This part is called “time batching” or “batch working” and I learned this directly from my corporate days, but it really helps so I continue to do it. Each quarter is broken down into 13 weeks, which roughly translates to 4 weeks/month. So, continuing with our content creation example, the first week in the month is for content planning. I set aside the following 2 weeks for content creation as this takes the longest, and the fourth week is for content scheduling.
This entire process repeats 3 times in the quarter, one for each month. I write each step in the process down in my calendar for a week at a time (you could even put this in your project management software of choice so it keeps track for you).
And here’s the beauty of this process: if your time batching routine only takes 4 weeks, you now have an extra week each quarter to do whatever you want with! I like to put this one at the end of the quarter and use it to knock anything on my to-do list out that I’d been putting off, run reports, catch up on the latest Netflix binge, whatever. Let me know if this works for you and enjoy!
Think something like this could work for your business? I’ve got a free quiz that will help you figure out what tasks you can time block. You can find it here!
i get it. trying to figure out systems and processes can sometimes feel like trying to find your way out of a corn maze (these are a thing, right? if not, my western pennsylvania is showing...)
that’s why i created a quiz that will tell you exactly which part of your business you should start streamlining first, as well as some of my best tips to get you started.