Taming Time: Batching and zoning

Okay, we've talked about knowing your best times for working, and creating a weekly to-do list. Now it all comes together when you batch your tasks and zone them for the appropriate energy level. That probably sounds like something Keanu Reeves would have said in Point Break, but there's a time-management science to batching and zoning, I promise.

One of the basic premises of organization is "put like with like." Batching means you group similar tasks together. If you need to contact many people individually via email about a project, for the love of Pete, don't send those emails throughout the day. You'll break your momentum when you decide to start writing an email, then you'll break it again when you're done with that email and decide to go back to what you were doing.

Instead, spend an hour doing nothing but sending emails to those people, maintaining your focus on the project and on the act of verbal communication. Similarly, if you have a bunch of errands to run, batch them all together, then start with the errand that's farthest away from you and work your way back to your home base.

You can also batch entire days on projects or on themes. If you're a freelancer, you might want to spend all day Tuesday, for example, focusing on marketing. Consider setting aside specific days to work with clients, even telling new clients "I'm available Wednesday through Friday" so you can keep the other days free for completing projects and running your business.

Once you've grouped your to-dos into batches (activity-based and/or project-based), it's time to take out your calendar and consider what you've learned about yourself and when you're at your best. It's time to do some zoning.

Identify your best time on your calendar (consider sketching a little box around it) and put the most difficult batch of stuff for that day in that time slot. Going back to the email example, if composing emails is a struggle for you, put that task in your best time zone. If calling people is a chore, that goes in your best zone. If you need to do some spectacularly creative work on a project, that definitely goes in your best zone.

What goes in your lower-energy zones? Stuff you could do in your sleep, stuff that needs to get done but isn't terribly important, doctor/dentist/hair appointments—everything else in your day, basically. To the extent possible, don't put this stuff in your best zones. It would be like putting high-octane fuel in a Yugo.

So remember: know what you need and want to do, know when your best times are, then batch and zone. And hang ten.

Have any of you tried the batching/zoning method? How's it been for you? If you're considering trying the method, or you're not sure about it, let me know what you're thinking in the comments!

Comments

[Alex Fayle]

Thanks for this post - it's exactly what I wanted to say to a client today! ;)

[Catherine Cantieri]

Thanks for commenting, Alex! (Alex has a great blog about how to start living the life of your dreams. Highly recommended!)