How to Use ‘Task Batching’ to Instantly Be More Productive

As someone who's read and written a lot about various approaches to increasing productivity, I can say with certainty that the majority of the methods out there are primarily focused on how to structure your tasks over the course of a single day. Techniques and plans that call for prioritizing your to-dos, for instance, generally expect you to prioritize your to-dos for that day. The best scheduling advice also typically revolves around how you designate and take on chunks of time throughout a single day.

But sometimes—or often—you work on things that span a longer period of time, so you need productivity tips that are more expansive too. And while too much pre-planning can feel daunting, there's a method you can start using right away that can help you more effectively structure your time in the longer term. It's called "task batching."

What is task batching?

At its most basic, task batching is the act of grouping similar tasks or responsibilities together and completing them around the same time. Ideally, you can work on all the tasks at once, somewhat multitasking but still staying in the same frame of mind for all the jobs. Your goal here is to avoid context switching, or changing mental energies between tasks. While it's true that multitasking makes you worse at everything—which is why I've sworn off it—this isn't the same thing.

For instance, instead of jumping from your inbox to paying bills to taking video meetings to washing dishes to cleaning, you can batch the emails and video calls together, batch the dishes and cleaning together, and save the bills for a different chunk of the day (or the week). Keeping yourself in the same mind frame will help you stay focused instead of allowing your thoughts to be pulled in a bunch of different directions.

You already do task batching without thinking about it. When shopping for gifts, for example: Let's say you have to buy new shoes for your kid and your spouse, a gift for your bracelet-loving mother-in-law, one for your necklace-loving sister, and a candle for yourself. At the mall, you wouldn't pick one pair of shoes at Foot Locker, run to the jewelry store for your mother-in-law, head back to Foot Locker for the other shoes, circle back to the jewelry store for your sister's necklace, etc. You'd group these purchases together, getting everything you needed in each store you went into before moving to the next one. If one of the stores was in a different place altogether, you'd probably kick those purchases to a different day. That all just makes sense—and you can apply that same duh logic to your other to-dos.

How to batch your tasks effectively

At the start of each week, start with your regular to-do list, but then group together the similar things and schedule those groups for specific days. For example, if you need to buy dog food, school supplies, and groceries, schedule a shopping trip for one day of the week. If you have dinner scheduled with a friend and also need to call your mom to ask how her book club went, try to do all those social check-ins on the same day. Writing-intensive work goes in a batch, no matter if it’s for school, work, or pleasure. Personal and professional emails all get handled in one batch. Household tasks go in a batch, whether they’re cleaning or unpacking from a trip.

If you have a big party or event coming up, schedule the prep for a single day instead of picking up one necessity one day and another the next. Complete your similar tasks in one day so you can move on and focus on the next group the following day.

One key step here is not just pre-scheduling your batches at the beginning of the week, but checking in on their progress as the week goes on. Deadlines can change (or be missed), and what was low-priority on Monday may suddenly be important on Wednesday. Task batching helps you to get more done in big chunks, which frees you up for the unexpected emergencies or responsibilities that might crop up.

The reason this works is that it keeps you in "the zone." Instead of getting pulled in a bunch of directions and constantly thinking about the gear-shift necessary in order to move to the next disjointed task, you remain in the flow. On email day, you move through your inbox more quickly because you remain focused on that one task the entire time. On cleaning day, each chore seems less individually daunting because you're crossing off a bunch of them in sequence. When you're in that kind of flow state, things start to come easier and you can focus more deeply— plus, this strategy allows you to think ahead instead of constantly jumping from responsibility to responsibility.

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