We covered a lot of valuable ground in yesterday’s Thursday HotSeat, including a very useful strategy which applies to us all as successful business leaders (and our Teams too), no matter what business we’re in.
This is the concept of ‘batching’ your work day to increase productivity, rather than switching regularly between tasks, or even attempting to multitask.
In an article published by Psychology Today, entitled ‘The True Cost of Multi-Tasking’, Susan Weinschenk, PH.D has this to say:
“Does this describe you? While you are on a teleconference call you are writing up your quarterly report, checking your email, and texting your friend about where you are meeting for lunch. You would say that you are good at multi-tasking, right? You might want to re-think your strategy.
Recent estimates are that you can lose up to 40% of your productivity if you multi-task.
The term multi-tasking is actually a misnomer. People can’t actually do more than one task at a time. Instead we switch tasks. So the term that is used in the research is “task switching”. Task switching is “expensive.” “
She continues on to explain what is known from research about the efficiency of task-switching and it’s not a pretty picture. As well as taking more time to get tasks complete, working on multiple things at the same time causes an increase in errors, compared to doing tasks one at a time.
An article published by Forbes entitled ‘Eight Tips For Structuring Your Workday To Increase Productivity’ quoted a recent study which showed that heavily multitasking can temporarily lower our IQ by up to 15 points which is astounding and possibly very costly.
Batching is starting to sound like a pretty good option at this point – right?
A practical example of batching in life is how we do the laundry. We don’t waste time, energy and resources washing each item individually, instead we wait until we can gather a load together and do many items all at once.
And as an example of implementation for business, the way I use batching in the Club is to have one day a week set aside just for team meetings and operations, and another just for Membership/business development, certain time slots for coaching and so on, also leaving enough spaces for spontaneity and things I don’t yet know about 🙂
During those allocated days/times, I only wear that one hat and my Team knows which hat I’m wearing and they generally don’t come to me with an operations question on the Membership/business development day, for example.
I also support my Team to batch their activities wherever possible, to ensure that we are achieving increased efficiency and minimal errors. We find that personal fulfilment and general morale goes up too, as we focus solely on doing one thing well, until it is time to change to something else.
Could batching be the holy grail of efficiency and quality that you have been looking for?
Or perhaps you’re already a batching pro?
Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
