I have previously written about the importance of daily planning and weekly planning and in those posts I gave some pointers about how I go about each of these crucial exercises. If you haven’t done so – I recommend that you read through those. But what are the principles of an effective plan? Today, I want to share a couple of key principles behind the process of planning my day and planning my week. Those being ‘batching’ and ‘the critical path’.
Neither of these are new ideas, in fact, I didn’t even realise that the critical path was a principle I had until in a phone call with an older gentleman he explained that decades ago when he was working this was a thing and something I had written reminded him of this. Batching is something that is spoken of a lot today and it goes by other names such as ‘chunking’ or ‘grouping’. or its bigger brother ‘theming’ If you combine these two ideas together, they provide some of the core principles of how to plan an effective day or week.
Task Batching
The basic idea between batching or chunking etc is that you batch similar tasks together and do them all at the same time, sequentially. The principal is that different types of tasks require different things and a different frame of mind. Batching them together minimises the amount of switching mental states that you do during the day, helps you to get in to that flow state and is all together a more efficient way to do things.
So, rather than constantly dipping in and out of email through the day, you set a side an hour and batch your emails together, responding and processing them all together. If you have 5 calls to make, you do them together, one after the other. In a former life, when processing a lot of different financial documents for the church I worked for, invoices and expense claims to process and pay, gifts and donations and statements to check etc, I found that by far the most efficient way to do it was to set aside 3 hours and do all of my weekly finance related jobs in one go, grouping each different type of item together and working through them sequentially. I had a simple checklist that I followed to make sure I never missed anything. I did the same thing with publicity, building management and maintenance issues etc.
This is not a new idea. It comes right out of GTD (Getting Things Done) itself way back when David Allen first published his seminal book. Here, one of the key ideas is to allocate every task that you have to a context. The context would be the people, place or item of equipment (e.g. computer or phone) that you required to complete a task. And, the theory went, if you weren’t with that person, in that place or didn’t have that thing, you couldn’t do the tasks on that list and all that was relevant were the tasks for the ‘context’ you found yourself in. This therefore batches tasks together based on the old GTD context system. Nowadays, for most knowledge workers, the idea of context as first explained by David Allen, is becoming less relevant. Quick and instant communication, the power of our mobile phones, the accessibility of our digital tools for tasks, projects and document storage and the portability of our devices means that it is rare that we will find ourselves without access to what we need for certain tasks.
However, task batching still comes into play for two reasons. First, different environments lend themselves better to different tasks for us. So considering our environment and context, is key to selecting the appropriate work for that situation. For example, Carl Pullein used to begin writing his weekly blog posts on his phone during his bus commute. I could not do that. Secondly, as mentioned above, batching our tasks together, keeps us in the frame of mind that best suits particular types of task and therefore helps us to be more efficient. The best article I have read on this was written about 5 or 6 years ago by Lionel Windsor, on the faculty at a theological college in Sydney. He called this ‘zones’. You can find it here – Living life in “the zone”: using zones to regulate life – Forget the Channel (lionelwindsor.net)
The bigger brother – day theming
The bigger brother of task batching is day theming. This an approach where you theme your entire day and each day has a different theme. I know of one church minister who did this, though I cannot remember who it was. I am told that for a couple of days each week he would be in his study all day, studying and preparing, on another day he would go to a coffee shop and be there for 8 hours of meeting people back to back. Another day would be devoted to admin. Another to writing etc etc.
I can see the merits of this and can see how it can work really well for some people however, for this, and for task batching in general I have…..
…a word of caution
It’s my view that this can only take you so far. Energy levels, concentration and focus will be better served by this approach but they will not hit their peak and then necessarily stay there until your day is over or your batch is finished. They will decline. When they do, the quality of your work will suffer as will your efficiency. This can be resolved by switching to doing something else. My word of caution therefore is not to have batches that are too big to manage. How big, is something that you need to learn over time. I know of other bloggers who batch produce their material, producing months of posts in a single day. It take me roughly 1.5 hours to write these posts and 30 minutes to write the shorts. In theory, I could write 5 weeks worth of blog posts in a day or 8 weeks worth of short posts. I don’t plan this as I know that the quality would suffer.
So this leads on to the next thing.
The critical path
Back in the old days, the basic idea here was formed around the sequential project. The project would require certain tasks to be completed before the project as a whole could be signed off as done. Some of them could be done alongside each other at the same time. Other tasks would be dependant on certain things having already been completed before they began. Some tasks, could be begun, but not completed or would simply be able to be completed faster or better, if other things had been done first. Therefore, it was the role of the project manager to work out the critical path. Effectively, like a navigation officer to chart the course through the project to minimise delays and hold ups and ensure that things happened as efficiently as they could.
This principle still applies today in project management. But, when it comes to personal productivity and personal effectiveness, it is a principle that I unknowingly use as I plan my week and my day. To be honest, it is rare that tasks on my list are blocked by other tasks and cannot start until they have been completed. The kind of thing for me would be that at the moment I am trying to switch one of our current accounts to a new one. First, I need to research and select a good account to switch to, before I can actually make the switch.
However, as I look at my plan for the week and plan for each day, there are things I do to chart my course through the day and through the week, to try and make best use of my time, energy and resources. I always plan my day the night before and then review and confirm that plan first thing. I tend to go for the most cognitively demanding tasks, like writing, in the morning and save admin for the evening. I prefer to do planning & development stuff in the afternoon. Once I have written this post, I am going to stretch my legs for 15 minutes and make lunch.
Through the week, I have given a lot of thought to my content production process to try and get the best out of the time. My main blog post, would normally be written Friday morning, edited Monday afternoon and then scheduled for publishing on Thursday morning. The podcast is written Tuesday morning, edited on Wednesday and then I record it at 8:45pm on a Wednesday (when my family are asleep), and it is published on Friday.
Now, I am still learning this process. An I invite you to learn it too. Some of us have more flexibility with our schedules than others. If we do, then I recommend we make the most of it. For example, Carl Pullein always does his daily exercise at 2pm. The reason for this is because this is where his energy slumps and scheduling exercise then gives him a boost and he works later in the day rather than trying to exercise first thing in the morning or at night. It isn’t just about maximising our efficiency. It’s about considering the relative benefit of what we plan in for when. For Carl, he gets more benefit from exercise at 2pm than at any other point in the day and since exercise is such a high priority for him that’s when he does it. What about you? What are your biggest priorities in life for how you spend your time? What are the times this week and today, that you could schedule time for these things that will give the highest amount of benefit in that area? An example could be taking a day off for your son’s birthday and flexing elsewhere to make it work. Or, if you know a colleague has a particularly difficult day coming up, scheduling lighter and more open to distraction things for that day so you can be on hand if needed. So, chart your course through the day and through the week, seeking to maximise the benefits of the time you allocate to different tasks and areas of life. Chart a course that maximises your use of time, energy, attention and focus. This may mean that you end up doing some things at times that histroically would be viewed as unconventional. But, if that serves the goal and is allowed then why is that a problem? In my recent short post (Go for a Walk!) I gave one small example of this. If going for a 10 minute walk in the middle of your work could help boost your focus, energy, motivation and effectiveness and this will enable you to complete a task within the time needed and to a higher quality, then this is the course your should follow.
Planning an effective day and an effective week
So, as we set about planning our time, and develop our process for doing so, combining these two ideas is a powerful way to maximise the quality and quantity of our output. But, it’s not all about work efficiency. Or efficiency at all. We can use these ideas to maximise the enjoyment we get out of work, maximise the benefit of rest times and also use it to schedule in the best slots for building friendships, spending time with our families and serving others.
We won’t get it perfectly right and maximising our efficiency is far from the most important consideration in our planning. But, I would suggest, that in order to be effective in our day, week and life, then considering these things is an absolute must.
