How to Start Day Batching (and a video from me)
Day batching is the single most useful productivity habit I have found.
I’m obsessed with day batching. As a small business owner of a company that provides mental wellness resources, a content creator on five different platforms and publications, and a mom of a three-year-old, I would lose my marbles if I did not organize my days in a focused way.
Day batching is the single most useful productivity habit I have found.
The simple idea behind day batching comes from Elon Musk who allocates specific days to each one of his companies (Mondays at SpaceX, Tuesdays at Tesla, etc.). It was almost a year ago that I decided to try setting up this system for myself. It is one of the only productivity habits that has not only helped me organize my life, but it has also helped me release some of my anxiety over my perpetually gargantuan to-do list.
While day batching as a concept may seem simple, I have learned a few things since I started utilizing this productivity habit. I have found some things that worked and some that just didn’t. So, if you would like to start a day batching productivity habit, here’s a step-by-step plan.
Your Day Batching Productivity Habit Setup
First things first, you should know what kind of things you want to spend your time on. For me, I have three main projects — my business, my writing, and my kid (not necessarily in that order).
If you have one main job or focus, it is helpful to break your main tasks into days. For instance, you might do sales calls on Tuesdays and product development on Wednesdays. Or, you might do lesson planning on Fridays and grading papers on Thursdays.
You know you and your job the best, so I recommend choosing two or three main things you would like to schedule during the week and then assign them anywhere between one and three days each.
Here is the current breakdown of my days:
Writing — Mondays and Wednesdays
Danscend (my company) — Tuesdays and Thursdays
Catch-all day — Fridays
Remember that the more important something is to you, the more time you should allocate toward it (within the confines of earning a living, keeping small humans alive, and the rest of the craziness of living).
For me, growing my business and growing my readership as a content creator are equally important to me. This will probably shift to three days per week for Danscend and one day per week for writing in the new year. Please note this entire day batching productivity habit situation is always malleable to meet the demands of your life, your business, and your health.
Including a catch-all day
Adding a catch-all day into your schedule is key to keeping this productivity habit sustainable. In my opinion, you need at least a half day (preferably a full one) to do all the crap that life throws you. This day can include everything from replying to your aunt’s request to mentor her coworker’s cousin’s daughter to getting your car washed and repaired. It’s the day to do all the tasks you keep hitting “Mark email unread” on in your inbox.
I also like to schedule all of my taking-care-of-myself appointments during my catch-all day as well. I am working on automating as much of the upcoming year as I can and I have scheduled regular checkups, dentist appointments, and even spa treatments on my catch-all day.
It’s important to schedule time to care for yourself, so I make sure to put a massage, a hike with a friend, or a lunchtime yoga class into my schedule alongside all of my other tasks. If I don’t put these things in my Google calendar, I can go months without doing anything to care for myself and then I burn out quicker than my favorite Diptyque lemon verbena candle.
Having a catch-all day may seem like too much time, but I am always surprised by how quickly it fills up throughout the week. And if I don’t schedule a day to tie up the loose ends from my week, I stress about them over the weekend (which is reserved for morning writing sessions, teaching mental wellness workshops, and — mostly — rest and family).
The pic below is me on a catch-all day - relaxing, enjoying coffee, and getting $h!t done (I don’t know who Clark is, BTW. I maybe stole his coffee).
Creating your day batching process
There are three important things to set up when embarking upon a new productivity habit like day batching — brain dump receptacles, survey time, and communication with all impacted parties.
Brain Dump Receptacles— It’s Murphy’s Law. When you’re working on one thing, you will remember something else you need to do. If I don’t immediately get these tasks out of my head, they will bounce around like the noisiest of distracting pinball games. In short, you absolutely need a place to put your to-dos not related to your current batched day. I like to have three physical old-school notebooks — one for writing, one for Danscend, and one for my catch-all day. When something comes up, I jot it down in the notebook and complete that task on the appropriate day.
Survey time — Emergencies will occur. There will be time-sensitive requests. And, overall, the world doesn’t always conform to your perfectly batched days. So, I include a half hour of what I call “survey time” in the morning and at the end of the day. This keeps me from missing important time-sensitive requests. I check email during these times and I tend to anything that seems like it can’t wait 48 hours.
Communication with impacted parties — If you’re doing day batching, it’s helpful if people need to know about it. My business partner knows I am busy writing on Mondays and Wednesdays, so she usually refrains from bothering me because she knows she will get a much more timely response on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. People are generally very supportive of day batching and it also can help them plan their own schedules as well. A simple email saying, “I’m reorganizing my schedule to do some day batching (link to this awesome article if you want). I have scheduled [insert days] for working on [insert relevant project].”
Once that is set up, the only thing left is to…well…do it. The day batching process is a productivity habit that takes time to get used to. It is oh-so-tempting to just hop over to a task scheduled for another day and complete it.
Don’t do it!
When you switch tasks, it takes your mind off your current task. There is inevitably a transitional time to reacclimate to your new task. And then, there is yet another transitional time to get back to what you were doing. A quick completion of a five-minute task can easily turn into ten minutes of lost productivity time.
Final thoughts
In short, day batching has helped me chill out a bit. I can focus on one thing at a time and I can stop spinning in my head about the thousand items on my to-do list. It has also helped me get used to not being always available to everyone all the time. And that has helped me focus a bit more on myself and what I need.
And, of course, creating this new productivity habit has helped me make the most of my time in the way I feel is congruent with myself and my values. So, give it a try. I’d love to know how it goes!
Here are free friend links to my favorite articles from this week:
The Dirty Secret Side of Perfectionism
3 Ways to Combat Productivity Booby Traps
If you would like to read all my work (and the work of tens of thousands of other fantastic writers), you can subscribe to Medium by clicking this link.
Have a fantastic week and please share this Substack with anyone who wants to kick start their productivity in the new year!
Love,
Michelle
Thanks for posting. I keep getting closer to being able to do this. So no Trello or Asana, just good old-fashioned $50-cent, now $90-cent composition notebooks? I use those for my Morning Pages, and for this question to revamp my social media presence, and start writing daily on Medium and on set days on Substack. I began last April and what a grueling journey. --Donny PS: Oh, and I am in the dark about what you meant about Clark. :-)