so how we schedule our days and how we manage our time is really one of the
keys to figuring out how to produce at a very high level how to get a whole lot
of stuff done in a short period of time and if there's one change that I've made
in my life it's incorporating something called
batching when it comes to some things in life batching tasks comes naturally we
run the dishwasher after it fills up we water our plants at the same time each
week we do our laundry once the hampers full could you imagine how unproductive
our lives would become if we decided to break these tasks up into 100 different
parts how insane would it be to wash each shirt right after you wore it and
yet that's exactly what we're doing when it comes to many other areas of our
lives and when you begin to think about how you might be able to incorporate
batching into other domains you'll start to find just how powerful it can be by
planning ahead and consolidating tasks we can save time prevent constant task
switching and focus on the things that really need to get done so this approach
did not by any means come naturally to me it was definitely a process of trial
and error as well as pulling inspiration from a lot of books that have written on
this topic before but I do find that when I'm really intentional with how I
schedule my days when I wait until these tasks accumulate and build it up to the
point where I can just knock them all out at the same time I find that I build
a lot of momentum and I'm able to actually get ahead with my work and
clear some space to actually enjoy the work that I'm doing so I want to provide
a couple examples that have helped me out the most from email to meetings
phone calls and my own creativity so let's hop right into it I want to start
with an area that you might least expect to see batching in creativity
so I am a filmmaker by trade as you might have seen from the videos that I
make on this channel but I don't imagine that a majority of people that watch
this really understand what goes into making these videos how long it takes as
well as how much stuff I make across all platforms from social content to my
newsletter to patreon exclusive content the YouTube videos of course there's
just so much stuff that I make in a given week now I've hired a couple
people to help me out to bring into that process but for the longest time I just
did it by myself and I continue to do a lot of this work on my own and I find
that I would never be able to produce this volume of content this amount of
stuff if I didn't incorporate some kind of batching I have a newsletter that I
send out every week whenever I come up with an idea for my newsletter I'll jot
it down on my phone I'm not gonna drop everything and write the whole thing
right there then when I have a collection of ideas I set aside some
time to write I'll work my way through writing for newsletters in a row each of
them typically taking about one hour to write so in just a half day I'll be able
to write one month worth of newsletters now all I need to do is schedule to send
them out over the next four weeks and I'm done that's one less thing I have to
think about similarly once a main video for the channel is completed my editor
or I can go about putting together all the social content creating all the
captions and scheduling them all out at the same time these tasks are similar
they require you to be in the same editing application in the same
headspace to become familiar with the same style of creating now this is
really important I'm not talking about turning our creative work and our
passion into an assembly line that is the last thing that I want you guys to
do what I'm talking about is using that creative momentum that energy that
you've built to continue to make the same thing using that same mindset that
you're already in if you guys remember back to a few weeks ago I did an
interview with Steven Kotler about flow once we enter this heightened
state of consciousness known as flow our creativity goes through the roof
Mackenzie did a 10-year study found that motivation productivity can
go up 500% and flow 500% we see creativity spike four hundred seven
hundred percent learning Japan whose numbers you're going by the partner
defense did some work they found the learning spiked to two hundred thirty
percent in flow and here's the funny thing about the human brain we actually
are horrible by you for peak performance we the body will move in the direction
of peak performance on its own so another way that I've brought batching
into my life is through phone calls meetings and interviews so back when I
was doing the podcast regularly I found that the only way that I could stay
consistent with it was to schedule two to four interviews over the course of
one to two days I found that the kind of energy that I needed for interviews was
totally different from what I was doing with my video editing and by
consolidating them by scheduling with all these people over a short period of
time it just made that whole process so much easier and again now that I have
four interview shot in two days that those are all of the podcast episodes
that I would do for an entire month I do the same thing for phone calls meetings
and social activities and for a very important reason these activities
require a completely different type of energy and focus compared to my solo
creative work if I had to constantly bounce between social meetings and
creative work it would absolutely drain me and I wouldn't be able to bring the
best of myself to either of these areas so I'll often batch meetings and phone
calls on the same day each week I sometimes find myself in a zone of
connecting and meeting with other creatives around Los Angeles instead of
breaking up multiple days of my week driving around LA to meet with people
for coffee or lunch i schedule everything into the same day this way
I'm still able to make those connections but I also don't let it interfere with
my other work now this might be weird this might I might be alone here this
might just be a me thing but I also find that I need to warm my brain up so if
I'm talking to somebody in the in the morning and I'm like getting coffee my
brain is just not working I am not clicking yet it's not the coffee it's
just that I am an idiot and like when I talk to people especially when it's the
first person I've talked to in the day I just don't know how to say sentences but
then as my brain starts to warm up in my brains like oh that's what we're
doing today we're talking to people I feel a lot better about those
interactions and I feel like I can get much more out of them and I can enjoy
them much more I just you know I just start to talk better unlike this video
I've set it before and I'll say it again your inbox is a trap it's one of the
most distracting places on your computer and constantly pulls you back again and
again throughout the day and each time it does it will typically absorb large
chunks of your time but if we decide to instead treat email like laundry the
entire flow of our days would change by scheduling an email once a day we're
accomplishing two things we're preventing the constant distractions
throughout the day of always checking back at our inbox and letting other
people's priorities become our own and to once we actually do go through our
inbox we can just fly through it it's instead of just like the constant check
check check check check check all day it's just check let's just check it
might actually be check cuz it's a little bit longer but it's not gonna be
checked check you get it you get the point
by doing this you prevent task switching and stay focused on checking writing
replying and archiving you can do one quick pass through your inbox
it might take 30 minutes to an hour but then you're done and you can get back to
your work in my experience most people understand that emails often take up to
24 hours even 48 hours to respond to you can even allow up to a week to respond
if you have an automatic email responder that lets people know that you only
check email once a week now I will say that when it comes to your closest
collaborators maybe it's a client should probably have a conversation with them
and let them know hey I'm only gonna be checking email once a day or hey once a
week this way if something urgent does come on the table you can offer up hey
give me a phone call shoot me a text if you really need me but for the time
being I'm gonna really experiment with trying to just focus on my work and this
is something that most people should be happy about especially if their
collaborator you're being more effective more productive during the day and
you're not being as distract by all these requests in your inbox I
understand that not everyone's work allows this if you're a personal
assistant then living inside your inbox is kind of a part of the job but I'm
guessing a huge portion of people watching this video don't realize this
is even an option.
Before I wrap this video up a quick word about our sponsor
for this week's video, Storyblocks.
Now Storyblocks is a new sponsor to this
channel but it's not something that's new to me I've been using them for the
past six to eight months and have gotten so much value from their service I have
saved so much time by using Storyblocks
99% of what you see on my channel is shot by myself but that remaining 1% can
be a pain in the ass to fill it's the planes flying over airports, busy cities
filled with people and aerial shots of Los Angeles
Instead of spending an
entire day running around the city getting these one or two shots that I
need to finish up my video I just go onto Storyblocks and then I have
hundreds if not thousands of options
Get access to an unlimited library of over
1 million assets strong
anything from Storyblocks massive library of high
quality footage, After Effects templates, music illustrations and sound effects is
yours to download with their unlimited all-access plan
if you're a filmmaker or creative
I highly recommend you check them out. Click the link in the
description below to try it out for yourself.
So batching has become a really
effective tool that I've used on a weekly basis to just prioritize my work
and like I said get a whole lot of stuff done in a really short period of time
that said batching is not gonna work for everything I do realize at least for
myself that there are definitely tax tasks that either take too long there's
simply just one offs that I do once and then I'm done or it might be something
where it just drains my energy completely and I'm just unable to do it
back to back to back so when it comes to your own work your own productivity
you're gonna have to experiment with these things and see what feels right
for you above all I'd love to hear from you guys in the comments if you already
do something like this maybe you didn't even think about it you didn't even call
it batching or maybe it's something that you're inspired to do now I would love
to hear about it so let's start a discussion down below in the comments
and that's it for this week's video thank you guys so much for watching and
I'll see you next time Banna I gotta stop doing that it's so
weird