Use the Power of Batching to Streamline Your Low-Impact Tasks
Follow these three batching fundamentals to be more effective with your routine tasks so you can focus on what matters in life.
To prioritize the meaningful activities in our lives we must segment and isolate the low-impact ones that get in the way.
These routine activities are what I call upkeep tasks. They need to get done but have little or no impact on our lives. They are simply to maintain a “standard of living”.
Laundry is a classic upkeep task. You have to keep doing it to have clean clothes. Sure, not having clean underwear is annoying but laundry is never a life regret.
Treat your laundry like cash in a checking account. It is good to have some cash but you aren’t getting any return.
Contrast that with high-impact activities. Spending quality time with friends/family, exercising, and learning new skills give you a solid return. These are the true time investments that matter.
But it's easy for us to let low-return tasks distract us from higher-return ones. This is because low-impact tasks are enticing, low effort, and give the allusion of productivity.
This is why I batch upkeep tasks into dedicated days. Below are details of how I do it and the fundamentals to start your own routine.
My Upkeep Task Routine
If your job allows it, batching emails can make you less scattered brain. Rather than constantly checking and replying, simply set a schedule to process your inbox at given periods across the workday.
Batching can be applied to our upkeep tasks. Wait until they pile up or until it’s time.
For me, I bundle laundry, returning Amazon items, grocery shopping, cutting my nails, cleaning and vacuuming, and watering plants, all into a single time period on Sundays or Wednesdays.
There are also one-off and infrequent tasks that get added throughout the week. Paying a medical bill, sharpening kitchen knives, canceling a streaming subscription, activating a new credit card, and booking a haircut were all part of my batch last week.
Your batching cadence will need to be tailored to your life situation and mental bandwidth for cleanliness and disorder. But everyone can reap the benefits from isolating low-impact tasks into their own time and space.
To get the most out of batching upkeep tasks, make sure you follow these three fundamentals.
1. Avoid the Temptation of Easy Tasks
Upkeep tasks might be boring but never hard or complicated. There is no anxiety associated with laundry. It might even be pleasant folding clothes while watching TV.
This is the trap of letting upkeep tasks be scattered across your week. You feel the pull of doing trivial to feel good. You might call it a small win or reason small wins give momentum to start the hard stuff.
Another argument could be that these tasks give a break from the workday like throwing a load of laundry between meetings.
I find the time between meetings can be better spent for real breaks. Like taking a walk. Or doing related tasks like writing action steps from the meeting.
The reality is you are spending far more time on low-return tasks than you think. Both in time and cognitive effort on when things like cleaning and vacuuming should get done.
The better alternative is collecting low-return tasks into a scheduled period. By batching you remove the temptation and decision fatigue which lets you keep your head down on high-return activities.
2. Always Match Energy with Effort
The other common trap is doing upkeep at the wrong time. Pairing low-effort activities during peak cognitive periods is poorly managing your energy.
Never wake up and start the day with upkeep tasks. This is pretend productivity. Instead of eating the frog, you are eating dessert.
Low effort deserves low energy. Find time in the afternoon when energy dips (for 2/3s of us) and then take on that load of laundry.
I have a recurring calendar appointment on Wednesday that starts at 430 p.m. called Upkeep Task Batch.
Work is wrapping up and I am ready to move my butt to the sofa—an opportunity to grab my laptop and do some admin work or fold laundry while watching ESPN. Sometimes, I fight low energy by moving my body and running errands.
There is no doubt about the feeling you get from a clean home but eventually, it gets messy and the cycle begins again. We don’t need to give it our all to get that feeling.
Strive for mediocrity. Strive for average. Low-return tasks need to be sacrificed for higher return gains.
I ask myself, “Do I want an extra hour cleaning or writing one extra article?”
Upkeep tasks are also an infinite game. You never win. You will never get upstream. The objective is to stay with the current.
The game is also rigged. Upkeep tasks are bottomless. Cross one thing off and another appears. Trivial tasks can make us believe we don’t have time for other things.
To fight this, we need to limit the time we can do these types of tasks in our lives.
3. Work Fast, Set a Timer, and be Imperfect
Parkison’s law states we fill the time that is given. If we decide Sunday is for cleaning and chores then the entire day will given away.
To fight that notion, put a time limit on your low-impact tasks.
I hold myself to 3.5 hours of upkeep activities a week. 90 minutes on Wednesday and 2 hours on Sunday.
This is the right balance to have my tasks under control but not be overly invested in low-impact activities. Figure out a limit that is reasonable for your life situation and stick to it.
Doing upkeep tasks at a semi-fast pace also helps not be a perfectionist and lets you fit more things in a smaller time window. Focus on quantity not quality.
There is an amazing feeling of crossing out 15 small things in 2 hours. And if there are items you didn’t get to, move them over to next time. Never getting through it all is a feature of batching, not a flaw.
Batching Doesn’t Mean Rigidity
Don’t take my advice as a prescription. Batching upkeep tasks is a rule of thumb. It also needs to be paired with common sense and efficiency in mind.
If you make a big mess clean it up.
Don’t pass up the grocery store if it is not Wednesday.
Don’t wait for things to smell.
Your ability to think differently and change your routine will take time so be patient. It took me a month before I got my batching schedule just right. Start with small incremental wins.
Below is a three-week plan to ease into this new style of batching upkeep tasks.
Week 1: Categorize your upkeep tasks and decide which can be batched.
Week 2: Start batching related ones together like cleaning tasks.
Week 3: Start a batching day(s) and measure the time it takes to get them done in a fast-paced manner.
In my experience, the brain still craves easy but having a trusted batching routine resists the temptation and keeps you locked in on higher return activities that move the needle in life.
Thanks for reading!
Irfan
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