Batch Your Work and Protect Your Focus Time

It's really hard for me to switch focus. What really helps me to kind of keep things more organized is batching.

Batch your work when you have multiple part-time projects

Whenever I'm assigned to multiple projects or tasks part-time, I try, where possible, to batch the entire day for one project.

One client, one full day

I'll give you an example. When I was working with Alcon here in DFW, even though my allocation started with 25%, I used to dedicate the entire day (Thursdays) when I traveled to their office. I took calls, met with my stakeholders, worked on weekly reporting - all fully focused on one particular client. Then the rest of the week I switched back to my other main project, and stayed fully focused on that one.

This helps me, and works much better than trying to keep it all on the plate throughout the week.

Keep a 25% assignment within one day

If there's a project that takes 25% of your time, I would try to keep this project work within one day - whenever it's possible. Rather than try to spread it thin across multiple days of the week, I try to do most of the week's assignment within one day.

Of course, this won't always work, and especially if you face the worst possible split - 50%-50% across two major projects. But in most cases, when you have one major assignment and one or two secondary assignments, consider batching everything related to one assignment into one day of the week.

Do you batch a project's tasks into one day - or spread them across the week?

Talk soon, Sergey