#31 – Blocking and Batching

Attract More Families

As a private school leader, you need to working smarter and not harder to get the productivity you need. You don’t need to work 80 hour weeks to get all your work done. You can use blocking and batching. Learn more in this podcast.

Lenght: 12m 5s

Blocking and Batching

The key to getting more done is not to work harder or work more hours. The key is to work smarter and work in congruency with how the mind is designed to operate.

Take it from me; you can get a lot more done by working efficiently, time management. As many of you know I produce the work of someone working 80 hours a week, however, I work a maximum of 4 days a week and often work even less. Being extremely productive allows me to spend time with my friends and family, and enjoy the activities I love.

You cannot multitask

I know this will upset many of you and I will probably get several comments. However, your mind can not multitask. The human brain is a serial processor. In other words, it can handle one task at a time.

When you are trying to multitask what your mind is doing is jumping between the multiple tasks. Your mind works for a short period on one task then stores that information. Your mind them jumps to the next task, recovers that information and operates on that work for a short time before storing that information. Your mind then jumps back to the original task, recovering that information and resuming work.

This jumping, storing and recovering of information all takes time and energy. Although it happens quickly, this processes takes up to 15% of your productivity time. This means for every hour of concentrated multitasking you are losing nine minutes of productivity. Put another way, in an 8 hour day you losing 72 up to 72 minutes on just jumping back and forth between activities.

How much more could you get done with one extra hour per day?

Blocking

The first step in improving your productivity is to block your time so you can work on only one thing at a time. These blocks can be as little is 5-6 minutes or all day blocks. The key is to block the time on your schedule and stick to this block.

This means no working on other items for “just a minute.” You know how that ends up. You drift off and never get back to the original task.

Creating Blocks

Create blocks that are long enough for you to finish your task but not so long as to allow you to waste time. The amount of work needed to complete a project will fill the time allotted. You see this all the time with your students. No matter how much time they have to complete a task, they will use all that time. You do the same thing.

By creating a block just long enough you force yourself to stay focused and get the work done. Then when the time over your task is done, finished, and you can move on to the next item.

You can use anything you want for scheduling blocks. I use Google Calendars because it allows me to access my schedule from both my office computer and from my mobile phone. This way when I come across something I want to be done I can schedule its task right then.

Avoid “Got a Minute” Meetings

Read More…

Transcript:

Welcome again. This is Devin Murray with AttractMoreFamilies.com, your source for private and independent school marketing ideas and help. Today, I want to talk to you about a concept, a time management concept of batching and blocking. I know a lot of you when you talk to me, I get the question a lot of, “How do you get so much done in the time that you work?” Because I don’t work 80 hours a week. I have kids, I have a wife, I do a lot outside. I’m a very outdoor person. Those of you that know me, I actually stand up paddleboard race, I mountain bike race, pedal mountain bikes. I do a lot of skiing, I do a lot of cross country races, so I travel a lot.

I also do a lot of speaking at association events and working with clients at their private schools. Going in and actually talking with them, doing presentations, doing stuff like that. You’ll find a lot of times that I am in the office fully three to four days a week, but yet, I get as much done when I talk to people, as someone who’s working 80 hours a week, that’s here six or seven days. People always wonder, “How do you do it?” One of the big ways that I do it is the concept of batching and blocking. The concept is the human mind does not do well jumping from one thing to another. Although we might think that we can multitask, we really can’t. The human mind does not do parallel thinking, so it doesn’t think in two rows coming down, right?

What the mind does is it thinks in one column down. Now, if you’re doing multiple things and multitasking, what’s happening is you’re starting over here and then your mind jumps over here, and then it comes down and it jumps back, and it might jump back and forth. What happens then is that jumping back and forth takes a little bit of time. Takes some time when you move from one thing to the next. We might think that it’s not taking any time at all, but when you look at it, it really does. It slows us down. You might think you’re getting a lot done, because you’ve multitasked and you at the end of the day have three different things that are 80% done. But that’s not, you haven’t really finished them and you’ve taken a lot more time to do it.

As the old Zig Ziglar used to use the example of what a blocking and batching looks like, he used to have the example of the day before vacation. Have you ever experienced that? That day before vacation, when you get in the zone or the flow or whatever else you want to call it? Where you sit down and your office doors close, and you know that you have to get 3-4 things done before you can go on vacation, heading down to the Bahamas tomorrow, right? You just get everything done, and you don’t know where all the time flew, but all of a sudden everything is done and you’ve been in this state where you’ve just been purely focused.

That’s what batching and blocking does. It puts you in that state. It allows you to focus on one thing at a time and then move to the next. There’s actually a bunch of research out there that shows working with emails, if you’re working on something, if you’re working and an email comes in, even if you do not read that email, just the notification that it came in slows the brainwaves down and actually transitions you over to thinking about something else and takes you off the task you are doing. It takes you 15 minutes before you are back fully focused and working just like you were before. Even if, and that’s only one email.

Imagine if you have your emails on and people are walking by, and every five minutes something pings up. You’re never 100% focused on what you’re working on. Therefore, you’re never going to be 100% efficient on getting everything done. That was the word I was looking for there. The concept of blocking and batching is really pretty simple. The first concept is batching, which is you put like things together. When I’m working on something, when I’m working on marketing for a school, I might do two or three different groups that I’m all going to do the exact same thing for. It’s batching.

When I go to do website updates for my clients, myself, and the rotary. I run my local rotary’s website, awesome. I will actually batch all of those together so that I have the tools in front of me and my mind is in that website updating mode, right? The site I do for this one school over here and the tools that I use to update the rotary’s website are generally about the same tools and the login processes are about the same, and where stuff is on screens is all about the same. By batching, I save myself time. I can leave that website editor open, I can remember that it’s up here on the top left hand corner is the button that I need, or it’s under this menu selection.

Now, let’s take that to what you’re doing. When you’re doing batching, when you’re working on grades, do all your grades at once. Don’t skip. When you’re looking at doing marketing, if you’re doing two or three different fliers, do all the fliers at once. Do all the marketing at once. Do all of your Facebook posts, all your social media posts in one sitting, and schedule them, right? Because this way, your mind is working on, “Oh yes, what does Facebook need to look like?” You can take the two or three minutes that it takes you to think about, “Oh yes, how do I log into the page? How do I find the update button? Where’s the images that I want to use, the articles that I want to pull down? I have them all together so I’m not taking that 3 to 10 minutes to get set up every day. I’m doing it in one setting, and I’ll just do four or five Facebook posts.”

You can do that, too. Then, you schedule them to go out. Obviously Facebook has its own scheduler system, or there are lots of tools out there that allow you to schedule across all the different platforms if you want to. That’s what batching does. It does the same thing so that you’re not jumping from one thing to another, which saves you time, because you get the tools and the mental process done ahead of time. Now, blocking is the next thing, which allows me to get so much done in such a short period of time, and when I teach this to my clients, it just transforms their working time.

What blocking does is you set aside time for what you’re doing and you only work on that. If I’m working on marketing, you set a time that goes, “This is when I’m working on marketing, and I don’t do anything else but marketing, nobody can talk to me,” unless it’s about marketing, and then it has to be a meeting set up ahead of time so that I’m not pulled off. Because you know that if you get pulled off that marketing for even five minutes, first off you probably don’t want to be doing it anyways, so if you can find any excuse at all to not be doing it, you will, right? “Oh, yeah, let’s go, yeah, the toilets need cleaning. I’m going to go take care of that instead of the marketing because someone complained about it.”

Next thing you know, your marketing never gets done. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. By blocking your time out, you get things done. It also allows me to say, “I only answer emails twice a day.” Those of you that have worked with me know this. I don’t answer emails when I first come into the day. I answer them at around 10 and 1, are the two times of day that I have blocked answering emails. Then, I get in there and by batching, I’m just doing all the email stuff, and by blocking it, I’m not being disturbed by email all day long. I have no notifications about email on any of my devices. My phone doesn’t tell me when an email comes in, my tablet doesn’t tell me, my computer doesn’t tell me. Nothing tells me when email comes in.

I just go and look twice a day at those emails, and it’s blocked. I’m very efficient. I get through all my emails very quickly, because I’m focused on it. All of my energy is doing that one thing which is working on those emails, or whatever else I want to do. Now, some of the other things I’ve seen … Some of the schools I work with, is the leaders will put outside their office a signup sheet that goes, “Here’s the times of day that I will take meetings. If you would like to have a meeting with me, talk to me. Sign up, and then come in ready to go, and let me know what the topic is about head of time so that I can be prepared.” This really saves so much time because it keeps those, “Hey, you got a minute?” meetings that take 20-30 minutes, and it’s someone that really just doesn’t want to make a decision on their own.

They come in and you’re working on answering some emails or writing a grant proposal, any of those things that we’re always doing, and someone comes in with a “Got a minute?” meeting and next thing you know it’s 15-20 minutes down the road and then you have to transition back into trying to right that, and 10 minutes into it, someone else comes in. Before you know it, your day is completely shot and nothing has been done. This is what having a schedule and blocking your meetings takes care of. It makes sure that no one’s interrupting you when you’re working. It allows you, when you are doing meetings, to be focused purely on them, and you know what they’re going to talk to you about, so you can be prepared.

If you needed a document or an email or some other resource, you’ve had time to go get it prior to them showing up, so you’re not wasting your time or their time not being able to answer the questions. Finally, the big thing that I find happens with, and I learned this years and years ago, is that when … If I made every decision, then people expected me to make every decision and they would not make any decisions at all, and they would come to me with every little thing. I was micromanaging by force. They would force me, essentially, to micromanage, because they would not make decisions. But when I stepped out and starting blocking my time and said, “You know what? You can’t talk to me again until 2 or 3 o’clock this afternoon, a lot of them started making their own decisions.”

They were the right decisions. They knew the answer. They just wanted to run it by me because they could, because my door was open, and they could walk in. That killed my productivity and by doing that, it actually enhanced their productivity at the same time because they just made the choice, and they went ahead with it. I hope you can take these simple concepts. They sound really simple, but start implementing them. Start implementing batching and blocking, and even if you just do it with a couple little things, you’ll find that it starts increasing your productivity throughout the day. This has been Devin Murray with AttractMoreFamilies.com, your source for private and independent school marketing and enrollment growing ideas.

If you would like some more help from me or would like to talk to me about some of my ideas and how we can actually implement those into your school, feel free to give me a call, send me a message, email me, whatever, and I will get back with you as soon as I can. Take care and have a tremendous day.

The post #31 – Blocking and Batching appeared first on Independent School Marketing - Attract More Families - Private School Marketing | Parochial School Marketing \ Charter School Marketing.