How to use batching and sprints to create more time in your week

The Business of Psychology

How to use batching and sprints to create more time in your week

Links for this episode:

Instagram:

@RosieGilderthorp

@ThePregnancyPsychologist

Recommended books:

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Sprint by Jake Knapp

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Today, I wanted to talk to you about two methods of productivity that I find really helpful in running my practice. The reason I've decided to share this now is that a lot of people have been asking me how on earth I'm managing with my second Instagram account! For anybody that hasn't been following my journey with it on social media, I have set up a new account called @ThePregnancyPsychologist which is all about pushing forward my work with severe pregnancy sickness and the mental health impact of that. I've been meaning to do this for years, I've wanted to do this for a really long time, but I haven't had the headspace. It isn't something that I'm particularly using to promote my private practice (although if I do get clients from it, that would be brilliant because I love working one on one with people who are struggling in this in this part of pregnancy) but actually, for me, it's much more of what I would term an impact project. It's something that I don't really mind if I don't get paid for it because I'm generating income in the other parts of my work with Psychology Business School, with my private clients, with my coaching clients; those are the activities that generate the profit that I then use to pay myself to do some stuff for free. And that includes working with charities that are focused on this area, it includes putting social media content out into the world, and hopefully soon, launching my new podcast, which is actually meant to be an intervention; it's not a marketing podcast, it's not out there as a funnel, it's there to directly help people in their earbuds, who are struggling with severe pregnancy sickness. I've been working on it for a while - because it's a bit different to a normal podcast, I'm not going to hit go until I've got the entire intervention recorded, so it's unlikely to launch until January, but I'm using this Instagram account to provide people with direct support now, because it's something I can do instantly, I can share meditation tips, I can share the framework of the intervention via social media and hopefully start making a difference to people straightaway. So that's why I've decided to do it now because I've got a little bit of profit that I can put into that. But of course, I'm still only working two and a half days really, because I work two full length days, and then one school length day, and I always say to my coaching clients and my students in Psychology Business School, if you're working school hours, that is not a full day, you can't expect yourself to achieve what other people do in nine to five when you're working 9:30 until 2:30, that's impossible. So structuring my expectations, I've only really got two and a half days to play with in my work and I'm doing a lot in that time. But it is possible with organisation, and not just organisation, it's also about having gotten your other projects to the point where you can take something new on, because you've got the systems in place that allow certain things to run with minimal input from you.

So that's the first thing to say, if you're thinking about adding something new into your practice, the first thing you need to do is focus on your systems and processes with everything else.

I've spoken on this podcast before about my work with my assistant, Anna, who deals with all of my admin, my scheduling my invoicing, responding to new inquiries, responding to DNAs, credit control, all of those processes, which I know take up a lot of time when you start in private practice. I don't do any of that anymore and that frees up a lot of time and creativity for me. Also on the Psychology Business School, my online courses, a lot of that technical stuff is handled by other people, so I have a lot of support with everything from uploading videos onto my website to helping me figure out when I should do stuff, so for a lot of that side of my business, I'm only showing up and doing the bits that only I can do, and I think when you're starting out, when you're just setting up online courses for the first time, that's not usually how it is for you. So my youngest online course is actually two years old now, so all of those systems and processes have had time to bed in, they're working well. I've kept the same team for a long time, I've got the same person doing technical support, I've got the same person managing my community that I've had for the past couple of years. And so all of that is working quite smoothly in the background. Yes, I am doing a lot, I show up and I do my coaching sessions, I'm there teaching, I'm there doing the weekly coaching calls, but I'm not doing any of the admin associated with it. So if you're looking at all of that, and thinking how on earth has she got time to launch this new Instagram account, it is partly because I'm not doing lots of the kind of technical stuff that goes with those things.

So that's the first thing to do if you're thinking about adding something new; check that your systems and processes are running as efficiently as possible for everything that you're already doing. Have a look at who you could get to support you, any support you can bring in and also have a look at apps like Zapier, that can create automation for tasks that you might be doing right now. I won't go into it right now, I'm not a sales rep for Zapier, but do go on to Zapier's website and check out what they can do for you, because just this month I discovered lots of stuff that can save me and my team time by using these apps that integrate different apps together. It's amazing what they can do, so go and have a look at that! Then once you're sure everything is as streamlined as possible, and you've got a bit of time to play with in your week, then you can think about adding something new in.

What I'm going to share today are two strategies you can use to make sure that when you do add something new into your practice, you're able to do that in the most efficient way possible and maximise every moment that you have to spend on it. The two ways of working we're going to talk about today are batching and sprints. I use these both in completely different ways and you've probably heard of them both before (or you'll definitely have heard of batching before, you might not have heard of sprints) but I don't think I've heard many people going into the kind of nitty gritty of how it looks. Certainly when I heard the word batching I thought that meant I had to create everything upfront and in advance, and that just doesn't work for my brain at all. I find that extremely boring because particularly people often talk about batching social media content, and I've heard some people saying that they will literally batch 90 days of social media graphics in one sitting. That would make me want to die! I can't stand it, that sounds so boring! Some people's brains might really like that, but to me that would take me ages and I'm getting bored and backache just thinking about it! So that isn't the way that I do batching. I have a sort of year round system that I use for it, and that is the system that I've implemented for this new social media account that I'm running. It's also the one that I use with my normal social media for @RosieGilderthorp, the one that hopefully if you like this podcast you are following, that's my Instagram where I talk to you guys. I've been using this system for that account and it's the same system that I'm using for the new account, and it makes it possible, because you do have to do a lot for your marketing, you do have to do a lot to make social media worthwhile, but it doesn't have to be something that you work on every single day. I think that's what batching gives you; batching gives you that freedom to do other stuff in your working week rather than spending all day every day on social media.

So I want to talk to you about batching, and then when we finish talking about that, I'll talk to you about sprints, which are an intensive way of solving a problem in your business, which I think really allows creativity to flow.

Batching - why you should do it

Batching is getting a lot of stuff done in one go, which allows you to get into a flow state with it and to really focus on the type of mindset you need to be in to do that task. So we know, don't we, that when we're multitasking, it sometimes takes us a long time to shift between tasks. Batching is where you switch off all distractions and you just focus on doing one thing for a set period of time, so that there's none of that wasted cognition, you're entirely in flow in that one task and it can be really, really useful. But it can also be a little bit overwhelming, especially if you don't really like the task that you're asking yourself to do. So I'm going to share my method for batching and how it works for me specifically relating to social media in my business.

There are some things that I batch annually and one of those is my overarching marketing plans. Every year I will sit down and I will think, what do I want to achieve this year? What are the projects that I'm hoping to work on this year? What are the dates that I'm hoping to launch certain things? What are the logical times when stuff that is happening all year round in my business probably needs a bit of a marketing push. So for example, my private practice; I'm all year round doing that, I'm always offering therapy sessions, it's not like an online course where I might launch it several times during the year, it's always there. But there are certain points during the year when it makes sense for me to do a bit of a marketing push, there are times of the year where I might recognise that I often have a low in referrals (over the summer for example). There are times in the year when people are often looking to work on their businesses, so it's a good time for networking - September and January are good times to be out there, expanding my professional network, which is a key part of my marketing strategy. There are also times of the year when my particular client group might need extra support or when the media might be more open to talking about my particular client group. Because I work in perinatal, it will make sense for me to be looking for media opportunities around Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month for example. I go through my year, and I look for all of those key dates and times when I'm likely to want to do a marketing push for different areas of my business and I get that all mapped out at the beginning of the year. Then I look at that marketing plan and think about what assets this marketing plan requires. That could be everything from emails that I'm going to send to journalists pitching ideas, to emails I'm going to send pitching myself as a podcast guest, to social media templates, to graphic templates, to video templates, because I even template my live videos because if I don't have a template that says: introduce yourself at the beginning and say this stuff, and have a call to action at the end that says go to this podcast or go to this website for more information, I'll forget to do that. I'm actually pretty good at ad-libbing the educational content part of the live video because I tend to only talk about stuff that I'm thinking a lot about, but I'm really rubbish at the top and tailing bit, so I will create templates for that. I look through and I think what do I need a template for over the next year? And I'll have a batching session where I create all of those templates. I'm not creating the actual content, I'm just creating the templates that are going to make creating that content a bit easier, and that tends to be email templates, it tends to be social media templates, and it tends to be templates for videos and podcasts.

Then, quarterly, so every three months, I will batch podcast episodes for this podcast, I'll batch blog posts for my perinatal website and also for Psychology Business School, and I batch quarterly my educational Instagram reels, and that's because I get somebody in to help me with that. We will sit down together and create 10 reels in one sitting, and that really helps me because those are the ones which I struggle to do week in week out, because they take me too long. I'm not very good at doing the kind of reels where you change camera angle frequently, where you have little stickers, you use trending audios, that kind of thing. I'm not good at it. So what I do is once a quarter, I sit down with somebody who is good at that stuff. I record with them the educational content and then they week by week, put a trending audio behind it, put stickers, carve it up into cool different angles and things, and they basically make it look like a good reel. I've just provided the educational content, which is the bit that I'm good at, that because I'm working with them has to be batched quarterly. That also works really well for me because it means I'm not dreading it week in week out; it's all done in one day.

Then on a monthly basis, I batch my social media graphics and that's because I only actually release one social media graphic a week, so it works for my brain to do that all in one sitting to make that really high quality, spend time researching it, thinking what do I really want to say in this graphic and then creating those all in one go. Again, that means that I'm not trying to do it on the fly because I would dread that. If I was like, every Monday, I've got to create a new graphic, I would really dread that, because I'm not very good at it and it doesn't play to my strengths. Getting that all out of the way in a couple of hours once a month means that I don't have that Monday morning dread of having to do it on a Monday. So that works for me.

Then on a weekly basis, I'll batch my social media video plans. I deliver a lot of my social media videos live, but I always have a plan for the live that I'm doing and I'll do that plan on a week by week basis. I don't like doing it monthly or quarterly because what I think my audience needs changes week by week, according to what's going on in the world. I think sometimes batching stuff like a video too far in advance can leave you a bit tone deaf. So that live video that I do every week on both my social media accounts, that's something that I will plan that week, and then deliver when it's in my schedule to deliver it. I batch those plans weekly, but I wouldn't want to do that further in advance so that it's always relevant to what's going on in the world. I also, on a weekly basis, batch scheduling my posts. I have a graphic that goes out every week, I have the reel that goes out every week, and I also have a little graphic that promotes my podcasts that goes out every week. I think some people find this effortless, but I hate putting it into the scheduler for it to go out at the right time. I don't enjoy that, I don't like typing out all the hashtags and that kind of thing. If I tried to do a whole month in one go, I would just not do it, I would just give up, so for me it works to just batch those on a Monday morning. I've already created everything that needs to go in there, so it's just literally plugging it into the scheduler on a Monday morning before I do anything else, and then I know my social media for the week is there and ready to go. It also reminds me what is going out, because sometimes if you batch stuff monthly, you then forget about it and that means that you're not really present on social media wanting to talk about that topic. So on a Monday morning, I put it all into my scheduler so I know exactly what's going out when, I remind myself when I'm going to do that live video that I'm planning, and so it's all in the forefront of my mind so I can be there to chat to people about it on social media. That's also when I will create any Instagram stories that I'm going to use. A lot of my stories I actually do on the fly, but I'm not very good at creating Instagram stories which start conversations on the fly. I don't mind sharing a snap of what I'm doing but I'm not very good at those ones which are almost like a little quiz for your audience, just because I find it fiddly to do that on my phone. So I will try and create any of those that I think are really important for that week. I will try and create those on a weekly basis, and then I don't schedule them, I just save them in my phone and put them out on the day that it's relevant.

That brings me onto the stuff that I do daily. So daily for my social media, the only thing I'm doing is creating live videos; actually showing up live on the day that it's in my plan that I'm going to do that, and stories. Stories are not something I've historically been very good at, but I am trying to get better because I do see the value in letting your audience on social media see a little bit of your working life. For me, I'm never going to be sharing stuff like my breakfast, but I do think there's stuff that you can share there that is relevant to your audience and will help them to connect with you and have conversations with you. I'm trying to show up on stories a bit more and that is something that I will be doing on a daily basis rather than planning that too much into the future because that's just the nature of stories; people want to see what you're actually up to and I think it's a great place to be really current. It might be that you've come across a book or a podcast that really inspired you that day; I think stories is a great place to share that in the moment where you've got that inspiration. It demonstrates your authority, helps out your audience, and doesn't take too much thinking about, so I think that's a good way of using stories on a daily basis.

Top tips for batching

Some top tips for batching are to be really intentional about numbers. If you say you're going to follow a similar plan to me, and you're going to do your Instagram reels on a quarterly basis, know how many of those you want to get done in that session. For me it's 10 or 12, depending on how many ideas I've got, but it has to be a set number otherwise you'll never feel like you've achieved it and you won't ever take it off your list. Dedicate a set period of time and tell yourself how many you want to get done in that time. For me, it's three hours and 12 reels. Make sure you're that clear with yourself.

If you want to do something big, like you wanted to batch 12 podcasts, which is another thing that I do do, be realistic about how long that's going to take you. That is a lot of talking for you. It's also a lot of organisation to get your guests, if you're doing an interview show, into those batch slots. What I tend to do is have three afternoons or three mornings, where I say, I'm going to batch all of my episodes,...