Last week in my mini series about lessons from motherhood and business, I shared my realisation that I don’t have to do it all. It took a long time to come to understand this but longer to truly accept and embrace it. Since doing so, I haven’t looked back and I cringe at the thought of reintroducing those tasks that I have so happily removed from my plate!

One thing that came a lot easier for me was the lesson I’m sharing with you today: the lesson to batch it!

I Batch Everything I Possibly Can

It’s one of main keys to getting lots of stuff done – I absolutely have to batch tasks. I’m more productive, more focused and a lot calmer when I batch my to dos.

In the business, some of the things I batch include:

Blogging

Not only the writing of blog posts, but also their scheduling. I batch the graphics for them, the content calendar: everything I possibly can.

Web maintenance

If I notice something that needs updating on my website, I jot it down to fix at the time I have set aside for web maintenance – 15 minutes every first, second and third Friday of the month, to be precise! The only time I will do web maintenance outside these times is if it’s urgent, but that’s pretty rare.

Outsourcing

As much as possible, I try to batch the jobs that I outsource. So instead of sending receipts to my bookkeeper as they come in, I wait until the end of the month and send them to her in bulk. Instead of sending one video off to be edited, I’ll wait until I’ve done a few – this works fine, as I’ve usually batch filmed the videos anyway.

At home, I batch:

Cooking

I’m not a huge fan of cooking, so I batch cook as much as possible. If I’m cooking spaghetti, I always do a double or triple batch of the mince and freeze the extra. If I’m baking biscuits, I’ll triple the mixture and roll half into a container to freeze, slice and cook at a later date. Apart from saving time at the stove, bulk cooking also saves you a lot of clean up time.

Homeschool preparation

I do an overall plan for the year each summer and then check in over the term holidays to make sure we’re on track or make any adjustments going forward.

Shopping

We buy our fresh produce from a local green grocer and if there is ever bulk produce on sale, I’ll buy it, then dice and freeze for later use. This saves money and time and sometimes even enables us to eat out-of-season produce.

Cleaning

There’s not much point getting the bathroom cleaning gear out to just wipe down one basin. I might as well take an extra few minutes and do the whole bathroom. If I have a bit more time, I’ll do the ensuite as well. If I’m changing the sheets on one bed, I may as well do the others and get that job out of the way. While time and family commitments don’t always allow me to batch clean, whenever I get the chance, I take it.

It helps me remain focused, rather than flitting from one task to the next. Definitely a valuable lesson learned during my first 10 years as a mother and business owner.

Now over to you. What do YOU batch?