How to Cure Procrastination | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership

What is Batching?

I want to talk batching today. Hopefully most of you have heard about batching, where you put certain activities all together on your calendar. So, for example, email. You may set email to an hour in the morning and an hour to clean up in the afternoon, so you’re not constantly being pinged by email. It can really make you much more efficient, much more focused.

Increase Your Efficiency

You’re not creating more work for yourself all day long by keeping those conversations going endlessly throughout the day. People also batch things like paying bills, returning voicemails, focusing on sales activities. I know for me the videos are a great thing that I batch. You’ll notice that I’m wearing the same thing in a lot of the videos. It’s because I do a bunch of them at once, and for me that’s just more efficient. You just kind of get in the flow and you crank them all out.

Reduce Stress from Procrastination 

I think for people that procrastinate it’s useful too. The hard thing about procrastination is that it’s stressful, because the things that you’re not getting to that you know you need to get to are lingering in the back of your mind, and that actually creates physical stress for people.  

If you just put a placeholder on your calendar, and say, “ok here are the five things I’ve been procrastinating on. I’m going to get them all done in this one hour.” Then psychologically you release those activities from being in the back of your mind. Because they have a mental placeholder on a calendar. And then guess what? That calendar’s going to hold you accountable for focusing during that time on those things that you procrastinated on. So, time hack as far as batching goes, it’s also great for curing procrastination.  

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