SOLOPRENEUR: Batch Tasking 101 (And Cautionary Tale)

In my experience, it goes against everything we know about productivity + Highway discount TIME IS RUNNING OUT

Jul 5

It’s another day, another addition of the Frolics

I’m, as always, Ellen “Jelly” McRae, the writer/solopreneur/content creator/whatever you want to call me, with the goods.

By trade, I write ‘💜 1 Lovelock Drive 💜’ and romanceship articles using my experiences.

To my faithful, welcome back. I’ve missed you!

If you’re new to my blogletter, I’m pretty happy you’re here. Stay a while, get to know me, and come with me as I stuff up life, make amazing and dumb-ass career decisions, and share my *cough cough* wisdom.

Let’s Bring You Up To Speed

Lately, I’ve been working on two things in particular. They are:

Consistency
Pushing myself outside of my comfort zone with work which includes consistency - double whammy focus.

Consistency is hard. It sounds easy, that one little word for this writer. But the practice of consistency is easy when everything is going well. When you’re feeling well, healthy, focused, and motivated, consistency is like second nature.

But when you feel like the world is coming down around you, which it sort of has for me in the last few months, consistency goes out the window with good eating and a healthy mindset.

Being sick for weeks has put me behind; on consistency, my dreams and goals, and my ability to be the solopreneur I know I can be.

I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. The situation sucks and it’s my responsibility to make lemonade out of the rotting sour lemons.

Yet, as I struggle, I know I need to evaluate how I approach consistency, do lots of what works, and do very little of what doesn’t.

In the spirit of this, I’m sharing something that doesn’t work for me. Batch tasking…

Batch Tasking Can Go To Hell

I’m all about time-saving.

I love productivity hacks. I’m someone who gorges on anything to shorten the time it takes to finish a project. If there is a way of getting the work done in a fraction of the time I want to know about it.

And I definitely want to try it.

As we’re quickly becoming a hack generation, here is one I couldn’t possibly ignore. Batch tasking.

I loved the sound of it. Here is the theory:

Dedicate entire working days to doing one thing, and doing it well.
Eg. if you need to write ten articles, you write them all at once.
No deviation between tasks. You write an article, take a short break for your human needs, and then move on to the next.
It’s doing a lot of the same tasks, one after the other. Rinse, repeat.

You are going to find many people who share how wonderful this style of working is. How it’s a time and productivity game-changer.

For me, I don’t believe it. I tried it, and it doesn’t work. And upon reflection, it makes little sense when you look at how we learn.

Reason #1: Welcome To Extreme, Unrelenting Boredom

For some, all you have to say is do the same thing for the next seven hours, without changing tasks, and the boredom immediately sets in.

It’s like getting in the car for the start of a road trip. You know boredom is ahead of you.

I try to resist making any boredom assumptions, considering the theory; you’re batch-tasking something you love doing. But in my experience, it doesn’t matter the task, repetition is the enemy.

Here’s how it happened to me:

I settled into writing articles. Sticking to the rule, no deviation of tasks. An hour passes, and boredom hits.

When the boredom overtook me, I started hunting for distractions. I wanted anything to break up the monotony.

Determined not to change tasks, I started writing other articles, changing what I was writing about. Halfway through the process, I had six half-written articles. I hadn’t actually completed anything, and I was still bored out of my brains.

Batch tasking boredom

When boredom takes over, your favourite things can suddenly feel like they are your hated.

Keeping up with this time-saving hack could result in you loathing your passions.

It didn’t exactly make me want to write again after that. This was burnout in the worst possible way. What I wrote towards the end, the last one or two articles, you could sense how fatigued I was.

It meant I had to spend more time on editing later, which didn’t exactly save me time. Boredom and zero time-saving.

Reason #2: Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.

I understand the merit in batch tasking when you’re focusing on quality control.

If you’re packing orders for your eCommerce store, it makes sense to do them all at once. It’s easy to make sure, through repetition, that:

Each order has what it needs.
All items get packed the same way, with the same stickers, same packing tape, etc.
All orders are packed and ready to send within tight deadlines.

But when you’re batch-tasking inventive tasks, such as writing, designing, or anything creative, you can end up in a loop.

For me, I was writing the same things. I used the same language, made the same points, and used the same phrasing in all my pieces.

I hadn’t created wonderful continuity or a consistent voice between my work. I created the same piece over and again. At least that’s how it read to me.

I wasn’t surprised when reading the drafts later on. The topics felt as if they blurred into one when I was writing them, so there was no surprise it read like this on paper.

As much as we separate our feelings from our business when we aren’t feeling the process, it’s reflected in the end product.

Reason #3: It’s All About A Lack Of Timing

I love the idea of assigning days to do one task.

Monday for writing.
Tuesday for editing.
Wednesday for social media.
Etc etc etc.

All this day by day tasks seem wonderfully predictable, and you can predict your business by this routine.

But as we know, running a business or working towards a dream is like being on a rollercoaster. You go up and down with little to no predictability. And if you don’t allow for random interruptions, your goals suffer.

Batch tasking has the issue of zero flexibility for when urgent matters come up.

If you’ve committed to one task for the entire day, how do you fit in any emergency work? How do you exercise flexibility when the work demands you do?

Now I’m sure people who love batch tasking will tell you, “of course, drop your tasks for when something important comes across your desk. It’s silly not to.”

But that’s the issue we have. Isn’t batch tasking meant to keep us focused, to avoid the emergency distractions? So how can you have both?

To me, the two concepts can’t co-exist together.

Reason #4: Learning How To Wrong, Right

And if we want to use batch tasking as a way of quality control, or ensuring everything gets done together, it’s easy for this hope to backfire on us.

Because if we make a mistake at the start, we keep doing it across all our work. And then lose hours of time fixing our repeated mistakes.

What batching tasking can achieve is the cementing of bad habits. It can:

Prevent you from seeing your mistakes until it’s too late
Prevent you from adjusting processes as you find errors in them
Cause bigger headaches when you need to mass correct an error
Teach you zero about testing the marketing/processes and figuring out what works before setting it to autopilot

This style of working might help if you’ve cemented your craft. Writers, for example, who know how to put together a blog article in their sleep.

But if you’re new to it, or learning your trade, batch tasking can mean you practise the same error without having tested it first.

Reason #5: Delivery Discipline At An Alien Level

Batch-tasking requires immense amounts of discipline.

Doing the same thing, over and again, knowing there is little reprieve ahead, takes unhuman-like discipline. It requires you to:

Never be distracted - going against everything in our fibre as normal humans
Never change gears - going against what we know to do, which is pivot when we need to
Never give in to distraction - going against our human, normal demands that require us to give in to distraction
Never re-prioritise - going against the needs and demands of our business and life

So what happens if we don’t have alien-like, laser focus? What happens if you find yourself unable to maintain such discipline?

If you’re not careful, you can start to fool yourself into believing you don’t have any discipline.

You weren’t able to write/design/market/create a product for nine hours straight, what kind of entrepreneur are you? You mustn’t be that good if you couldn’t sustain one task for that long.

Yet, this isn’t the test of discipline. It’s not a reflection of how dedicated, motivated, or committed you are to your goals.

Not everyone can run a marathon every week.

My Hot Tip: Do What Works For You

As you can tell, batch tasking doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes I can make it work, but I encounter way too many roadblocks along the way. I’ve realised why it doesn’t work, specifically for my style of working.

It’s the complete opposite of how I learned in school.

We know kids can’t concentrate on one topic for more than a few hours at once. And as adults, we never really grow out of it.

But despite concentration, batch tasking goes completely against the grain. Breaking up tasks in a day, within a week, is what I learned to do. And probably what you learned too.

We’re trying to behave in a way our instincts don’t like. And we chastise ourselves when we don’t meet our unrealistic expectations.

If batch tasking works for you, keep doing it. If it takes you longer to learn than the task itself, rethink how time-saving it really is.

And if you give it a go, and it doesn’t work, don’t worry. There’s always more than one way to complete a task.

Update on Highway

The journey has begun and I’m beyond excited, ecstatic, thrilled, and jubilant about getting this story to the page. Thank you to my wonderful family here for supporting me so far by taking up the free subscription.

There is still time to come join me! Until July 31st, sign up and never pay a cent to be on the Highway with me!

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Pick My Brain

I hate to say it, but I write about my experiences in business because I’ve worked in a lot of different businesses, and owned several myself. Writing, website design, freelancing, administration, retail, hospitality.

If you have any questions about the solopreneur or business life, drop them here! Anything you would to know, I will do my best to answer. 😎

The Frolics