Batching household tasks will revolutionize your productivity. I’m not kidding! When you multitask, you’re just putting out fires and working at a surface level on everything. But with batching, you can focus on the most important thing in front of you at that time.
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This post is Day #22 of our 25-Day Productivity Challenge! You can find the entire round-up HERE. Make sure you pin this post so you can find it later and don’t forget to take action!
If you were creating a product for a craft show, what would be the most efficient way to produce 100 of them? You would likely want to do one step at a time – like a manufacturing line would.
In a similar way, batching like tasks together, then focusing on each one at a time instead of multitasking, is the best way to be productive – even as a stay at home mom!
Batching Household Tasks
So, instead of multitasking, where you’re flitting from one task to another without really finishing it or going deep, you’re going to batch your household tasks.
For example, schedule in related household tasks for certain days.
What if Monday was your food prep day? This could include:
- Placing your order on Sunday evening for Monday pickup
- Pick up your online grocery order
- Bring it home and put away pantry items
- Prep the meat and veggies for your weekly meals
By batching your food prep on Monday, you’ve freed up multiple hours the rest of the week, because you already chopped the veggies, browned the beef, and done whatever else was necessary to cook meals for the week.
Here’s another example. What if the scheduling/paperwork/bills could be batched to one day? Then you wouldn’t spend a chunk of time each day just trying to keep up.
Maybe Friday is your paperwork day. All week, the paper tasks get put in the bill folder, and on Friday afternoon, you schedule in a few hours to completely focus on:
- scheduling appointments
- paying bills
- filing medical information
- filling out forms for the kids
- etc!
This is what deep work is all about. Deep work wins over multitasking every time.
Batching Homeschool Tasks
In the same way, you can batch your homeschool tasks. It might not seem as clear cut, but here are some examples.
First, decide on the best time of day to homeschool. Maybe mornings are independent work time (math, language arts, reading), and afternoons are for nature walks, science experiments, read aloud and art.
Maybe you batch school work from Monday through Wednesday, Thursday is time blocked as errand, library, and park day, and Friday is reserved for homeschool co-op. This is batching!
One other batching-type method you could use is looping. This is where you time block a certain time of day for your loop subjects (maybe it’s first thing in the morning, or maybe it’s right after lunch), and every day you do school, you complete the very next subject in the loop.
So, if your loop subjects are art, nature study, and poetry, then on Monday you complete art, on Tuesday you complete nature study, and if you’re gone on Wednesday, you would just pick up with poetry on Thursday during your loop time. It’s a great way to make sure nothing gets neglected with those subjects that don’t need covered every single day.
Now it’s your turn! Figure out which tasks in your home or homeschool could be batched for increased productivity.
Check out the complete 25 Day Productivity Challenge!
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