Batching Tasks… The Productivity Hack for Dental Leaders

In a world where none of us has enough time, many are constantly looking for “productivity hacks” that allow us to do more in less time. 

For those of you who have heard me talk about time management and productivity, you know that 99% of these hacks are clickbait and don’t work. That being said, the core concept of batching is something I have tried to regularly instill in my own life and have tried to encourage my team to do the same. 

At its core, batching is the act of grouping tasks together so you can do them all at once instead of switching between tasks that take place at the same time or location.

Why is this so important, and how does this save time?

It has to do with the realization that switching from one task to another and then switching back from that task takes a lot of time and attention during our day. This concept is well researched and called “attention residue.”

Whenever we decide to tackle a task, it takes time to get into the flow of doing said task. Once we get into the flow, we are able to manage the task efficiently and effectively. 

This is about going for a 3-mile run. This is the task you are setting out to accomplish. How efficient would you be with your 3-mile run if you were getting disturbed multiple times throughout the 3-mile run with:

• “Hey, you got a minute?”
• Email and text notifications
• “Can you review this report I just finished?”

YOU WOULDN’T EVER ALLOW THIS if you were on a run. It would be the worst possible use of your time, and your run would suffer greatly.

Yet what often can happen when we are trying to “multitask” (do multiple procedures at one time), what we are actually doing is task switching, allowing these constant interruptions to happen and get us out of our flow. The research is very clear. Multitasking is a fallacy, and what is occurring when people think they are multitasking is, in fact, task switching. Every time we switch tasks, however, we have to again spend that time getting into a flow of doing said tasks. There is lingering attention residue as we switch from one task to another and back to the original task we were doing in the first place. All of this switching and residue takes infinitely more time than it would have to simply batch and do the tasks in isolation.

Let’s talk about a few examples . . .

Emails, Texts, and Social Media Messages

Let’s say you are in your office, going through and answering emails. You finally get into a flow, and you are killing your inbox…then a coworker comes to you to ask you a question regarding a patient. You stop what you are doing and address the question, and then once that’s done, you go back to addressing your inbox. The time it takes you to leave your flow of managing your inbox and talk to your co-worker, and then the time it takes you to get back into the flow of starting to manage your emails, is a real time expense. You may not realize it in the moment, but I assure you that you are losing tons of time going back and forth on these tasks. 

Don’t believe me? Here is my challenge to you: Check your email once a day for a week. Dedicate a time when you will be undisturbed. I promise you that no matter how many messages you have to get through, you will be able to do so in ⅓ to ½ the time that it normally takes. YOU WASTE SO MUCH TIME ENDLESSLY CHECKING EMAIL THROUGHOUT THE DAY!

Cooking

How long does it take you to think about and prepare your breakfasts and lunches? I know from experience that the decision fatigue that comes with this is over the top and way beyond the time it takes to think through what you want. Kitchen prep, food prep, cooking, plating, and clean up take way longer than you ever intended.

What if you batched it? Dedicate a period of time every week to food prep. Do it once, and you will realize you save hours of time on a weekly basis and no longer have to deal with decision fatigue when answering the question, “What am I going to eat today?”

I personally was forced to adopt food prep when I was preparing for a bodybuilding show. It was amazing to me how much time I saved via weekly food prep and how much willpower I was able to conserve via this practice.

Other great examples where you and your team can batch to create oodles of time:

Accounts Receivable and Collection Calls

Get in a room, don’t tell anyone where you are, and make ALL your calls in less than an hour. The alternative? Having people constantly come into your office and blow you up. Next thing you know, it’s time to go home, and you’ve only gotten through ⅓ of your calls.

Vitamin/Supplement Prep

Some people have all their bottles on the counter. Some people even fill a weekly supplement container, which is a good way to batch tasks. Have you ever considered a monthly container? It takes 10 minutes, once a month, and saves tons of time. I’m patiently waiting for someone to develop a yearly container. 🙂

Food Prep for the week

Take 60 minutes on a Sunday to prep all your breakfasts and lunches for the week. One session to prep and clean up is better than multiple times throughout the week . . . not to mention all the times you find yourself in a crisis where you are HANGRY and you end up at McDonald’s.

Content Creation

Dedicate a morning, lock yourself in a room where no one knows where you are, and brainstorm content: blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, system development, process refinement. Brainstorming once a month, for two hours, will result in so much more content than trying to “fit it in” between multiple other tasks throughout the week.

The possibilities are endless. There are so many tasks that you can batch. Brainstorm your current task load and see which of them can be batched.

Reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

With much love,

Jason