Yesterday, I wrote about the concepts of task batching (combining similar activities) and time blocking (putting time on your calendar for individual work). Both of these practices can be beneficial for anyone at work and at home.
Thinking deeper about this, I started to consider the difference at work between independent workers and people leaders. When leading a team, the work starts to look different and include tasks that you didn’t have as an individual contributor.
My Perspective – Intentional Planning
When I consider the leadership roles I’ve held, there are a few things that have been common across all the different experiences. These commonalities include managing multiple projects, coaching team members, creating monthly reports (financial, project, etc), and reviewing work from the team.
There are additional tasks that vary from role to role, but these four can help demonstrate ideas for task batching and time blocking for leaders.
Daily Purpose Batching – If you have multiple projects of responsibility, you could strive to put all the content for projects on different days of the week. Monday Project A. Tuesday Project B. On these days, you would have meetings, 1on1 conversations with your team members, quiet time to review emails and presentations, and maybe even a call with the client or a customer focused on that project.
Type of Work Batching – An alternative to daily purpose batching would be to focus days of the week on types of work. One day focused on quiet time to review presentations and respond to email. Another day could be focused on team member growth and 1on1 meetings. A third day could be focused on meetings with the internal team and or clients/customers.
Monthly Blocking – As a leader, you typically know when status or budget items are due every month. You proactively plan time blocks into your calendar to complete the task. This will prevent the last-minute panic and stress to complete “in between” the other work on the day that it’s due.
Weekly Blocking – Similar to monthly blocking, you can consider the types of work you have each week and set aside focused time to handle. An example would be two-hour block on Friday to review work from the team ensuring they have the feedback they need before the start of the week ahead. Another great add to the week might be an hour mid-day on Wednesday for work time. This could ensure you have a time block for an unexpected project that comes up early in the week.
Your Turn
Could one of these strategies work for you?
How might you try one of them for a week or two to determine if there is a positive difference?
Have you tried other methods of task batching and time blocking as a leader?