Everybody seems to be talking about batching these days, it's obviously the current buzzword or maybe I'm just super-aware of it as this is my new way of working (before I knew what it was called).
Basically it's doing lots of the same sort of work all at once, ie, in a batch.
What sort of work can be batched?
I block out every Monday in my calendar and I work on a set task, so for example, this is a typical Monday (I alternate these)
Blog Posts & Pinterest
I write a load of blog posts (such as this), I tend to do three or four at once and I do all the graphics and images for them or little training videos and I schedule them to drop two or three times a week (sometimes more). I may spend three or four hours creating blog posts and can normally get five or six done in that time.
I then spend the next few hours creating pins for Pinterest off the back of it, using an app called Tailwind. This allows me to create 8-10 pins for each blog post very quickly (I'll do a separate post on Tailwind in the next week or two) and I schedule those pins again using Tailwind. Those 8-10 pins are scheduled at one a week for the next 8 weeks and I do that for each of the blog posts I've created, so in an afternoon I can sometimes create and schedule as many as 60 pins to run over 10 weeks.
Email Newsletters
Again on one of my Monday sessions I may spend half a day creating newsletters to go out, in half a day again I can normally get 5 or 6 scheduled and I tend to use the information I've already used within the blog posts for at least part of the emails.
The other half of the day I spend on social media going through liking and commenting on posts and joining group discussions on Facebook etc. Or I may do some work on updating my website.
I create 18 IG posts all in one go. I use a "puzzle template" (see this post I did on creating content fast) and then split it down using Pinetools. I then schedule all the posts using the Later app, batch writing the captions and the blurb. Instagram can take me all day but then I have 6 weeks worth of posts done in one fell swoop (posting three times a week). Again a lot of this can then be repurposed for Facebook and even LinkedIn and of course I will Pin my Instagram posts as well adding one a week to the schedule.
If I was super-efficient I'd have everything co-ordinating together but I'm not that organised as a person and so often I can re-use stuff I've created for one platform on another but it's rarely scheduled all at the same time.
It's just a really efficient way of working, whilst you are in the "zone" you just get on and do it all at once. I now also batch my course creation, because once I've got my microphone set up I may as well record several modules at once and do the slides all together too whilst I'm in the zone and able to move seamlessly from one topic to the next.
Batching has transformed the way I work and I didn't even realise it was a thing!
