This week on the blog, we are featuring a blog post from Erin Grossi of Lou & Pine. Erin helps woman-owned small businesses – just like you – simplify and streamline your processes and systems, so you can finally have the freedom you work so hard for.

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Want my step-by-step process for time batching that gives me an entire month of time back in my year? Keep reading!

Back when I was working for a Fortune 500 company, I quickly learned the importance of using routines when it came to tackling my responsibilities. Being fresh out of college at my first big girl job was overwhelming in itself, and the company I had just recently joined was in a state of transition as well, so everything felt ehhh..let’s just say intense.

The company had a monthly cadence for the role that I was in, where we were responsible for different tasks each week of the month. This. Was. Huge. In helping me to learn how to prioritize and manage my tasks. I knew exactly what to work on each week and everything else kind of went to the back burner because it would be handled eventually.

How To Set Up Your Time-Batching Routines

How does this come into practice today, 8 years later as a full-time work-from-home mom? Great question, I would love to tell you (Elyse Myers, anyone?).

I start by looking at a task that feels really overwhelming to me – just for example, we’ll use content creation.  this can be blog posts, social media content, email newsletters, youtube videos, or anything that requires a lot of time to create upfront.  the first step is breaking the larger task down into smaller ones. A blog post, for example, has 8 steps in my world:

1. Coming up with an idea about what I’ll be writing about
2. Researching the idea to come up with keywords, a title, and points to hit in the post
3. Creating a brief outline to make sure everything is included and flows in a way that makes sense
4. Actually writing the post
5. Editing the post and adding tags
6. Finding any pictures or external content that need to go into the post or be linked to
7. Posting or scheduling the blog
8. Creating and scheduling pins and social media posts that link back to the blog post

Then I can combine these steps into broader “themes”:

• Steps 1-3 become “content planning”
• 4-6 become “content creation”
• 7 and 8 become “content scheduling”

You can do this with any task that seems insurmountable. Anything can be broken down into smaller steps and it makes a world of difference in actually getting it done.

Applying To Monthly Business Routines

So, how does this apply to my monthly business routines? This part is called “time batching” or “batch working” and I learned this directly from my corporate days, but it really helps so I continue to do it. Each quarter is broken down into 13 weeks, which roughly translates to 4 weeks/month. So, continuing with our content creation example, the first week of the month is for content planning. I set aside the following 2 weeks for content creation as this takes the longest, and the fourth week is for content scheduling.  

This entire process repeats 3 times in the quarter, one for each month. I write each step in the process down in my calendar for a week at a time (you could even put this in your project management software of choice so it keeps track for you).

And here’s the beauty of this process: if your time-batching routine only takes 4 weeks, you now have an extra week each quarter to do whatever you want with! I like to put this one at the end of the quarter and use it to knock out anything on my to-do list that I’d been putting off, run reports, catch up on the latest Netflix binge, whatever. Let me know if this works for you and enjoy!

Think something like this could work for your business?  I’ve got a free quiz that will help you figure out what tasks you can time block. You can find it here!