Bunching tasks saves lots and lots of time.
For example; Instead of calling 5 new prospects per day, take one day a week and call 25 prospects.
(More about cold calling)
Cut away the warm up time
What is so good about bunching tasks is that you don’t have to “start” and “stop” again all the time.
Like in the example above, calling 5 prospects can take anything from 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on the length of the calls but also on the time it takes you to mentally warm up to the task.
Often when we decide to start a task it takes us between 5 and 10 minutes to actually get started, once we are done we have to put everything away which takes another 5 minutes.
If you look at the above example again, that means we take 5 minutes a day for warm up and 5 minutes a day putting everything away. That is 50 minutes per week.
If you instead do all the calling in one day it will just take 10 minutes (5 minute warm up + 5 minute put away) gaining you about 40 minutes of work time per week.
Think what would happen if you did this with all your tasks.
40 minutes/week/task, all of a sudden you might have found 5 hours of extra work time per week.
Finding the “flow”
What is also great about bunching tasks is that once you have started a task and got into it, it is easy to continue and you get on a role.
That means that you can do the job faster and better.
In the cold calling example above that might mean that the time between calls gets shortened, the quality of the calls gets better and your results improve.
This could mean that instead of making 25 calls all you need to do is 20 for the same results and those 20 calls, because of your improved efficiency only take as long time as 15 calls used to take.
To make it short, you just gained another 20 minutes!
The problems
It isn’t all good though bunching tasks, some tasks are just not good to bunch.
Some things have to be done every day and some things cannot afford to wait, that’s just something we will have to live with.
Procrastination
One danger though in bunching tasks is that we might be inclined to procrastinate.
As the small tasks invariably become bigger, 25 calls is a lot more than 5 calls, it might become more daunting to start.
Just remember that once you are done, you are done and don’t have to think about it again for a whole week!
Conclusion
In my experience the positive by out ways the negative and bunching my tasks have saved me hours and hours of unnecessary work that I know spend with my family.
Action Exercise
1. List all the activities you do in a month.
2. Right down all the activities that you do continuously either daily, weekly or monthly.
3. Try to bunch the tasks, for example with email, decide to just check your email once or twice a day instead of every 5 minutes. You will probably be able to find many other examples when going over the list.
Photo Credit: psd
Related posts:
- Here is a Method That is Helping People All Over The World to Accomplish Their Goals
- How to Become Efficient by Using the 80/20 Rule
- How to Stop Procrastinating – The 15 Minute Method
- Becoming More Efficient Than Your Peers – 7 Time Management Techniques That Will Put You Ahead
- How to be more Efficient With Your Time
