Batch Your Life: Save Time, Money, and Stress

Do you batch your work? Unless you enjoy a surfeit of free time, you should.  I love batching.  It relieves financial and time pressure from your life.

Here are some simple examples.

• Run multiple errands on the same trip driving your car.  Be sure to think through the most efficient route.

• When a non-perishable product is on sale, buy way more than you need and just store it.  I just bought half a year's worth of tennis balls for half their normal price.  By purchasing a larger amount, I also saved myself the time, hassle, and expense of having to drive to the store a month from now to buy more.

• Batch processing your email.  Don't hop in and out all day long clearing out a handful of emails.  Instead, plow through them as a group, deleting everything you can and responding to the others as needed.  (I recognized that some work environments fully expect you to be always on your email.  If that is the case, you can still batch--just a lot more frequently.)

• You can make work-related phone calls in a batch.  Stack meetings in a certain part of town in a batch, etc., etc., etc.

• You can even batch your travel.  I was going to visit my friend in London this spring, but decided to wait till this fall and combine the visit with a trip to Croatia.  By going to Europe for longer in one trip, I will save time and money (over $1,000)--and only have to deal with jet lag twice rather than four times.

Get Creative: Use Batching To Save Money and Reduce Time Pressures

There are dozens of other areas of life where you can batch process.  The above are just a few examples.  I included the last item about travel to encourage you to think more ambitiously about what, when, and where to batch.

You can reduce a ton of economic and time pressure from your life if you simply get more efficient and batch events and purchases in your life.  It's a matter of running your life more like a business.

So what can you come up with to batch?