Now, I can’t very well give the boss signatures one at a time in the middle of my assembly line. Plus, the office gets busy and doesn’t allow me to work in that way. So, I fill out forms and make copies whenever I can get access to the machine and/or book. I give a stack to the boss to be signed. I file the copies and give priority to the ones to be mailed. I know that the filing goes much faster when I’m filing several things at once instead of going to the file drawers one paper at a time.

Some items can be broken up to make them easier. Others have to be batched to make the work more efficient. Like others have said, it’s about finding a middle ground.

Dean, I like the networking analogy, I think it sums up the process very well. When I was decorating a room recently I only did one wall a day. This meant I had to take out my paint tools and clean/put them away four times. Never really thought how much that increased the latency of the job. However, I might not even have done the decorating if I’d done all the walls in one go.

Luciano, thanks for pointing out time boxing. I’ll have to check it out some more. Going to have a read of your post on the topic to get me started.

Adam, it certainly is about personal balance. I break my work down into small chunks and spread it all out throughout the week so that I’m never overloaded. It works for me but I can imagine many people struggling to find any momentum and focus from such an approach.

However, when I see that many little – and often irritating – tasks have piled up on my to-do list, I make a few little rush cards with a handful of items on them (stuff I expect to take about thirty minutes or so). Then, I’ll schedule as many blocks of these as I have rush cards in the same way I schedule any other block of work. During each rush, I shut off all interruptions and just plow through the items on the cards. I do tick off each item as I go for the psychological boost though when I’m done I rip up the card.

I don’t ever batch just to batch, only when I start to get a bunch of tasks that can benefit from it.

I actually wrote two posts on this a few weeks back, one looking at each side, the pro-batching is at and the pro-incremental.

The key is to do what motivates you. For me, knowing that I had all my bills paid or all my shirts ironed was motivational. For others, looking at that large block of work can be demotivating. It’s all about finding your own personal balance.

You’ve pointed out an obvious point where these benefits start to fail, when you’ve created a batch so large that you start having the opposite effect – boredom. I think the key is figuring out what batch size works for you so you can balance the reduced start-up times with the fatigue from boredom.

Writing is a task that I can be highly productive in for around two or so hours. After that, my energy drops and further batching slows me down. I think every task has this trade-off point, you just need to find it.