How Batching Can Help You Be More Productive

Over the recent years, it seems like there’s social pressure to always be productive. At first thought, you would think that multitasking would be the way to getting more done in a shorter amount of time; unfortunately it’s quite the opposite. If we know multitasking is a way to decrease our productivity, looking at the exact opposite of multitasking may be the way to unlocking your productivity potential! Today we’re looking at batching when it comes to songwriting.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Why Is Multitasking Less Productive?

Our brains can really only handle one thing at a time. The less you do, the more brain space you can put towards the task at hand.

One of the most common ways of multitasking that has crept up on us is the use of phones while we work.

If we’re carrying on a whole conversation with somebody while trying to do something with a lot of thinking power, most of that thinking power is going towards the conversation and it’s limiting how deep you can go into flow. Constantly switching between tasks doesn’t actually make you 2x more productive, it slows down each task each with half the effort and depth.

What you’ll want to do to be extremely productive, is get into a flow state.

What Is Flow?

The flow state is sort of a “mental place” you can get into that keeps you hyper focused, expands your creativity, and gets you very productive.

It’s the state where you’re only thinking about one subject, and are very resistant to distractions. Nothing can stop you from what you need to get done if you don’t let it.

This sounds like magic voodoo, but I promise you it’s not; you’ve most likely been in it one time or another without realizing it or being able to call it what it is. It’s an art trying to get into it, and you may need to rid yourself of distractions before being able to enter this state.

This flow state really only happens if you’re working on one subject, so it’s best if you have a lot of work on one thing, instead of a lot of work spread out across different subjects/areas. Then comes the idea of batching.

What Is Batching?

Batching is taking a lot of the same work, and working on it for a relatively long set period of time. The goal is being very productive because you’re only focused on one thing: doing the same thing over and over to stay in the same mindset to make working on your work as easy as possible.

So take writing these blog posts for example; there’s a lot of them, and starting is the hardest part. If I were to write one blog post per week, it’d be very unproductive because starting the thing takes the longest. If however I work on as much as I can, I can bypass the starting time because I’m already in the right mindset for writing!

If you find yourself taking a long time to write songs, maybe you should give this a shot! Try writing for as long as possible, trying to write as much as you can.

This serves a lot of purposes, one including being able to write many songs so that you can pick your best ones and take them further. So, you could write a bunch of bare-boned songs with just vocals and something like a guitar, pick out the best ones, and morph them into full songs later.

This doesn’t have to pertain to just songwriting either though; if you need to find gigs, just make a list of possible places to contact and contact all of them in the same sitting. This will make it go much faster than contacting them randomly, because you can make a sort of framework of what you want to say.

Not only does it save you time, but it breeds consistency as well. This makes it good for planning social media content; all of your posts and content can be related, and your audience can sort of expect a certain layout or style from you that couldn't quite happen otherwise.

This works well for album writing, if you want to have a unified theme across the album. All of the songs can be related to a certain idea, and that makes for a much better listening experience in my opinion!

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Batching is a key part of what makes me as productive as I am. Automating and delegating are key points in being productive as well, however batching is most available a majority of the time; automating and delegating isn’t always an option.

I think batching can really help you out in terms of getting things done and done well, so let me know how it goes for you!

-Michael