Alright so 7 minutes to write something and then 7 minutes to draw something could be something that I can keep up daily.Â
Again, I’ve fallen into the temptation of doing something daily. Likely reading too much Ben Settle—not a bad thing, in my book.
The key to making sure this doesn’t backfire is to overload on the days where I have more time and to schedule things out. And to try to keep things short.
Usually if I write enough then some book quote comes to mind that’s related and I can pull it up. So there’s definitely something about batching here.
I’ll just go with a leap of faith search and see what Evernote and Readwise send back to me.
Oh my god, it worked.
Okay so here’s what I got.
From Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis:
It requires discipline to maintain boundaries and not let other kinds of work spill in, but batching is a masterful way to protect creative work from the day-to-day interruptions that feel urgent but actually aren’t and can easily wait until you’re ready to deal with them.
One nice thing that this points out is that it’s important to treat the non-fun tasks with the same mindset. Definitely batch those things because, left unbatched, they’re the things that will interrupt the fun-time batches.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport characterizes certain things as shallow activities:
I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
I’m guessing randomly checking Twitter every 27 seconds counts as a shallow activity.
Lastly, in Free to Focus, Michael Hyatt explains that he doesn’t just normal-batch…
I used to research and record one new episode a week. It was sometimes hard to drum up the mental energy to produce. What should have taken me an hour or two would sometimes kill an entire day. But I found my team and I could prep in advance and batch record a whole season’s worth of shows over a couple of days.
This is where I reveal that I’ve been mega batching and I actually wrote this post in 2015, but that’s not the case. I did schedule this out a couple days ahead though (writing this on Saturday and scheduling it for Monday).
Time’s up! Good luck batching today!