Batching is the main reason I get anything done…and the principle that underlies AwayFind (the application I’ve been building for the past six months).  Darren Rowse wrote an excellent article on that topic today and I highly recommend checking it out.

Darren is one of the most respected and widely-read bloggers, literally writing the book on how to blog for money.  He’s got a lot of responsibilities and batching has been his solution.  He writes of his old life:

A typical day would see me checking email 30 times a day, moderating comments as they hit my inbox, being interrupted by IM throughout the day, reading RSS when I remembered to do it between using social media sites and writing extra blog posts. The result was that my inbox had over 10,000 unread emails, I never cleared my RSS Reader and that I would get to the end of most days feeling like a nervous wreck.

And then just yesterday he kept track of the work of he accomplished. He…

• Researched & Wrote 5 blog posts (2500 words) – Planned a future series – Edited 3 guest posts
• Moderated 150 comments (Lara did the rest)
• Read 300 emails – replied to and wrote 50 emails
• Twittered 30+ times (including private messages) – Plurked 50+ times
• Participated in a b5 training chat (1 hour)
• Read (scanned) my RSS reader (600+ feeds)
• Used StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Digg and other social media sites
• Took 4 Skype calls – IM’d around 8 others
• Oversaw the upgrade of DPS forums
• Did an email interview to promote the book – Arranged to do a radio interview later in the week

Read how he made this jump in productivity by utilizing batching…

Flickr photo credit: Uncle Ariel

Filed under: Productivity

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