You Batch Your Errands. You Don’t Batch Your Work.

Last updated: 2026-09-17

You wouldn’t drive across town for groceries, come home, then drive back out for dry cleaning, then leave again to pick up the kids. That’s a waste of a Saturday. You group those stops into one trip because you can feel the cost of every extra commute.

At work, you probably do the wasteful version.

Every email is a separate trip. Every file is a separate trip. Open the app, re-orient, check context, do the thing, close it, start over. Same on-ramp and off-ramp you already know how to avoid on Saturday morning. You just don’t apply that logic to your to-do list.

Does this sound familiar?

The barrier is the next 2 hours

Most people already know grouping similar tasks is smart. They still can’t batch. What I keep seeing is a reactive mindset, not a knowledge gap.

Most professionals I observe are in a firefighting state. They react to the most recent interruption or the task due today. If you’re only looking at the next 2 hours, you cannot batch. There is nothing to group. Batching is an intermediate skill. You have to look ahead 24-48 hours, sometimes further, so patterns in your to-do list can even show up.

The prerequisite is shifting from a reactive planning state to a proactive one.

Before you try another grouping trick, do this. Spend 10 minutes looking at your calendar for the next 3 days. Don’t process anything. Just look for repeating work: emails, reviews, 1-on-1s, admin, anything that shows up more than once. Those repeats are your batching opportunities. If you can’t find any, you’re still stuck in the next 2 hours.

This is how you last

Context switching takes real cognitive energy. Every time you jump from writing to Slack to a spreadsheet, your brain has to re-orient. That on-ramp and off-ramp is draining.

When you batch similar tasks, you cut the repeated switching. The work gets faster. The part I care about more is the drop in mental fatigue. You can sustain high-quality output for longer without the burnout that comes from constant multitasking.

I treat batching as a sustainability strategy. Speed shows up. Energy is why I bother.

Three levels, and most people stop at the first

I think of batching as a three-tier skill.

Level 1 is grouping. All writing together. All errands together. You kill the context-switching cost.

Level 2 is sequence and geography. You don’t just group the errands. You plan the route so you’re not crisscrossing town.

Level 3 is peak positioning. You schedule the batched block during your highest energy or focus period. High-cognitive work in the morning. Low-energy admin in the afternoon.

Most people stop at Level 1. The compounding efficiency comes from Levels 2 and 3.

Audit yourself for a second. Are you only grouping? Or are you also sequencing the work and parking it where your energy actually is?

How Brooks gets into the groove

Brooks uses batching to enter a flow state with specific tools. When he creates presentations, he batches all the scripting first, then all the slide design, then all the recording.

Once he’s in slide-making mode, his proficiency and speed in the software jump. The tool starts to feel like an extension of his thoughts. Doing those same tasks in isolation, one presentation at a time, never lets him reach that groove. The batched approach is exponentially faster than going sequential.

If you do software-heavy work (video editing, data entry, coding, slide decks), try this once. Batch the setup phase separately from the execution phase. Get everything open, named, and ready. Then do the actual work in one block.

Brooks also uses batching to protect focus time. If you control your schedule, move meetings, 1-on-1s, and administrative calls to a single day or a specific block. That meeting day is intense but predictable. The rest of the week opens up for uninterrupted work.

You don’t have to move everything. Batching 1-on-1s onto one day already increases available focus time.

If you lead a team, experiment with Meeting Mondays or Admin Fridays. That’s a structural change, not a personal habit. It helps the whole team, not just you.

The “I can’t ignore email” version

If you work in a corporate environment where instant reply is expected, you can’t just disappear from your inbox. I get that.

Here’s the hybrid I recommend. Set your email client so it only notifies you for 3-5 critical contacts: your boss, key clients, whoever actually needs you now. Everyone else stays silent.

Then check the rest of your inbox in two or three dedicated blocks per day. 11 AM and 4 PM works. You stay responsive to the people who matter, and you protect focus time for the majority of the inbox.

In Gmail, mark those people as Important or add a filter that stars them. In Outlook, add a rule so only those senders ping you. In Apple Mail, add them as VIPs. Same idea in all three: noise off, critical people on, processing happens on a schedule.

The number that sold the automation piece

Brooks ran a time-tracking experiment on document scanning. He wanted to see if batching actually beat sequential processing.

Scanning a stack of documents in one batch, then naming and filing them, took 17 minutes. Doing it one-by-one (scan, name, file, repeat) took 19 minutes and 35 seconds.

Then he added an automation tool, Hazel, to the batched workflow. Total time dropped to 12 minutes.

Batching saves a little time through reduced context switching. The larger gain is that batching creates the structure for automation. That’s where the biggest efficiency shows up.

If you have a repetitive admin task (email, file organization, scanning), time-track it once sequential and once batched. Then ask what part of the batched version a tool could do for you.

Do this today

Open your calendar. Spend 10 minutes looking at the next 3 days. Find one repeating type of work and put it in a single block. That’s it.

Don’t overhaul your week. Don’t wait until you feel proactive. The 10-minute look-ahead is how you get out of firefighting long enough to batch in the first place.