You don’t wash your clothes every time you change your outfit, and you don’t run the dishwasher every time a dish gets dirtied. Instead of repeatedly doing similar tasks in a short period, you batch them.
What seems so intuitive for chores is often stunningly unintuitive when it comes to distracting habits. Batching — or scheduling — distracting or unhealthy habits (essentially “putting binges in boxes”) can help you avoid indulging in them sporadically throughout the day.
Below are examples of tasks you can batch. Instead of doing them spontaneously, try scheduling a dedicated block of time — recurring daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly — to complete them:
- Checking email or chats.
- Digesting a social feed.
- Reading the news.
- Shopping.
- Checking your portfolio.
- Watching television.
- Eating recklessly.
- Almost anything you do on a smartphone or the internet.
“The first step is to recognize what you do in your everyday life that is, in fact, Insecurity Work. Whether it is checking the same search terms again and again or constantly watching your e-mail in-box as if it were a boiling pot of water, pay attention to where your focus wanders when you’re distracted from the project at hand.”
~Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen (Book)
