I love to travel and spend time outdoors. But lately there’s been too much work and not enough play in my life. Talk about spinning my own self created wheel!
What is having me all up in sorts? Lack of travel. Last year around this time I had already visited 6 National Parks, driven the entire coast of Oregon/Washington and been to countless other places. This year, I’ve only done one camping trip to Moab and a trip to Sweden and Scotland. I haven’t been anywhere outside my local area for a month!
Now some of you will blur out a not so nice word because from your point of view that’s a lot of travel but to me I’m way behind on my travel list for the year. Not to mention hiking. Normally by now I’m hiking 4-6 hour hikes on the weekends but I’ve been working so much I haven’t had time to go much longer than two hours.
What is different in my life this time around? Blogging. I didn’t start blogging on a regular basis until July of last year and I didn’t get serious about it until this year. All the “I should write about this and that” were mostly just thoughts. Now most of my spare time goes to writing blog posts, a book and running a side business which has cut into my playtime.
So what is a girl to do? When you start working on a side gig, project or business so that you can create your own path it’s hard to keep that work-life balance. It’s easy to spend more time on work than not especially if you are like me and want to build Rome in one day.
I’m already quite productive but there are always things I can do better so I’m going to experiment with various productivity techniques to see which ones work and then share the results with you.
First up is a productivity technique called batching and single tasking
Batching is commonly used by uber productive people. Instead of multitasking jumping from project to project, constantly checking emails, working on this and that they block out time when they only do one thing such as writing blog posts or checking emails. For a set amount of time all they do is to work on that one task or project. They practice single tasking.
Single tasking is something I struggle with. I do better when I stick to a weekly schedule but I easily get bored so I jump from one thing to the next. Which is why I have about fifty started blog posts in my writing folder and only a handful finished.
If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test that’s a classic ENFP trait. We are great at starting things but not very good at finishing. We rather hand it over to someone else to finish so we can start something new!
However, jumping from project to project is quite inefficient and with all the projects I have going (and I’m sure you do too) I need to find a better way so that I can have the kind of work-life balance I prefer. I will know in a few weeks if batching and single tasking works or not.
Do you practice batching and single tasking? If not, what productivity techniques have worked well for you?
