MVP: Batching to Save Time as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Are endless emails, scattered reports, and back-to-back meetings draining your energy and time?

If you're a humanitarian or development leader feeling overwhelmed by constant task-switching, this episode will show you a powerful yet underused strategy—batching—to help you take back control of your time and reduce stress.

In this episode you'll discover:

• What makes "batching" an efficient and easy way to get things done
• Learn the most common daily and weekly tasks in aid work that are perfect for batching (spoiler: it's not just emails).
• Get a step-by-step process to implement batching with your team so everyone becomes more efficient—without burning out.

Tune in now to learn how one small shift in how you organize tasks can help you reclaim hours each week and lead with more clarity and focus.

What Is Your Leadership Style?  Free Quiz:

Want to know how to lead better?  It starts by understanding your leadership style.   To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian development leaders. I hope you're having a wonderful week. So today I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm sharing an MVP podcast episode for my former podcast, the Aid for Aid Workers Leadership Podcast. I don't know if you know it, but I have over 300 episodes there, and this was one of the most popular ones, probably because it has to do with time management and how to become more efficient through batching. So I thought you'd want to maybe take a listen in case you have not, and if you have, it would be a good time to review it anyways. Alright, enjoy.

Welcome to the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast. The podcast helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the [00:01:00] while avoiding stress. Burnout and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey peace. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, all you aid workers out there. Hope you're having a great week. I'm actually in my last week of about six weeks that I've been able to come to the United States to visit my friends and family, which has been wonderful and is really a part of my larger. Big picture, goal and mission to spend more time with the people that I really care about and really build and focus on those relationships.

And one of the things that has allowed me to do that is by being really good with how I use my time. And I know that this is such a. A topic that we [00:02:00] all struggle with time management. And I was thinking about how, I've done a few things over the past months that have really saved me a lot of time, and I wanted to share one in particular with you around what's called batching.

And maybe you've heard of batching before, but if you haven't, batching is basically grouping like-minded tasks together so that you do them all in a few, you know, over a few, whether it's hours or maybe even days. But the idea is that because you're doing these like-minded tasks at once, it's actually more productive than spreading them out or doing them individually.

And I'll talk a little bit more about how that is. But the way that I've been using a lot of batching lately is actually with the [00:03:00] podcast and whom you might know from this episode. I think this is number 93, and I'm approaching 100. And I've definitely learned a lot about how to use time wisely when recording and doing new podcast episodes, because I'll tell you, when I started three years ago, it could take me eight hours to do one.

Episode and looking back on that, it was kind of ridiculous, but there was a big learning curve too with all the software and everything else. At any rate, I know you guys aren't doing podcasting, or maybe you are, but in terms of our. Aid work. What's probably more helpful for you is just to know how I was able to reduce the eight hours to four hours and, and actually when I was doing eight hours, it was only for one episode.

And now in four hours I can do about three episodes. And [00:04:00] so I wanna share how I've been able to do that. And basically it's through batching so. Batching. I know, like I said, a lot of you are not podcasting, but you can still do a lot of batching and I was thinking about how I had just kind of naturally done this to some extent when I was.

An aid worker or a country director, but also how other ways that I could have done it better or used it better to my advantage to really cut down on the number of hours that certain tasks would take me. So I'm telling you, patching can really increase your level of productivity. You can get a lot more done in a shorter amount of ti time, and I.

I think part of the reason for this is because when you're working on like-minded tasks like for example, report writing, [00:05:00] let's say maybe at a certain time of year you have two or three different reports to two or three different donors. Sometimes projects are funded by two or three different donors, and you might have similar deadlines.

And even if you don't, maybe you want to batch that report writing so that when you're, you're. Brain is in a certain mode of report writing. It's very different from other kinds of activities that you could be doing like. Thinking about you know, strategy or planning for a meeting, those kinds of things.

So the idea is that because you're working on similar things, which in this case would be writing a report that you're way more productive and you can get a lot more done, and that means that you can save time. So, like more of my podcast, what I found is. Sometimes, especially for the episodes where it's just me, I can record maybe three episodes or [00:06:00] four episodes in a four or five hour time period.

Edit everything. Whereas in the past it would take me a lot longer. And I do think part of the reason is because, you know, while I'm editing one, I can just edit another and it it for some reason, it just takes a lot less time. And another thing is if you have a team, you can do some of these tasks together as a team so you can accomplish things that might have been spread previously over several weeks, just in a day or so.

So I wanna show you how you can do this. So if you want to start batching tasks in your work week or your work calendar, I. The first thing I'd recommend doing is brainstorming some of those repetitive tasks that would qualify to be able to, to batch. And I'll give you some examples in a little bit, but you know, just think about the things that you do.

[00:07:00] On a repetitive basis, maybe it's like once or twice a month, or could be even more than that that can kind of be grouped as a similar kind of task. So that would be the first step. So, for example checking your email is a good example of a task that can be batched and I'll explain how in a minute.

The second thing y'all wanna do, once you have your list of repetitive tasks for batching is to block time in your calendar. And of course, if you're doing this with a team make sure that they also block time in their calendar and make an appointment to focus on. Batching that particular task for that particular time.

Then you're just going to repeat as necessary. So if you decide that you're gonna start batching your email, for example, on a daily basis, then you would just, every day you would just [00:08:00] repeat that. Or if you're gonna start batching report writing, then yeah, you would just repeat that every quarter, whatever it is that you decide to do.

And another suggestion I have around this is to really kind of make it fun if you can. I totally think it's possible. So you could incorporate, you know, like if it's something that's requires a certain level of thinking, I don't know what kind of. What you do to get in your zone per se. But you could incorporate music, you know, listen to music, maybe go outside of the office if you can get permission to work from a coffee shop or something if you're on your own, if you're not, maybe even with your team, go to like a local cafe or something to get outside of your normal environment.

Or at least go to a place where you won't be distracted, because that is gonna be one thing with these batch tasks, and that is you're gonna wanna be [00:09:00] somewhere where. You are not gonna be disrupted because you're gonna be working on this for a good few hours at least. And so every time you're disrupted, I think I've referred to this statistic in the past.

It's about like 20 or 30 minutes to get back on track, track of what you're doing. So it really. It is worth the time to try to find a quiet place or a place where you can really focus on, you know, the one task or batching that you're doing. Alright, so now for some examples. So I've already mentioned a few of these, but I'm gonna elaborate on each of them.

The first one is email. So checking email is something that we all do. Even now I check email, but I know that some people have the habit of checking it. Every 10 minutes and then others maybe every hour, whatever it is. Maybe you're better at this than some [00:10:00] than, you know. I used to be, sometimes I would catch myself every 20 minutes checking my email and it's so disruptive.

So one thing you can do is batch how. You check your email and you shouldn't be using your email as a to-do list anyways, which means that you shouldn't be just going to your email and based on what your email, you know, what whoever's requesting what, then that's what you focus on for the day. You, you should have a bigger picture perspective than that of your, you know, your priorities, but this will help with that too.

So if you, maybe instead of checking your email every 30 minutes, maybe you decide three times in the day where you're gonna set aside a 30 minutes to, to check your email and respond to emails. And you know, that's the kind of thing that. It'll be a lot more productive than checking your email every 10 minutes or every [00:11:00] 20 minutes or so.

Pre-planning, when you're checking your email in blocks and like two or three blocks in one day will really increase your productivity. You might be skeptical of this, but please try it and then see before you criticize it. All right. The second thing that might. You might be able to block or batch is maybe reviewing.

Budget comparison reports and those you know, we used to have to review those once a month anyways because, you know, whatever you get the, the amount of spending and you get a, a budget comparison report, which compares the budget with the amount spent and the previous month. And you can compare and track as you go along.

So maybe if you have several projects, for example, you'd wanna. Batch checking all of the BCRs for just a, a certain day of the month [00:12:00] instead of spreading it out over several days. Maybe you want to, check it all together. Maybe you, even if you have local partners want to bring them in and do, you know, everyone check their BCRs all in the same time in one day.

And not only will that be more productive in terms of getting everything done within a smaller timeframe, but also if there's a. Issue. You can all be together in the same place and you can maybe resolve it quicker than you would if, if, you know, you're checking your BCR one week and then the local partners checking it the next week.

Blocking out that time ahead of time and deciding as a team when you are gonna do this would be probably beneficial. I had already mentioned report writing as well. So if you have several reports due around the same time, or even if you don't, if you have a quarterly report for one donor, but then the next month you have note, another donor report.

But it's the same project. [00:13:00] Maybe you wanna block or batch your report writing so you do it all around the same time. Probably not a lot is gonna change in a month. If it's a quarterly report, or maybe it will, I don't know. But you can at least start you know, doing. As much as you can of the report writing at one time, and then you can just update it for the, the reports that maybe have to be delivered a little bit later.

But I think this would be an interesting way of batching. And something that we know is gonna happen, you know that you're gonna have a report around this time, so why not try to batch reports like across projects around the same time or across donors. Performance planning is another area where you can do this and I was fortunate to.

Have walked into a situation where and Timor, the culture of the organization there was to batch performance planning. In [00:14:00] other words, everyone sat down within, you know, the whole group. Team of us and team were the whole country program sat down within two days. We did our performance planning so wrote all the goals for the year and we also aligned them.

So we made sure they were in line with the regional objectives and the country program objectives and strategy. And so I really saw a lot of advantages in doing that and. That was definitely a great example of batching and how productive it can be. 'cause I've seen other examples since then of organizations that they have.

Sometimes the performance planning isn't even done. You know, maybe one department has theirs done, but another one doesn't have it done until like two or three months later. And then that means they're probably not aligned and they're probably you know. Things will change in a few months and they probably don't, aren't even [00:15:00] aware of each other's objectives.

So doing it all at once as a team definitely has a lot of advantages. So that's a great task to batch as performance planning. Also toward the end of my time in teamwork and I'm sure in many other organizations we started doing a lot more regular meetings around lessons learned and projects.

And I think that's another thing that could be batched, whether it's for one project or maybe across a sector, maybe within your country program. You batch the lessons learned for agriculture to do those all in one time, in one, you know, one day or maybe you batch you know, for your team doing the lessons learned.

I. For a particular project that you're working on or maybe, you know, across multiple projects. So I think this is another thing that can [00:16:00] be batched and done on a quarterly basis or whatever it is that you, you would normally have to do it. But instead of spreading it out over several days, across different projects, trying to.

Consolidate it. Of course, you know, probably a lot of you already do this, but I think a natural another natural area to batch would be community visits and. So that means, you know, when you go on a field visit to not only go and, and just look at one sector, what it's doing. If you're a project manager and you go out to see your savings groups, maybe at the same time, I.

You can organize and batch another visit to visit an agriculture piece of that same project or you know, whatever it is to go and visit, even if it's not another sector. Maybe just even taking advantage and going to visit the local government or [00:17:00] community leaders or however you can really take.

The most advantage of the time and something that you might already have to do at another time. You can do it all during one visit. So that's another example of batching. And then finally another one, and this is definitely not the end of the list of possible things to batch. I'm sure that you all could come up with a lot of, to other ideas in addition to these things.

But interviewing also is one that I thought of that especially for a new project, but if you're going through interviewing and you know you're gonna be hiring people two or three people over a certain timeframe, maybe trying to. Batch the interviews or even for just one position, like trying to have interview days where you bring in candidates for in, in one or two days rather than spreading it out across a few weeks.

So batching interviewing is another [00:18:00] example of something that would help you save time. Alright, so I gave you the ways you can batch how to batch and some examples of what to batch. But I want to give you a little warning here, and that is the purpose of batching is to save time. But if you feel like you're burning out, in other words, you're scheduling.

Too many interviews or too much report writing or whatever it is in one day, then that defeats the whole purpose. So just be aware of, you know, don't overdo it. Do enough where you feel like it's productive and you feel like you can still get quality work done. Put, don't overdo it. Alright, so I challenge you.

This coming week to think of at least one thing that you can batch, for example, email or, you know, I gave several examples [00:19:00] previously and I want you to try batching, like blocking time to. Batch the, those tasks that would normally be done over several days or weeks into one timeframe. And then tell me how it goes.

Let me know by emailing me. You can do so at Torrey, TORR Eey at e for aid workers.com and I really would be curious to know how you think about or what you think about batching after you try it out and if you have other ideas on different tasks that you do that you could possibly batch. Okay. I hope you have a, a wonderful week, and I will talk to you next week.

Until then, keep broadening your impact. Bye.

Are you the type of leader that tells [00:20:00] others what to do or to let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is a first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz. What is your leadership style? You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz. Fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will Thank you for it.