Life is hectic. I’ll say it before, and I’ll say it again. To streamline things, many people have written productivity tips to help us get more done at work, but that only helps part of our work-life balance.

How can we take these tips and apply them at home? Well, today I’ll look at batch processing and give you a few ideas how.

How does this work?

A lot of time and effort is wrapped up in the set up and take down for a certain task. For easier repetitive tasks, this can be a larger portion of your total time and effort than in a larger, more complex task.

For example, if you’re doing something that only takes a minute to do, but takes a half-minute each for setup and takedown, then that might might not be a big problem. But if you have to do 20-30 of these somethings, that can add up quickly.

For those who like numbers (like me):

0.5 min setup + 1 min task completion + 0.5 min takedown = 2 minutes
2 min x 25 tasks = 50 minutes

Looking at those numbers, you’ve basically spent 50 minutes to do 25 minutes work (25 x 1 min per task).

But if we batch them together (ooo, now I can use brackets, everyone remember BEDMAS?)

0.5 min setup + (25 x 1 min task completion) + 0.5 min takedown
= 26 minutes

That’s right, by batching, we’ve taken this hypothetical work from 50 minutes down to 26 minutes, saving almost 50% of our time.

So the theory makes sense, but to actually impact our balance, we need to put it in practice.

Here are a few suggestions for applying this strategy at home:

Cooking

We spend a fair bit of time in the kitchen every day. Whether it’s for breakfast, lunch or dinner, a lot fo the work in cooking is in the preparation; chopping vegetables, making sauces, etc.

By planning a weekly menu in advance, you can find ways to do a lot of your prep work all at once. Looking for recipes with similar ingredients (or something like Rachel Rae’s rollover meals), can allow you to just spend a little time on a Sunday afternoon and you’re set for the week.

Depending on where you live, your financial resources, and your cooking skill, you may also want to try a commercial food prep kitchen (like Supperworks in my area) or actually taking your Sunday prep a bit farther and making full meals in advance, just ready to cook and go.

Laundry

This one can seem pretty obvious; I’m sure a lot of us are good at doing all the laundry at once (most of the time at least). The time savings comes from some of the related activities.

That’s right, things like ironing.

This is definitely my personal weakness, I’ll admit. I’m terrible at batching my ironing. You’ll frequently find me, ten minutes before i have to leave for work, standing over the ironing board with the day’s attire in hand.

The few times I’ve done the ironing in one batch, the mornings have been much smoother, and I’ve been in a better mood.

Shopping

Again, this may seem like a fairly obvious proposition. Shopping once can save time.

However, I recommend taking this a step further. If you survey what your household goes through in dry goods, toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc. in a month, then do all that shopping at once, you can save time. Basically you buy the things that will last in larger quantities to cover several weeks or months. Then your weekly trip focuses on only the things that must be bought fresh.

My fiancée and I have even taken this a step farther. We buy a lot of our meat in larger quantities, and portion it to our liking, and freeze it for when we want to use it. This ends up making some of our weekly trips for fruit and vegetables only, which can be great in the summer when the farmers markets are in full swing.

Cleaning

For a lot of us, housecleaning isn’t a highly enjoyable activity. We love a clean house, but don’t like cleaning it.

Batching our house work provides two main benefits:

  1. It saves the time and effort of getting the cleaning supplies out over and over
  2. It gets the complete activity over with quickly!

Having everything done at once can take a larger block of time, but then other than basic daily tidying (dishes, etc. which can also be reduced through batching) you don’t have to think about it for a week!

Paperwork

“What? But I thought this was about the home, not the office!” you may be saying.

Relax, it is about the home. But in perhaps the most direct transfer from work to home, look at the type of work this is usually used on at the office. That’s right, basic paperwork.

Whether it’s paying bills (Find bill, log in, pay bill, open Quicken, enter transaction, close everything), sending out Christmas cards or wedding invitations (write card/invite, write address, assemble, put a stamp on it, mail), or any of the myriad other activities that keep a modern house running, a lot of them are small but frequent. Going back to our math above, the savings might seem small for each time we do these activities, but with the sheer number of them, the savings can be huge.

This basic tenet of office productivity can be applied to gain time (and money in some cases) in your everyday life. Gaining a minute or two here or there may not seem like much, but when you gain 10 minutes a day, that’s over an hour a week to do with as you will!

These are only 5 ways to save some time. If you’ve got some others, please share them in the comments!