‘Day Batching’ Is a Better Way to Organize Your Work Week

Here’s a step-by-step guide to making it work for you

Photo: Hanan Isachar/Getty Images

As the owner of a company that provides mental wellness resources, a content creator on five different platforms and publications, and a mom of a three-year-old, I would lose my marbles if I did not organize my days in a focused way.

The single most useful productivity habit I have found is day batching.

Day batching, as I’ve written about, is a productivity system in which you only work on certain projects on a specific day (or days) in the week. If a non-urgent task comes up that doesn’t relate to that project, it has to wait. The simple idea behind the system comes from Elon Musk, who allocates specific days to each one of his companies (Mondays at SpaceX, Tuesdays at Tesla, etc.). The system has not only helped me organize my life, but has also helped me release some of my anxiety over my perpetually massive to-do list.

While day batching as a concept may seem simple, I have learned a few things since I started using the system about a year ago. Here’s a step-by-step plan for making it work for you.

Getting set up

First things first, you should know what you want to spend your time on. For me, I have three main projects — my business, my writing, and my kid (not necessarily in that order).

If you have one main job or focus, it is helpful to break your main tasks into days. For instance, you might do sales calls on Tuesdays and product development on Wednesdays. Or, you might do lesson planning on Fridays and grading papers on Thursdays.

I recommend choosing two or three main areas of focus and then assigning each of them one to three days per week.

Here is the current breakdown of my days:

• Writing: Mondays and Wednesdays
• Danscend (my company): Tuesdays and Thursdays
• Catch-all day: Fridays

Remember that the more important something is to you, the more time you should allocate toward it (within the confines of earning a living, keeping small humans alive, and the rest of the craziness of living).