Batching similar tasks: group the work your brain does
Batching has a branding problem. The popular versions belong to people who control their whole calendar: content creators with a filming day, developers who can declare a pull-request afternoon. If your day is half other people's meetings, batching sounds like a technique for someone else's job. It isn't — but the version that works for a mixed job looks different. It starts with a sort, not a schedule.
Batching is about modes, not categories
The cleanest definition comes from Toggl's guide to the technique: time blocking schedules when you'll do a type of work; task batching decides what goes in the block, by grouping tasks of the same cognitive type. The two work best together, and the grouping key is the one most people get wrong. Batch by what your brain is actually doing, not by the label on the task. Answering email and answering chat messages look like two categories; to your brain they're one mode — short, reactive, other-people's-words communication. Drafting three proposals back to back crosses project boundaries, but it's one mode: sustained strategic writing. Sending invoices, filing expenses and updating a tracker are all admin mode, however unrelated their subjects.
The reason modes matter is the switching cost underneath them. Every guide in this space cites the same research family: brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks, which the American Psychological Association has linked to losing up to 40 percent of productive time, and reorientation counts in the thousands per day for knowledge workers. Treat the exact percentages as directional rather than precise — what matters for your calendar is the mechanism: each mode change costs a re-entry, and batching is simply the discipline of paying that cost three or four times a day instead of forty.
The sort: three passes over your list
- Pass one — separate the fixed from the flexible. Meetings, calls and anything with another person's clock on it are fixed. They don't get batched; they get surrounded. Your batchable work is everything else, and in most jobs it's a larger share than it feels like at 9 a.m.
- Pass two — tag each flexible task with its mode. Communicate, create, decide, administer, or run errands between systems. Five modes cover most jobs. The tagging takes two minutes and is the whole technique; everything after it is placement.
- Pass three — place batches in the gaps. A typical day holds three to four batches well — more than four and you've rebuilt the switching you were trying to remove. Communication batches go where responsiveness matters (late morning, mid-afternoon — the developer-world version runs notification checks at set times like 10, 1 and 4). Your deepest create batch goes in your best hours, and admin goes where your energy is already low, because admin mode asks the least of you.
Sizing batches so they finish
The failure mode nobody warns about: the batch that grows until it becomes a dread object — the Friday “clear the inbox and do all the admin” block that everyone quietly reschedules. A batch should be sized to finish inside its block with room to spare: 25 to 90 minutes of genuinely similar work. If a mode's pile exceeds that, split it by day rather than by willpower — Monday's admin batch and Thursday's admin batch. Day theming is the same idea at a larger grain: recurring types of work assigned to recurring days, so the mode decision is made once a week instead of every morning. Also cap the batch from the other side: a communication batch that always expands to fill its window is a sign the window is the problem. Timebox it, and let the leftovers roll to the next communication batch — there is always a next one, which is exactly why rolling is safe.
The escape hatch
Batching collapses the first time a genuinely urgent thing lands mid-batch and the system has no rule for it, because the rule becomes “the system doesn't work.” Give it one in advance. Urgent means someone is blocked now or money/safety is moving now — not “a senior person sent a message.” When the real thing lands: pause the batch, handle it, and return to the same batch rather than restarting your day. One interruption absorbed by a rule is a system working; the same interruption absorbed by guilt is a system dying. And tell your team the response windows batching creates (“messages get a reply by late morning or mid-afternoon”) — batching that makes you look unresponsive is a political problem, not a productivity one, and it's solved by publishing the windows, not by abandoning them.
A batched week, assembled
Here is the whole method applied to an ordinary, meeting-heavy week. Fixed commitments — team standup, two project meetings, a one-on-one — stay where they are. Around them: a communication batch at 10:30 and another at 15:30 each day, where email and chat get answered in a single pass instead of continuously. One create batch in the best morning gap, protected the way a meeting is protected, because it is reserved for one mode rather than one task — whichever proposal, draft or analysis is current fills it, without a fresh decision about what the hour is for. Admin — expenses, forms, scheduling, tracker updates — collects into a single late-afternoon batch on Tuesday and Thursday, when energy is lowest and admin's demands are lowest too. Friday's last half hour holds a small decide batch: the week's leftover judgment calls, made together, plus a glance at next week's gaps to place its batches while the placing is cheap.
Notice what the week does not contain: no hour labelled by a project, no block for each tool, no batch longer than ninety minutes. The modes repeat on a rhythm the people around you can learn — colleagues stop expecting instant replies at 11:00 because the 10:30 batch reliably answers, and the 15:30 batch catches what the morning missed. Predictability, it turns out, is what makes batching socially survivable: a responder with known windows reads as reliable, while an instant responder who vanishes unpredictably reads as flaky, even when the total response time is identical.
Check it on yourself: Toggl's suggested test is the honest one — track a normal week and a batched week in the same categories, and compare total deep-work hours. If deep work rose and nothing urgent died in a batch gap, the system is earning its keep. If not, shrink the batches before you blame the idea.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from time blocking? Time blocking is the calendar appointment; batching is the rule for what fills it. A block labelled “work on stuff” is time blocking without batching — the switching just happens inside the block.
My job is mostly meetings. Is there anything left to batch? Yes — the work between meetings is exactly where switching is worst, because each gap gets spent on whatever shouted loudest. Even two placed batches a day (one communication, one create) change the texture of the gaps.
What about tasks I hate? Batching is quietly kind to dreaded admin: one bounded, scheduled encounter with all of it beats encountering one item at a time all week, each with its own small dread.