Learning what and how to batch process, can help make your business and career a success. It can help you through times of illness, allows you to take holidays and can make you more productive. It can even help you to stop procrastinating!
You might be thinking that batch processing is only for people who work online or have big businesses. I want to let you know that this isn’t the case. Batch processing when you are small or a solo freelancer can really help you out. Freelancers have a risk filled career with no sick pay or other employee perks. This means that you need you business to keep working for you when you can’t.
In this podcast I talk through ways that you can make it work for your own career, so that you aren’t spending every waking moment on your business, and can take that longed for holiday.
Have a look at the tasks that you complete online to keep your career or business working. This is a list of some things that you might do:
List of processes
- Newsletters
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- Video content
- Social media posts
- On-boarding clients
- Sharing workshop notes
- Press releases
- Images for press releases
- Selling products on-line
Have a look at this list (or one that you have made yourself). What out of that list could you batch process? Is it taking a selection of photographs over one day for your social media posts for the next month, or creating blog post ideas in one sitting for a 6 month burst of content?
We can feel most overwhelmed when we set ourselves tasks that need to be completed each week. You try to stick to a schedule, but life gets in the way. Or you wake up one morning feeling ill and you have to stay home rather than completing your work. Batch processing really can help save you time and those feelings of overwhelm.
Start with something small
Think about something that you can start with right away. It might be how you create your newsletters. Maybe you write them every week, but it is eating into your creation time. Think about a range of topics that you could talk about for the next 4 weeks, and then sit down for one hour and write 4 newsletters and schedule them. I like to use Mailchimp to schedule mine, but there are lots of other software to help you do the same, without any initial costs.
I have found that it really helps to plan out what I do each day across a week. Emails answered during a certain time each day, newsletters scheduled for Thursdays etc. You can read more about how to do this yourself in my book The Business Of Creativity.
Looking at all of the processes that you do to engage with your audience or clients, will help you to focus in on areas that you could batch process. Things like adding content to social media can be scheduled directly inside Facebook. Batch processing things like images or podcasts can really help you when you are having an off day, or sickness strikes. It can even help you to plan out vacation time while not worrying that your business or career is going to disappear when you are relaxing on a beach someone lovely.
Share your batch processing tips in the Facebook group. It really helps to learn from each other. Join The Group
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If you are struggling with confidence, overwhelm or imposter syndrome, these articles might help you out.
Dealing with imposter syndrome
How to cope with feeling overwhelmed
If you’ve enjoyed this free content and workbook, I’d love to raise my coffee cup to you.
