Batching

Andrew and I recently read this book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss. If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend it. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, but he has some great ideas, one of them being "batching."

The idea behind this concept is to do certain things all at once in order to save time. For example, in the book Tim shares that he only does his laundry once every two weeks, deals with his mail once a week, and only checks his email twice a day.

I thought it was a good idea, but not all his examples would have worked for Andrew and I, so I started thinking about changes I could make to incorporate batching into my life to save time. One of the major things I thought of was making meals... I realized I was pulling the SAME things out of the fridge every night to make my lunch for work for the next day. So I thought, "why not do it all at once for the week?"...


... so I did. On Saturday afternoons I have started making 5 containers of veggie-styled lasagna (it keeps fine for Mon-Fri). I hard-boil and peel all the eggs I'll need for breakfast for the week. I bake all the muffins, granola bars, whatever and wrap them individually, I wash and cut up a huge ziploc bag of celery, etc.


Then I stick it all in our midget-sized fridge and just pull it out every morning before work. True, it makes Sat afternoons a bit annoying (when I'd rather be relaxing in the sun), but it is a big time-saver, and it makes me feel like I have some "time off" on weekday evenings after being at work all day already.

Good times!