If you’re a connoisseur of productivity methods—and even if you aren’t—you’ve likely heard about “monotasking,” the alternative to multitasking in which the name of the game is to stop juggling multiple tasks and instead focus deeply on one thing at a time. There are a handful of different ways to monotask, but one of them is a technique sometimes called “batching” or “mode-based scheduling,” which author and productivity expert Michael Hyatt describes as “setting aside an intentional amount of time for intentional tasks and making an intentional effort to not allow the distractions or interjections of others break that focus.”
Key Takeaways:
- Since there’s nothing but your own personal decision-making that actually holds you to that structure, though, it’s especially liable to come crashing down at any time.
- If batching your entire week doesn’t offer quite enough flexibility for you, there’s no harm in breaking up individual days into smaller chunks of time.
- In other words, there are multiple reasons to pick multiple modes, just so long as you’re only adopting one of them at a time.
“Many freelancers use mode-based scheduling to organize their entire workweeks, not just individual workdays. To do that, start by looking at your calendar at the beginning of the week and assigning a specific focus or task to individual days.”
