The Decisions You Shouldn't Have to Make Every Day.
Your workload isn’t the only thing leaving you feeling exhausted.
Like many people, I’ve adopted AI tools, and I’ve been learning how to use them. And yet, despite the many promises of a reduced workload, my list of things to do continues to grow.
Technology often does this: It promises to save us time, but instead it speeds everything up, which increases our workload.
AI can summarise meeting notes, write email and message responses and create reports, articles, and so much more, but somewhere in this mix, a human still needs to review the results and decide what should happen next, such as judging the merits of a proposal, agreeing on a major purchase, or deciding whether to hire candidate A or candidate B.
Decision fatigue.
This means we’re likely to have to make a lot more decisions about what work to do. And this constant decision-making can feel like you’re draining your brain’s energy supplies faster than an old Tesla in a freezing snowstorm.
Reducing the need to make decisions can help to reduce the fatigue you can start to feel at 2:15 pm after you’ve spent all morning trying to decide which fire to put out first.
Imagine you start the day with a team update meeting. Veronica is angry because Jason didn’t finish the product launch documentation last week, and now she’s having to wait before she can start her work.
You spend the meeting calming Veronica down, then as soon as you leave the meeting, five Slack messages ping on your phone. You spend the next ten minutes responding to them, grab another cup of coffee, sit down at your desk, accidentally open your email and discover 25 new messages, all, apparently, urgent.
It’s now 11:20 am and all you’ve done is put out fires, responded to a few messages, and you already feel drained.
The report for your boss is still waiting to be started, the customer who emailed you first thing this morning has not been responded to, and you have a lunch appointment with a prospective customer at 12:00 pm.
You may know what you need to do; your task list is full of potential there, but it doesn’t tell you what to work on next. This means every time you return to your list, you have another decision to make.
Do you start the report, reply to your customer’s email, sort out Veronica’s problem, or something else on your list that’s grabbing your attention?
It’s not just the workload that’s exhausting you; it’s all the little decisions you’re having to make as well.
Something that helps reduce decisions is a good old-fashioned time management practice: “batch processing” your tasks. It’s time-tested and still works in today’s work environments.
How batch processing works.
Batch processing your tasks means you group similar tasks together; emails and messages go into one batch, Team issues into another. Client affairs go into a third, and the difficult report gets given a slot on your calendar.
Then, at an appropriate time, you pick one batch and work on it. You do as many tasks in that list as you can in the time that you have. It’s not about the number of things you get done; it’s that you have a dedicated time to get on with the tasks.
Now, I should caution you here. Batch processing only works if you “hold the line”. In other words, it works if you respect the decisions you’ve made about when you will do these tasks.
You might be brilliant at dealing with issues as they arise. You’re decisive and quick. Yet, you find that when you do get a moment, your messages have piled up, and you still haven’t found time for the important work you meant to do today.
With batch processing, holding the line means shutting off the distractions for a bit. Perhaps you can protect 3:30 to 4:15 pm for dealing with your communications, and may be 5:00 to 5:30 pm for your admin tasks.
When 3:30 pm arrives, you sit down, open your list of actionable communications tasks and start responding. The only thing you do in that time is respond. Approve requests, give a project status update to a colleague or request information from another department.
Your untidy desk can wait, so can refilling your Pilot Custom 823 fountain pen. I know, pure joy to do, but seriously, it can wait until you finish your communications.
Some work may need a dedicated slot on your calendar rather than be batched. A good example would be a rather difficult report for your boss. Often, this type of work requires a few hours of work.
Categories of work.
Batch processing works even better when you know the different categories of work you are often required to do.
Take a look at your list of tasks, what types of work appear most often? You may find communications, admin and planning; we all seem to share those types of tasks. Beyond that, though, you may find client work, team management or project reviews.
Allocating time for dealing with these daily or weekly tasks (depending on how urgent these often are) means that as new tasks arrive, you add them to their appropriate list, then when the time comes, you work from that list.
No trying to decide which individual task to work on next, just a decision about what category of work you will work on in the time you have available. Having a dedicated time for them means you are less likely to be worrying about them.
If you’re comfortable allowing your AI tool of choice access to your lists, you could have AI categorise your tasks for you, although in my tests, I’ve found the time saved is marginal.
Running around switching your attention from this task to that task is exhausting and inefficient. It’s like a delivery driver delivering one package in the east of town, then driving to the west side to deliver the next package, only to return to the east side to deliver the third one. Slow, inefficient and expensive in energy costs.
We cannot always control the volume of work coming at us, and with AI making it easier to produce more work, that’s unlikely to change. But what we can control is how we organise our work.
Instead of treating every individual task as another decision to be made, group similar tasks together and give yourself some dedicated time to work on them.
Try it this week on your communication and admin tasks; you might find that the biggest benefit is how much calmer you feel with fewer decisions to make.
If you’d like a little practical help with managing your time, join me for the Friday Tea Break. Each Friday, I share one idea you can try the following week, as well as a few things I’ve found useful or enjoyed.
You’ll also receive my free Time Sector System Workbook to help you set up your own system.