Batching is the lowest hanging fruit in the world of productivity. If you want to get more done in less time, batch. What’s batching? Batching is the process of doing as many similar tasks in a row as possible. For example, if you normally plant 70 trays on Monday, 70 on Wednesday, and 70 more on Friday, you should batch prepare 210 trays on Sunday or Monday. Batching trays would look like filling, tamping, and storing 210 trays with dry soil at the beginning of the week. Preparing a full week’s worth of trays this way saves time and energy in two ways - task switching and context switching. Task switching is physical and context switching is mental. We’ll start with task switching.
Every task we perform in life has set up and clean up steps. If you want to cook dinner, you must first walk into the kitchen, grab your cookware and utensils, ingredients and seasonings. After enjoying that delicious dinner, you must clean and put away your dishes, start the dishwasher, and wipe down the counters. Don’t forget about the actual process of cooking your food. We know preparing home cooked meals takes time and effort, which is why many people choose to “meal prep.” Meal prep is batching in the kitchen. The same is true for nearly every routine task on your farm. You weigh seeds, fill trays, plant, harvest, clean trays, and even prospect for new customers regularly. Let’s use tray filling as the example again.
The set up tasks for tray filling includes fetching a bin or bale of soil and grabbing the soil tamper, box cutter, and empty top trays. The clean up tasks include putting away the soil bin, tamper, and box cutter, as well as sweeping up any spilled soil. The set up and clean up tasks take a total of 30 minutes. Let’s say you can fill 70 standard 1020 trays with one 3.8 cubic foot bale of compressed soil. In scenario one, you’re only going to fill enough trays for the Monday planting of 70 trays. It’ll take you an hour to fill, tamp, and store the 70 trays. The total time is 90 minutes. If you do this three times a week, that’s 4.5 hours per week just for tray filling. In scenario two, you decide to fill all 210 trays at once. The set up and clean up time is the same at 30 minutes. It still takes 60 minutes to fill 70 trays. The total time for tray filling for the week is 3.5 hours. Just by batching one step in your production process, you save an hour each week. What if you use batching to weigh seed for the week’s plantings? What if you batch label all your packaging? Even if you save just one hour per task and you batch for five tasks, you’d save five hours every single week. That’s five hours to put towards growing your business or spending time with family and friends. Now let’s talk about context switching.
Context switching is the process of mentally jumping back and forth between tasks. Your brain is trying to focus on one task, but then you redirect it to momentarily think about another task. Social media is a good example here. You’re laser focused on finding new customers, and then you get a notification from Instagram. You get distracted by the sight and sound of your phone lighting up, and then you try to refocus on customer prospecting. However, social media can easily be managed by putting your phone on silent or do not disturb. In the context of your farm, we want to eliminate the need to remember or think about repeated tasks. If you batch fill all 210 trays on Sunday, you can stop thinking about that task entirely. Again, if you reduce or eliminate context switching for five of your routine farm tasks, it saves a lot of mental energy. You're freeing up space in your brain to focus on key tasks, like finding new customers or training employees.
Batching saves time in your day and space in your brain. Batching costs nothing and requires no additional equipment. Give it a try and let us know how your productivity has increased!
Batching, the process of grouping similar tasks together, is a highly effective productivity strategy in farming, minimizing both setup and cleanup times. By consolidating tasks from each day of the week, like tray filling and seed weighing, into a single large task, farmers can streamline their workflow and reduce mental load, leading to increased efficiency. Implementing batching techniques allows farmers to save time and energy, enabling them to focus on key business activities and achieve greater productivity overall.
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