Episode 11: Sunday Resets & Lessons On Batching

Good morning, y’all! Today, I am giving you another tiny focus and flow tip that is something I’m going to elaborate on much more inside of our Change Academy workshop on Thursday. So, if you’re not signed up for that, I highly recommend getting on that. So, today, I want to talk about my Sunday reset habit.

So, a lot of you have seen on Instagram or enjoy on Instagram when I post pictures and videos and things of my Sunday reset. If you haven’t seen that or if you’re new to the podcast, welcome. What I do on Sunday is pretty intense. I essentially do all of my cleaning in one giant batch on Sundays.

So, I get up. I usually eat breakfast and get my workout done, and then I meal prep, I grocery shop, I prep all my veggies for the week, I clean my bathrooms, vacuum the house, I deal with the kitchen, I unload the old food from the fridge. All of the cleaning that I do during the week happens in like a three-to-four-hour time period on Sundays. I get a lot of people who ask me, “How do you have the sustained motivation to get through that?” or, “Why do you do that? That seems so intimidating.”

And so, what I want to talk to you about today is that really there are two different approaches to task management. One of the approaches is called batching, and that is when you put like-tasks together or do multiple tasks at one time, and that is really good for your brain because your brain tends to be more efficient when you do like-tasks together. However, sort of the opposite spectrum of the task management is the once-every-day approach.

So, in a lot of these tidiness accounts that I’m following (because I’m becoming tidy this year) they talk about doing one tiny bit of cleaning every day. I’ve even seen a schedule before where it’s a printout that you can buy from this particular woman, and she gives you one single individual chore to do every single day of the month, and then by the end of the month, it cycles over again. Okay?

So, batching versus breaking it up. Those are the two types of task management that I’m talking about today.

I know you might be expecting me to say A is better than B, batching is better than breaking it up, but what I want to remind you is that there is no right answer there, and it might be that certain tasks work better for you to batch and certain tasks work better for you to break it up or it might be that you are more of a batching girl or it might be that you’re more of a break it up human, right? I don’t know what it’s going to be for you, but what I would encourage you to do is when you’re looking at a task that you want to do on a regular basis, explore both of those options.

So, for me, I had been breaking it up for a long time with cleaning. I had not been breaking it up in a super structured way. It just sort of was like whenever I noticed that a particular thing needed to be cleaned, I would clean it. Now, that doesn’t work for me because I am not particularly observant of my surroundings. And so, that means the toilet, for example, would go a long time, and it would have to get pretty grody before I would be like, “Ooh, I really need to clean this.”

So, instead that’s why — I actually saw @simplymander on Instagram, she does a Sunday reset. I watched one of her YouTube videos, like four or five years ago where she cleaned everything on Sunday, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. I want to do that.” And batching works for me in this case because I put my mind to it, and then I get it all done, and I‘ve built intrinsic motivation around that. In other words, I like the ritual. I enjoy the ritual, and I enjoy having it done. Okay?

However, on the other side of things, I tend to enjoy the planning my day to day on a day-to-day basis. So, I time block which means that I put my general schedule together at the beginning of the week, but every single day I (right now, at least) like to pick tasks from my to-do list for the week that I want to get done.

So, as you’re thinking about your personal productivity for the week, I want you to ask yourself, “Are there any tasks that I could batch to be more efficient? And are there any tasks that I could break them up in order to make them less intimidating for me?” If you find something, feel free to shoot me a message on Instagram and tell me about it. And, as always, we are gonna talk much more about the science behind batching and why that works for our brains and what kinds of tasks you might want to be batching versus the kinds of things you might want to break up in Thursday’s workshop. So, I hope to see some of you there!