@Elizabeth – I would imagine that nine children can produce a lot of errands! Wise idea to batch them into one morning every few weeks. They can, indeed, expand to fill the available time.

One thing I make sure to batch is running errands. About once every two or three weeks, I get everything ready the night before (items to be returned for refunds, packages and other outgoing mail, confirmation emails for pickups, etc). Then I plan out my route around town and go at it. We have nine kids, so we usually have a lot of little bits of things that need to be done. If I try to do just one errand, it seems to take up half a day. But if I decide ahead of time that the whole morning is for errands and plan exactly which ones, somehow I can run through a whole list in the same amount of time. This is without kids in tow though. If I have kids with me it’s a whole other story. Unless something is an emergency, I’m at the point now where I don’t even try to do errands with children along. It’s too hard on them and me and it is just not an efficient use of time!

Ditto. I LOVE my food processor and have multiple recipes that require the use of this handy kitchen gadget, but I hate cleaning it. One of my two meal-prep days I often will make a flurry of these recipes, rinsing them between each use (nothing with raw meat etc – mostly energy balls/Aussie bites/healthy muffins) and reducing my cleaning time dramatically.

I’ll also batch cook up something like hamburger – making some in to meatballs, some in to loose meat for tacos etc. I hate handling meat, but when I do it in a batch environment it’s so little muss and fuss and I just freeze the prepped meat for a later meal.

I’ve also found this allows you to reuse dishes too for less overall washing!