However, sometimes there are things that need to be looked at and dealt with eventually, but don’t need to be done right that minute. We’re talking filling in the Google form a coach sent out, or checking a new school calendar of events that’s been sent from the HSA, or buying pretzels for upcoming half days at the elementary school, or filling out a survey for a work project, or signing a form or…Many things.

I tend to let these pile up and then deal with them every few days during a batch processing time. Friday is a good time for this. I sometimes do a mid-week email triage as well.

On Friday the 4th, however, the kids were out of school and while I was working that day, it was a short day. So it didn’t happen. Then last week I was in Portland and I wasn’t really building in email processing time so even more stuff piled up. I got home late Friday afternoon and immediately went into picking up kids various places.

On Saturday my husband took the older four kids white water rafting (!) and we had a sitter for a while for the 4-year-old, so I seized the opportunity to sit down and deal with the mess of the previous two weeks. Since I track my time, I also know how long this took me: 2.5 hours to get to current.

Now, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair as a count as I spent a reasonable chunk of time on an advertiser survey that was pretty thorough. But I guess every week brings *something* that has to be filled out. So maybe it is an accurate reading of the stuff from the last two weeks.

Two and a half hours seems like a long time but I also imagine that if I’d dealt with all those things in the moment, they would have taken a lot longer than 2.5 hours because I’d be going in and out of things. So I think batching is the way to go, even if it’s not necessarily the most fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Do you batch process email and the tasks that land in your inbox?

Speaking of batching…we are failing on this on the grocery front. There is a rather nice grocery store (McCaffrey’s, for any grocery store experts…) that is approximately a 4 minute drive from the house. This opened a year ago and as a result we don’t wind up thinking too much about what we need because it’s so easy just to stop by. But the net result is that my husband went to a different grocery store (Wegman’s) Friday night (after seeing Beetlejuice with our daughter) and bought some stuff, and then I went on Saturday to the local one to get some more groceries for the week…and then I realized we didn’t have stuff for hamburgers on Sunday night (a frequent choice) so I went back Sunday afternoon…and then got home and realized we didn’t have hot dogs (which we *always* have since we buy from Costco usually…but I guess some kid developed a real hankering for them?). Our nanny will likely get hot dogs and some other things today but she is more rationally making a list from looking at the pantry…

In other news: It’s definitely looking like fall around here! If you’re looking for a fall read, the first half of my novel, The Cortlandt Boys, takes place in a cozy small town in the Poconos during autumn. This remains my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Please give it a read! Or if you’d like a little time management in your fiction, Juliet’s School of Possibilities takes place in October in a place much like Cape May, NJ. You can learn more about this fable here.

I also wrote a post on Fighting the Email Addiction. Over the holidays, I went on an email fast for 5 days while my husband and I were outside the country. His phone worked, so family members could reach him in emergencies. But everything else I decided not to bother with. A few emails did come in that normally I would have responded to right away. I did miss some opportunities. But others will come, and more or less life moves along. It’s a reminder to me that if nothing goes horribly wrong when I don’t check for 5 days, I can certainly not check for 2 hours while I focus on a bigger project.

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