Batching is grouping similar tasks together to be able to complete them more efficiently.

If you think of a factory, it makes sense that you get better at it, more efficient if you do a repeated task or similar type of task. Instead of jumping around and trying to assemble different components, if you take a similar group of components, you can assemble those much, much quicker. And when we look at the evidence for batching, you can look to some evidence for what disruption looks like.

The reason I use that as a proxy is that whether disruption is doing another task or just being interrupted by other people or other things, the idea is that when you are working on something or trying to complete a goal if you are if you do something else,  that's a context switch.

That's a distraction. The research shows that the disruption cost is about 25 minutes to return to tasks. I was able to find a study by Gloria Mark at the University of California. And in that study, they had a group of students playing the role of having an HR person answering emails. They gave everyone a fact sheet of the information that they would need to respond to these emails. And then they distracted them through instant messenger, asking random questions.

And so what they found is that at the end of the study, it was about measuring what happens with the quality of the work and how long it takes to complete answering all the emails. So everyone was given a similar type of inbox that they had to answer.

And so what they found was and in this study was that they made more mistakes. They made a lot more mistakes. And of course, depending on what you're doing, mistakes mean you will have to do more rework to get that task done.

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