157. Why to NOT batch your weekly content (and what to do instead)

You've most likely heard of the concept of batching (doing similar tasks together to free up time) and love the idea.  But if you can’t seem to make batching work in your biz, here's the secret spoiler – I discovered that NOT batching like the gurus glorified led to the most amazing momentum.

Curious to know more about this? Tune in to find out why I actually recommend you do not batch (especially when you're newer in your business) and what you should do instead. We're gonna dig into that in today’s episode and I’m sure you're gonna LOVE this one. 

 
EPISODE  SHOW NOTES👇

➡️ https://heathersager.com/episode157/

Transcript

00:01

Well, hey friend, welcome back to another episode. Today we're gonna dive into batching your content. And specifically, I'm talking today about batching video content or batching audio content like a podcast. But really this episode could apply to any kind of content batching, whether it's blog, post writing, social media writing. We're going to talk about things that a little bit of a different take because I don't know about you, but when I started in the online space, I kept hearing this word, batch, batch, batch, batch, batch, batch, batch, batch, batch, everywhere and I sucked at batching. I mean, just point blank, I'm going to tell you, I sucked at it, and I continuously felt super guilty about it. I felt like I was a frickin failure at this online business thing because I could not get my rhythm of batching together. And here's the secret spoiler, I actually discovered that not batching in the way everybody talked about was became my superpower. I'm going to tell you exactly why and why I recommend that, especially when you're newer in your business, or you're newer at a certain part of your business, why I actually recommend you do not batch and what to do instead. We're gonna dig into that in this episode, and I think you're gonna love this one. This one's really tactical. It's not like a step by step like do this, do that but this isn't a very tactical episode, and I just can already anticipate all of the incredible Instagram messages around how you're going to be like, Oh, my gosh, me too, or I never thought about it this way before so I just I can't wait. So side note, you always know I love hearing from you on the show. So if you ever hear anything that you're like, yes, this is it. This is the moment, please screenshot the episode, share it on your Instagram stories. Tell me what resonated with you. Not only do I get to see that, and I always reshare it. And I always start a conversation with you to dive in a little bit deeper but I genuinely appreciate you sharing it with your audiences.

02:08

Here's the thing I know, I know, people share a lot of stuff online. And it just can be easy to passively listen to something and if you're like, oh, yeah, this is great and keep it to yourself. But when you have the excitement to share it with other people that that means something. One, I think your audience really appreciates that you continue to share a great stuff with them and it exposes them to the kinds of things that you expose yourself to that informs how you see business and how you show up. But as a creator, having other people share your work, it is the best compliment you can ever get. And I hope that you are very generous in when you see other people's content that really resonates with you share it because my hope is that I mean the golden rule, other people do it for you. So let's be the kind of consumers that we want of our audiences, if you see content you love, ie. if you love the show, share, share, share. And the more your audience sees you doing it, the more likely they are to share your stuff do. I see that happen all the time of me sharing tips and insights from my audience of other things that are inspiring me. I just see a direct correlation with people then sharing my stuff. So this is my ask if you haven't had a chance to either review the show on your favorite podcast platform. Please, please take a chance to do that today and then share it, share the episode with with someone and other business owner that you think would find a benefit from it whether it's this episode or another one that's resonated. It really means the world to me.

03:37

Okay, I'm ironically recording today's episode in a batch recording session. I just finished recording last week's episode that hopefully you listen to, that was all about showing up, having more fun when you show up in your brand. It's the summertime as you hear this episode, I am most likely back from my trip to Hawaii but my adventures continue we're going, we're still enjoying the sun. I am not back in the office. I'm taking a couple weeks off just with my family. So I did have a requirement, I needed to batch, I need to batch some things. So I have this and then I'm recording tomorrow another episode that you'll hear next week with my good friend, Emily Hall, all about a debrief from the Craft and Commerce event. And what you need to have in mind as you think about what live events to navigate in your business moving forward so just there's a little teaser for next week's episode. But one of the things I wanted to hit up first, I talked about us on social media. At the time of recording this this happened this week. I got back from the Craft and Commerce event. The time of you listening to this it'll be a couple of weeks now. But I had forgotten just how much time I needed to my little introverted heart. I needed time to decompress. So Sunday when I got back after all the people in, there was a lot of people and it was good people in but oh my gosh, my introversion. I was like oh my gosh, all the people in. I need a break. I needed some time off so we did a lot of not talking in our house all day on Sunday which was blissful. And then Monday, I was ready to get back into it. I had all these things I need to do to prepare for my upcoming trip and my brain wouldn't work. So I ended up taking off the day with my seven year old, Owen, we just ended up playing hooky. And I mean, he's out at school now so we were riding bikes. I ended up reading a murder mystery novel on my Kindle. It was super fun. And I'm like, okay, I'll get back into it on Tuesday. And then get this, this is what happened on my Tuesday. I woke up and I was like, oh, crap, I had a two day live event and a coaching program that I was in that I had forgotten I blocked my calendar off for. It was one of those things right where you schedule in your calendar, and you're like, excited to go at the event but you're also excited to have your calendar blocked off just in case you need to get some other stuff done. It was kind of where it was at with it.

05:54

So I was rushing all morning, getting Levi ready to go out the door. My husband was taking him to preschool. Owen was going to be home, we would figure that out. And I was rushing to sit down at my desk to start that live event at 9:05 or at nine o'clock, and I get to my desk at nine of five and I'm like ferociously logging into the Zoom call and I realized I'm like, Oh, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I realized that Tuesday was the day that I had scheduled to take Luna, our puppy, sweet Luna, if you've seen pictures if you're with me on Instagram. Luna is going to a dog like a doggy overnight resort. Well, it's like a dog boarding thing, but they call it a resort to make you feel better about it. It's really adorable place. She's going to this doggy resort and she'd never been there before so they had to do a trial run with her. And the only day we can make that happen was yesterday, Tuesday. And so I sit down at nine o'clock and I was like, oh my gosh, I forgot about dropping Luna off. So I grabbed my keys, like Owen we gotta go, we gotta go drop Luna off. She had to be there by 10 and I couldn't find Luna's dog collar anywhere. Side little track thing. Y'all know I have a hearing loss so I can't hear at nighttime. My husband has incredible ears and any kind of movement or jingling at nighttime keeps him up so he gets really annoyed with the dog collar so he's got to get on collar off. Well, Levi, my four year old thinks the dog collars hilarious and he likes to hide it in places. He was already at preschool. Here comes 9:00, 9:05, 9:10 and I need to take Luna to his dog place and I can't find the frickin dog collar anywhere. Ensues a ferocious house raid by me and James, my husband, and we're looking everywhere, kid you not 25 minutes later, we still can't find this fricking dog collar so I'm like call it what it is. We just gotta go.

07:51

So I'm ferociously, I'm using ferocious a lot because it's really just describes my attitude at this moment. Finally find an alternative dog collar and we get it on her. I get her in the car, get Owen in the car, we race our way over to the dog place. Go to drop her off and this dog will not go inside this place. She's like terrified, like freakish little scaredy cat dog. She's so sweet but she's scared of other people and other dogs. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm the worst mom ever. It was like the day that you drop your kid off for daycare and they cling in your leg and then you feel like a terrible mom. I'm reliving all of this with a dog child so that whole experience lasts 20 minutes. Finally, they scoop her up and take her inside. I breathe like okay, I'm only gonna be an hour and a half late for the event now. Awesome. We may as well stop and get coffee Owen. So we stopped at the coffee shop and Owen grabs a breakfast burrito, I get a coffee. And as we're waiting for it to brew or to finish up, I get a phone call and it's my son's preschool. And they were at garden time, he goes to a Montessori school so they have all these different activities they do. During garden time another child wham hit him in the face with a shovel, and I'm getting the call of you need to come pick him up because he probably needs stitches. I'm not laughing because it happened. I'm just laughing at the absurdity of like nothing going right in a day.

09:29

So here I am like okay, the frickin day is gone. The day is gone. Oh my gosh, I should have not taken the day before off. I should have got stuff done. Yes, I'm acknowledging my son's face got it's fine like he's got this little slit in his like his eyebrow. He's okay by the way. I knew this before I started processing my workflow. But let's be honest moms who run businesses. We're thinking about all the things while we're thinking about our kids. So Owen I grab a burrito, grab a coffee, we go to daycare. We have to pick him up. He's got to gush on under his eyebrow, get home called the doctor and they can't deal face, whatever stitch things, so the only choice is to go to the hospital.

10:11

 So very long winded story to share that I ended up spending the majority of my day in the Children's Hospital, which ended up being a delightful day because the boys had so much fun. We go to the Children's Hospital because my kids have the bone condition I was born with which would be a very breakable bones. So it's really important that they see like pediatric style doctors whenever we go anywhere. Anyways, they're awesome. They gave them snacks, they gave them playdough and clay and the boys got to see the tram, up on the big hill in Oregon. It was ended up being a really delightful day, but I just, when it rains, it pours, man. When it rains, it pours. And this is the thing about running a business is at the end of the day, when you run a content business, if you're always living from week to week to week and you don't accommodate for days like that happening, you can see how easily it is for us to not get things done, ie. the three podcasts I needed to record on Monday, the five emails I needed to bulk write, none of those things got done, and here I am, it's still not done yet and the week is almost over. They will get done but this is why people say that batching is so important. Now I think there are why most likely is like to be more efficient and sure there are a definite reasons for why batching which, if you're not familiar with this term, the batching is just doing things in bulk, essentially. So it's taking similar tasks and doing them in like bulk. So recording four podcast episodes together, or writing emails together, or doing a series of social media posts down at one time. And it's the idea of you're more productive and less susceptible when you're not switching to different tasks, ie. trying to move from your creative brain, your analytical brain, and we are constantly task switching throughout the day, so many productivity studies show that when you group like tasks together, you can be more effective with it and so that's one reason. But I think the bigger reason of why batching can be very valuable is because batching creates our business to be a little bit more life proof. So if you have things come up or like so many over the last few years, if you have child care cancelled or school cancelled or somebody gets sick, or I don't know, something happens, right? You're more life proofed where you're not constantly going, oh my gosh, I can't get my blog post out, or oh my gosh, I can't get my podcast recorded, so there is a huge case for why batching is important.

12:46

So you might now be wondering, okay, so, Heather, but this episode is called why you might not want to batch your content. And yes, so let me dive right into why I actually think that batching can hurt your business in certain ways, so let me go into a couple of things. So one of the one of the things we have to be mindful is when we batch, I'm going to use podcasting as a great example because this is actually where this topic came from with many of my clients inside my program. They're either doing video or podcast. One of the things that happens, I see a new business owner decides that they want to launch a podcast, yay. And then they get the big idea because someone somewhere is like you have to launch with 10 episodes so that you could rank on the charts and blah, blah, blah. Sidenote, those people who do that and rank on the charts, they're no longer ranking after a couple of weeks so it was just like a big splash with a big hoopla and a bunch of frickin work and then it's like blipped down to their normal size audience that they would have had had they have just not busted their ass to begin with but side note, that's an opinion for another day.

13:58

So here's the thing, what happens is we think we have to go through and bulk batch a bunch of podcast episodes. So what do we do? We go like, okay, let me get it going and then we sit down with all of our outlines, and get everything done and then we bust our butt to schedule or to record all of these episodes. And then here's what happens. We start putting them out in the world and as we start putting them out the world, what happens is, and I see this happen so many times, by week three or week four of previously created content that's out in the world, what happens for so many business owners is they start cringing over their own content because the speed at which your skills improve in the online space is like dog years. So if you batch record in your first six podcast episodes, a month and a half ago, and now they're just being trickled out in the world, you're going to cringe because you're going to realize just how many filler words you used to use or just how many ah and uhms and awkwardness that you have in your voice or you not looking at the camera, and all these weird creepy things because you were just trying to get on camera but now you're smarter because you've been doing this for a few months or longer and you're cringing at the quality of your old content.

15:17

I see a lot of business owners, they stopped publishing the content because of frickin embarrassed by it. But now they have this whole batching machine that it's so overwhelming to try to create new content, so they just don't, and their rhythm fizzles out, then they become less consistent and it's just not very exciting. So here's my take on it. Okay. So when you bulk, do content, like I'm talking six, eight episodes, maybe more, maybe less, maybe it's even just three. I don't frickin know whatever number is in your brain. What happens is a couple of things, you have to acknowledge that, number one, the timing might become stale. Most business owners forget to not mention things on their podcast that then make when it goes live. It makes it irrelevant. So for example, when I'm recording these podcast episodes, today, I'm looking at the calendar and I know when they air, I know what time's the air. I'm referencing, last week, I referenced Independence Day, specifically, when that episode came out. I'm referencing summertime. Now here's the thing, imagine if I were batch recording 12 episodes this week to go out for the rest of summer and I'm talking about hot weather and summer and blah, blah, blah, and one of the episodes comes out in October. That's not going to work. Our timing is still. What happens if you batch record and start doing podcast episode and a huge crisis happens in the world. That happened in the pandemic were all of the sudden all these people had all of this scheduled content going out and the world shut down or huge conversations that need to be front and center like Black Lives Matter, many other things that came up. What happens if you have all this other content coming out, it's how are you going to like add that kind of sensitivity into the conversation.

17:02

So one of the pitfalls that happens when you pre record so much content in advance is you cannot reflect what's happening in current events, or trends in your online space or your specific niche and your content can become pretty stale. Now, depending on what kind of format or industry you have, this might not matter. But I know one of the things that's really powerful in podcast is being able to develop a relationship with your audience. And part of that is kind of talking about what's happening now in your intro or somewhere in the episode. So one of the negative pitfalls that I find is if you record too far in advance, your content can feel very systemized and honestly, quite sterile. And sometimes that can translate for your audience where your audience feels like they're being processized. Is that a word? We just made it a word. Have you ever noticed that like some podcasts that are like so freaking streamlined? It just feels like every episode is kind of the same. I'm snapping because I'm doing like the wheel in my hand, like over and over and over and over again. Honestly, that's a huge reason why, oh my gosh, I don't know if this is a bomb drop or what but why I've stopped listening to the big podcasts is the system is so rinse and repeat. They all sound the same. It's just a new topic, same rhythm. I don't know about you, but I want interesting. I want to feel like I'm having a real converse. I want to feel like I have somebody's real insight, not their curated insight. I'm done with scripted podcasts like I'm not a fan of those. I don't want to listen to that. If I want that I would listen to an audiobook where I'm actually going to get like the full context on it, right? Not just like a modified blog post. So I don't know that's just my style, that might not be yours. But what happens is when we get to batchy-batchy systemized, the mistake, a lot of people make, systems are good, but your audience should never feel like they're part of a system or that they're being put through a process. The power of a process is it should never feel like one. The problem is, a lot of business owners don't know how to find that rhythm so it becomes to feel like you're in a process. I don't know, maybe that's just a me thing but that's one thing that I get really frustrated with.

19:15

But here's the bigger one, this this one right here, this reason right here is exactly why I am not a huge fan of batching and it's because the quality of your skills have the potential to grow so quickly when you don't batch or if you can batch in a modified way, and let me just be really explicit clear what I mean by that. So skills like looking at the camera when you speak, skills like reducing your filler words, skills like figuring out your pace in your variation in your tone, learning how to string together ideas in a sentence that feels dynamic and exciting and you hear how my voice is doing all this but the big thing right now with my pace and then I pause. Do you hear how I do that? You know how I got really good at using my voice and talking to the camera and having this cadence and excitement when you hear me speak. It's because I record, I edit, I take notes, I get better. I record, I edit, I take notes, I get better.

20:20

Now here's what happens when you do batching. What most people do is they batch a couple of videos, then either they edit them or they send them to an editor which by the way, I don't edit my own videos anymore. Let me make it explicitly clear. I do not do this process anymore. But I have an editor, hey, Max. Shout out to Max. He's been with me from day one. He gets to hear all of the fumbles and stuff on the show which we keep 99% of them in. But what happens is back to you, what happens is if you batch let's say, four videos, or eight videos, or podcast episodes, whatever they are, you batch them, and then you send them to an editor or you do them yourself, typically, when you record them is a different time than when you edit them. And what happens is when you edit them, you most likely are cringing the entire time like I hate the way I look, I hate the way I sound, and you're just nitpicking the crap out of yourself but you're not giving any kind of constructive feedback side note, you need to know how to give yourself feedback which if you listened to the episode a couple of weeks ago around how to filter feedback, it applies to how you give yourself feedback. So side note, there's a couple episodes dedicated to that. We'll put those in the show notes for you so you can be more effective with how you give yourself feedback. But what happens is we whatever we pick ourselves apart, and then we forget about it because next up is we don't have to worry about batching again for another six to eight weeks, or whatever the timeframe is. And by the time you get back to the camera, do you think that you brought any of those lesson learns with you? Hell, no. So you're back right where you started from. And what happens is, if you do record, let's say four episodes back to back, sure your fourth episode comes out better. But your first one probably sounds like, I don't know, the more like this quiet, reserved, boring mirrorinh voice that you have sorry, we all have it. We all start with that. But we get warmed up as we go. That's why the, like two thirds in the episode how we sounds the most dynamic versus the beginning is hey, guys, welcome to the episode.

22:15

But what happens is if you batch, you do not get to benefit from the learning. Okay, if you batch your feedback is delayed, the application of that feedback is delayed and therefore microscopic. So here is what I recommend instead. I want you to think about how you can get into a cadence, where you're recording, where you are either editing, or you're watching the edited version back or even the unedited back. You need to see how you actually show up. And I know you're going to hate that, you're gonna hate how you look on camera, you're gonna hate how you sound, you're gonna hate how you filler word it up, you're gonna hate your run on sentences, you're gonna hate your slurry whatever you do with your mouth, whatever, it's there. It's just fact it's happening. But until you acknowledge it, and then ask yourself the question, how can I get better, you're not going to get better.

23:13

So here's what we need to do instead. If you want your content to be like mask quantity, go for it batch all day long. But if you want your content to be high quality and to get people to pay attention and keep coming back, you have to build the skill. The skill of speaking, the skill of looking on camera, the skill of video, the skill of podcasting, the skill of blog post writing, if that's what you're doing, the skill of writing really good captions. All of these things, friend, they are skills. And there are no shortcuts to you getting better at a skill other than you actually doing the skill. But if you're only doing the skill, once a month, how can you expect to get better at the skill and I'm talking like mastery level? What we have to do instead is build consistency and repetition with that skill, so this is my big beef with batching. Batching put your skill building a silo and if you want to get really, really good, you have to become the fancy word called, prolific, which I used to laugh at and like why do people have to use that word. Prolific just means you do it a lot. You produce a lot of the thing, a lot of content, a lot of writing a lot of video, so being prolific what that means is you show up and you do it frequently and in abundance.

24:32

So what I want you to think about and you're probably gonna push back and be but this, Heather, sounds inefficient? Well, it depends on how you define inefficient. If you're thinking about productivity and efficiency is every like, nickel and dime all of your time to be like isn't the best use of my time and I'm doing this thing over and over again. I should batch. Sure, that's one way to look at it. But I look at quality output from my time. And sure every week so you might be asking Heather, do you record a podcast episode every single week. Not always, but you're never going to see me batching five to six episodes in a week. It's just not a thing I do. I record whatsoever between one to three episodes in a week. That means some episodes or some weeks I don't record any, but some weeks I record quite a few. But we have a cadence where we're pretty much on pace for typically a few weeks ahead, sometimes we're farther ahead. But I always had this idea of like, hey, should we should be farther ahead? No, I like being anywhere from one to four weeks ahead on our content that's about it. Right now, at the time it's recording, the last six weeks, we've been running, recording our episodes, for some people, this may be embarrassing, but for me I'm damn proud of it. We're recording our episodes Friday before it releases on Monday. We have a very, very dialed in process for how we produce the show.

25:49

But coming back to you, what I want you thinking about is what's going to be the cadence that's going to improve your skills. So if you are recording a podcast episode, you have to think about this. Don't put yourself in a position where you're going to be stressed about it because that stress is going to impact negatively how you show up. So maybe you can get out ahead by a couple of weeks, maybe your two to three weeks ahead, you got to batch a little bit to get your tushy ahead. But what would it look like for you to either do one a week or maybe two every two weeks. I don't know like you figure out that groove for you but the goal is how do I batch out the non live recording time, ie, could you batch together show descriptions, your show notes, those kinds of things, but the actual art of the recording? How could you put that in a cadence where you're forced to show up each and every week? I know you're gonna cringe and be like, I seem so inefficient. Sure. But again, going back to how you define efficiency. I think it's damn efficient for you to be working every single week on your number one marketing asset which is your voice. You being able to articulate your ideas in a compelling way is your number one asset. And if you are not working on that asset every single week, how can you expect to be the most effective version of you when you show up on a webinar, or when you finally get booked as a guest on that show you've been pursuing for years. If you haven't been working the skill that is your voice every freaking week, you will not be ready in the moment, or you'll show up in the moment because let's be honest, you and I both know that you're pretty damn good at winging it. But what you're gonna do is you're gonna have that regret cycle afterwards, where you're going to beat yourself up by being so freaking frustrated that you were not more prepared. I don't know about you, but I want to enjoy my big moments when my big goals and my dreams happen as I know that they will, some coming yours will too, I want to freaking enjoy them.

28:04

When I book that podcast side note, I've talked about this. It's been a while on this show. But right behind my camera right now is a vision board. And on that vision board, I have a couple podcasts that I want to be on. One of them is James Wedmore's Mind Your Business podcast. One of them is Amy Porterfield, Online Marketing Made Easy and one of them is Jenna Kutcher's Gold Digger Podcast. Those have been on my board since the fall of 2018. I'm not been on any of them. To be perfectly honest, I also haven't pitched any of them. That will be changing in the next six months. I will be going after those shows. But I know you probably have similar shows on your list too. I do not want to be on those shows just to be frickin nervous and worried about what I'm going to say or are really on the back end of going oh my god if only I would have been more prepared. No, I want to be like I frickin did. And I want to be here celebrating with you not pretending like oh, look at me. I'm cool now. I'm too cool for you. I'm gonna be like Holy mother frick, like I frickin did it. I said I was gonna do it, I did it. I want to be shouting from the rooftops that I did it and I want to enjoy it. And the only way that I'm going to enjoy is the same way that you're going to enjoy is if you are prepared for those moments and preparation as it come by obsessing and typing and writing and trying to get everything right. It comes from building the skill so that you can trust yourself to rock that moment. That is what this is about. That is at the end of the day why I am not a huge fan of batching is it because it puts your skill building in a silo instead, I want you to make it a practice to build the right skills for your business.

29:36

So if you need to be really good at writing, you need to be in the practice of writing every single week. One might argue every single day. If you need to be the advocate or the voice of your business, you need to be using your voice every single day, every single week in your business. If you need to be really good at blog posting or SEO or whatever the requirements of your specific business, if you need to have that skill, you need to prioritize It's time to build that skill. And I find when it comes to your content, whether it's a podcast, a video, whatever it is that you do in your business, this is the best way to prioritize it because it's the most consistent one that has a deadline. Because chances are, you've already determined that you're going to be on a weekly cadence, monthly, whatever the cadence is for you, for when you publish your content. What a great gift to give yourself a deadline and a commitment to your audience to show up for them. Leverage that moment as your practice stage every single week. And it might seem weird, but it is. Every week, I'm practicing getting better at my voice on this show. Is it perfect? Nope. I would actually argue it is literally never been perfect on any episode on any show. One might say I'm a hot mess express but I also think that's why y'all love me. That's why you keep coming back because I serve it up, give it real, right? It is tangible. It is it is relatable, it's entertaining but you also know I'm going to kick you in the high knee quite a bit and I'm going to keep it real. I'm also going to tell you, you're doing a damn good job. Those are the things that you can expect from me. But I have to continue to show up each and every week, with my imperfect voice getting better. If you go back to my earlier episodes, y'all I've always been a great speaker. Since I've been a professional speaker, I've been a really, really good speaker. But you can laugh with me go back to Episode 1, 2, 3. Go back and listen, you're going to hear, audibly hear a transformation in my voice. Go back to my earliest Facebook Lives, you can find them on YouTube, on my YouTube channel. You will see a visible difference in my comfort level as you go through the videos. I am a work in progress publicly. And I want you to have the bravery to be that too. But if you keep hiding your podcast batching in silos, you are moving much slower than you need to.

32:02

Now let me get the big fat caveat. You're like, wait a minute, but forever. No, you don't have to be on this weekly content cadence of showing up every week forever, right? And you should plan. So case in point for me, I have a vacation coming up this summer, I have a launch coming up in the fall. I'm getting ready for that. Yes, I will be doing some batch planning. But I'm going to give you a big caveat on here. I still especially through my launch, I still be showing up on live streams quite often. So I'm going to be showing up and using my voice on repeat. Also, I have been doing this for a very, very, very long time. So you have to think about your skill set right now. Are you early in your journey when it comes to your articulation or you're writing or whatever the skill is that you need to learn? If you're very early in the journey, you need to have a frequency level and you need to stick with it. If you have developed more of a mastery for it, you can get away with doing it less frequently. But I would argue if you really are pursuing mastery, you don't give up. You don't backpedal, right, but you have to figure out there might be different ways to do it.

33:01

So yes, there will be a time and place for batching. Yes, I use batching in my business. But I think that you want to consider not batching when you really want to intentionally build a skill. And if you're listening to this show, I'm gonna bet that you want to build the skill of becoming a very dynamic and magnetic speaker. So I hope that will be talked about today supports you on that. Now, am I giving you an exact roadmap of how to do it? No, because you have to figure out how to make it work for you. I don't know what your content is, I don't know where you're showing up. I don't know what your platforms are but what I want you to do is invite you to ask the question, where am I already showing up, where am I already committed, that I can leverage those as stages for practice? And whether that's on a weekly cadence, whether that's on a every couple of weeks, whatever that looks like, my number one recommendation is do a little mini batch to get out in front, so that you're never jumping week to week with the oh my gosh, if something happened, like my day yesterday with sweet Levi put a shovel in the face. If something like that were to happen which y'all stuff like that will happen, hopefully your child will not take a shovel to the face but some other version of that will happen and your week is going to slip by you're not going to get stuff done so you do need to be out in front of it a bit. Give yourself the grace of a lead time but then build into a rhythm. That way you can be timely, that way you can be fresh with your content, but also when most importantly, you can be building the skill.

34:27

Lastly, I want to give you this, find the blend that works for you in this season. And by this season I don't mean like an actual season. I mean whatever season that you're in business, so that could be a season of a few weeks that are super busy gearing up for a launch. It could be a season of a couple months where you need to be more present for your kids. It can be a season when you're going all balls in baby and you're leaning in because you're getting ready for some of the big. I would have season as I'm not going to define that time period but you know what that looks like? I want you to really find the blend works that well in this season. And I want you to be open that whatever works for you now doesn't mean that's what you need to do forever. I think the thing that I have done best in my business is if I have adapted to what I need in my business needs. So in this season for me right now, I need a batch a little bit. But a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, I said, hell, no to batching. I don't care what anybody else says. I need to be the season of skill building. I need to really dig in and be present with it, then the pandemic happened and I have to figure out, I don't have time for this, I had to get into batching.

35:30

So what you have to think about is what season are you in right now? Don't be committed to it for the future. It's just for now, not forever. Sidenote, that's my favorite podcast episode I've ever recorded. Let's link to that one in the show notes. Not for now, or it's just for now, not forever. It's a little mini episode, if you need to hear that right now. There's a whole there's a whole thing behind it. But I want you to start thinking about, it's not about chasing the best practice, and then figuring out forever, it's figuring out what works for you right now in the season. And then being open to find your next version that works for you. So maybe for right now it is a little mini version of a batch. And maybe later is a little more of a skill building sesh for a few months, then you go back to a batch. You got to figure out what works for you but I want you to relinquish the idea that there is a right way to do it and you need to work on finding your way to do it. But along the way, make sure that you're prioritizing the skill that's going to take you where you want to go. All right, friend, I hope you've enjoyed this episode has been both entertaining and informative. I will see you back next week with my friend, Emily Hall. We're going to be debriefing the Craft and Commerce conference. But more importantly talking about the role of live events in the online industry, post pandemic-ish world what that looks like and talk to you about a live event we have coming up this fall. Sidenote, spoiler alert, if you want to join us next week, we're gonna talk about how you can. Alright, friends, I will see you real soon.