What does it mean that batch processing for efficiency?

Group similar small tasks together and process them in one dedicated block, so that setup costs are paid once instead of once per task.

Example: You check email forty-seven times per day. Each time, you open your inbox, scan for anything urgent, read a few messages, reply to one or two, switch back to whatever you were doing, and then spend several minutes reloading the context of the work you interrupted. The email itself takes three minutes. The context reload takes eight. Multiply that by forty-seven and you have spent over six hours — most of your working day — not on email and not on your real work, but on the transitions between them. Now imagine a different pattern: you check email three times per day, in dedicated thirty-minute blocks at 9 AM, 1 PM, and 5 PM. During each block, you process everything that has arrived since the last block. You reply, forward, archive, and flag. Then you close the inbox and do not reopen it until the next block. The total time spent on email is roughly the same — maybe ninety minutes. But the total time spent on context switching drops from six hours to three brief transitions. You have recovered nearly five hours of your day without answering a single email less.

Try this: Identify three to five categories of small, recurring tasks that you currently handle as they arrive — email, Slack messages, administrative approvals, filing, errands, phone calls, social media responses. For one full week, instead of handling them on arrival, capture each one into a simple list organized by category. At the end of each day, schedule a single dedicated block for each category the following day. During that block, process every item in the category consecutively, without switching to anything else. At the end of the week, compare two numbers: the total time you spent on these tasks during the batch week versus an honest estimate of the time you spent on them the previous week, including all the context-switching overhead. The time savings will be substantial, but pay equal attention to a qualitative shift — how much more uninterrupted time you had available for deep work during the batch week compared to the prior week.