💡 Genius Content Batching Strategy Saves Hours Of Time ⏰
Are you stumped and forever trying to catch up with your businesses’ content? Then why not try a content batching strategy and get back into the game? In this episode, Adrienne Hill interviews the Founder of A Purpose Driven Mom, Cara Harvey. Cara talks about content batching, how it works and how it will help business owners get more out of their time. Tune in and learn more tips to maximize your time.
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💡 Genius Content Batching Strategy Saves Hours of Time ⏰
I'm here with Cara Harvey. She is a mom empowerment coach and a social media batching expert. I had to have her on. We need what she has to offer. Welcome, Cara. I'm excited that you're here. I'm super geeked out about your topic.
Thank you for having me on. I like to talk about all things like productivity, especially when it comes to social media. I'm excited to dive in.
For those readers who maybe have not met you yet, could you tell us a little bit about your story and your background and what it is that you do?
I call myself an accidental entrepreneur, which a lot of people can relate to. I was a school teacher for eight years, and I loved it. I taught high school Special Education. It was all I wanted to do since I was seven. Around year six, I started to feel burnout. I started to feel like I was living for my kids, which isn't a terrible thing but when you have a family and a life, it's not the best. In the school I was at, the kids went to 8:00 to 5:00 and every other Saturday, and that meant I was there 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM. I wasn't seeing my fiancé at the time. It was not ideal.
I remember the minute I realized I couldn't do it anymore, I was training to become a principal. I was the principal of our summer school program. The last day of summer school overlapped with the first day of regular school, and I cried on the way to work. I was overwhelmed and I thought, “I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm super burnt out and feeling anxious.” I had gone home and I said to my now-husband, “I'm done.” He's a principal and he understands. He’s a numbers guy and he said, “Okay. This is what you need to make for us to make this happen. What do you think?” I was like, “I can figure it out.”
Content Batching Strategy: When you're batching, you're taking these tasks and putting them together because not only does our brain like it, but it saves so much time.
At the time, I had been dabbling in network marketing. I had used the product, it was successful for me, and I shared it with a whole bunch of people. It was a hobby but I loved it. I enjoyed helping people with something a little bit different than the way I was helping in the classroom. I was making enough to pay for my product, and I thought, “If I put some time in, maybe I could make this a real thing.” I don't like the word hustle at all, but it's what I did.
For that year, I was like, “I want to get out of the classroom. I'm ready to do it,” and I did hustle. I was working 60 hours a week as a teacher putting in twenty-plus in my network marketing business. I was burning out, I will tell you that. At the end of the year, I was able to replace my teaching income and “retire” from teaching and become my own boss. I got into entrepreneurship through network marketing.
One of the things that happened though in that transition was I always equated success with burnout, and I didn't realize it. I always thought that if I was the last one at work, if I was the one working the hardest, if I was the one showing up the most, that meant I was the most successful. That limiting belief that you have to hustle and grind to be successful started to turn into what I was doing network marketing. I left one job and then start working 60 hours a week, network marketing. I thought, “This isn't it. This isn't freedom.” Was I successful? Yes. Was I able to grow a six-figure business? Certainly. I wasn't finding what I felt God had my purpose to be.
About 2.5 years into doing that, I felt a call to do something a little bit different. I had always been the one who helps people organize schedules, budgets, and manage their time. It’s been something I naturally was good at. I was doing it in teaching and did it with friends for fun. I'd be like, “Let me help you make your plan.” That was the type of person I was. I thought, “What if I could help other entrepreneurial moms figure it out?”
It was right around the time I was pregnant with my son. I have three kids. I thought, “I'm going to do it.” I completely took a leap and left network marketing in the sense that you leave it but still get this residual income for it. Thank you for that. I'm still getting paid to do that. I abandoned the ship there and thought, “I'm going to start over and become my own brand. I'm going to help women live a life they love.” It started that first year like spaghetti on the wall. I don't even know what I was writing about. I look back on my blog, there are recipes. I cannot cook. I don't know what I was doing.
It wasn't until 1.5 years in that I found my groove with productivity, and I realized that everything I was doing was anchored in priority-based productivity. It was helping moms feel less overwhelmed create seasonal goals that made sense for them at the time. There are times where we have to push a little more. There are times where we have to get up a little bit earlier. There are also times when our kids need us differently and we can scale back at work.
As moms, for me and the audience I work with, it was something that not a lot of people were talking about. In terms of productivity, when you have five hours to do something, it's not always the reality. It's been over 1.5 years that I've been focusing on this, and I help moms and mompreneurs figure out how they can make systems in their homes and their businesses so they can also go after their goals so that they're not burning out but enjoying what they do. We're supposed to also enjoy it.
I have to admit, I feel like you're living in my brain. I also started in network marketing, built a lifestyle around that business model, and found I didn't like it. I also hated the word hustle. I didn't want to be a hustler. Also, I pivoted into something else. It's like I'm looking at a mirror. This is interesting. It’s fascinating that this is how you help mompreneurs. I love this. Maybe for those who aren't familiar with the concept of batching, what is batching specifically when it comes to social media?
I found that when I became an entrepreneur, I was starting to try to do things the same way I was teaching, and that was always like putting out fires. It’s like, “Urgent, I have to do this. I have to do that.” It didn't leave me feeling like I was making any moves in my business. I felt like I was waking up every single day, looking at this to-do list, and be like, “Crap, this has to get done right now,” and doing it the next day.
I finally found this batching system, and it was built for me. Essentially, the concept of batching is going through and taking similar tasks and doing them at the same time. Here's the thing, our schedules are busy and there are times we have to do things in the pocket. On the side of my planner, it's called things I can do with my kids around. It's tasks that I can do when they're here. I don't mind breaking up a fight, opening a snack, or getting the Play Dough that's stuck, things that I can do. Sometimes we have to multitask. The way our brains are wired, they would prefer to single task.
When you're batching, you're taking these like tasks and you're putting them together. Not only does our brain like it but it saves so much time. Think about if you were to go through writing a blog post for example. You know you have to write the post, make the images, and do the SEO. If every time you did that, you open a new tab, you open Canva again, and then you're finding this link, for each post one at a time, it would take you hours to get one post up.
Essentially, if you plan in advance enough, and it doesn't have to be crazy planning in advance, I do a quarterly plan. I like to get stuff out a month. My aim is always to get next month’s stuff done before the current month closes. It could even be looking at the next week and batching that a little bit so that you can enter the week not as stressed out. I've shared this when we got on that I'm a little under the weather. I'm thankful that I batched because I woke up and I’m like, “Everything's already done for Monday.” I can take care of myself. That's also something we don't think about when we get into this entrepreneurial journey. We move from thing to thing.
If you're smart about it and you're pre-planning it strategically and systematizing it, when things pop up, when you’re like, “I forgot to send this email. I need to get on the phone with this client. I'm not feeling. My kids are sick.” You're like, “It's okay because I have given myself that gift.” I'm happy for Cara because she took care of Cara. She was like, “I got you. I knew you were going to be sick. All your stuff is done. You can rest.” That’s important.
The concept is doing like-minded things together. If you'd like, I can talk a little bit more about the steps to do that when it comes to social media. A lot of times, people will say to me, “I'd love to get into a batching system and I don't know how to even get started.” Let's talk about social media because there are many facets to this.
Content Batching Strategy: Engage with your people so you can figure out what they need and how to help them. Then you can sell them your product, make your income, and have more freedom to help more people.
One of the things I love to do is I like to do all of my Instagram posts for the month strategically before the month starts. They're written, images are done, hashtags and research, so I can post them and engage with the people. What often happens is you spend all this time finding your hashtag. You spend all this time writing the perfect caption or creating an image. You then post it and you're like, “I don't even feel like being on Instagram right now to engage with the people.”
You're burnt out. The concept of batching, in general, allows you to engage and enjoy everything in your business because you've done it in advance. We were talking about launching before we got on this. For me, I will never go into a launch without it all done. Yes, things pop up. I love to have the emails written and the social media scheduled. I want to enjoy my business.
If you worked ahead, you can be present with your people.
That's the point. The people are the point. The point is not, “I need to post on Instagram X amount of times a week.” The point is not that I need to do this in my stories. The point is not that I have to have my Facebook group running this way. The point is that you engage with your people, figure out what they need, and figure out how to help them. You then can sell them your product and make your income so then you have more freedom to help more people.
When we're not being strategic about everything in your business, in particular, the social media content, then we're living in urgent. We're constantly living in, “I’ve got to post today,” and not thinking, “I want to create a launch runway because I'm launching this product at the end of the month. I have this promotion coming up for an affiliate. I didn't do it. I need to fit it in but it doesn't fit into my 9:00,” however you look at it.
When you're super strategic about it, it makes the selling piece much easier because you're creating a launch runway intentionally and not, “I wanted to promote that webinar for that thing. I want to do this one-on-one service. I wanted to share this testimonial but I forgot to send out the survey.” All of those pieces. It comes down to systematizing it.
The first thing I recommend people do when they're batching is you need to know what you're doing. I'm not talking about business in general. We'll narrow it to social media. If you don't even know what tasks you're doing, you won't know how to batch them. I always recommend starting with the time inventory. Spend a week and do a time inventory. Write down everything that you're doing from how long it takes you to make the images, to the captions, to emails you're writing. Chart it and mark it down.
I have a time inventory sheet and on the bottom, I even put my four biggest time wasters: email, Instagram, Voxer and Facebook. Every time I open those, I put a tally mark because I knew that if I kept saying, “Two minutes,” I would drive myself crazy with it. I would tally every time I open those things. At the end of the week, you're going to get a good picture of where you're spending your time. One, you're going to see your time wasters. You're also going to see, “What are some things I could delegate that I don't need to be doing?”
For me, I don't like to make images. I'm not great at landing pages. Design is not in my zone of genius. Those are things I outsource because it will take me forever to do something that an expert could do. My time is worth it differently. I wanted to make a GIF for my sales page and I don't know how to do it. I wasted 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make this GIF that I'm like, “I bet somebody could do this in three minutes if they knew how to do it.” I had to take my own advice. We're stubborn because we want to do it all ourselves. The recommendation though is to do your time inventory for a week.
Once you're done reading this, start it. Do it for 3 to 5 days. You then can go through and code it, and you can say, “What are some things I can delegate? Maybe I'm not going to delegate them now.” Where this will save you time in the long run is you can start Loom and do a Loom video while you're doing your system. Start videoing your processes now. When you're ready to get a VA, when you're ready to hire out, you can be like, “I did a screen share of me creating my infographics for my Instagram. This is how I like it done.” You're saving your time. If you don't write it down, you don't even know what you're doing.
Once you go through it and you look at the big picture, I want you to categorize what you're doing. This essentially couldn't be done 1 of 2 ways. Sometimes you can categorize in batch by topic. Monday is my email day. I write all my emails for everything I'm doing. Thursday is my podcast day where I work straight on the podcast. You can have it either be a task or you can have it be by the leg of your business. Categorize them.
If you're going to make images, instead of, “Today, I'm going to make my podcast images. I have Canva open. Why don't I make my podcast, blog post, and my social media images, and do them all while Canva is open while I'm searching for stock images?” Your brain is in a better mood. You do your time inventory. You're going to categorize it by the type of thing you're doing. You've got to go through and say, “What am I doing on which day? What am I going to do to get ahead?”
Mondays are my email days. The way that I pre-plan this is I use Trello. I go through and I make three checklists on Trello. You could do this in any system, paper or whatever you want. One is Complete this Month, and the other is to Complete this Week, and the other checklist is Complete this Month. I did it for the end of July 2021 and I did it for all of August 2021. I batched and I worked vertically.
I was like, “What is every email I need to write to get ahead?” For me, I'm writing for September 2021. I'm trying to get ahead for a month. I was like, “I’ll write a newsletter every single week.” It would be newsletter 1, 2, 3 and 4. I’ll write a podcast email, podcasts 1, 2, 3 and 4. It takes me no time to think vertically like that. I batched the entire card out so when it's time to sit down and work, I know exactly what I have to do. It's rinse and repeat. That was a huge bird's eye view of the concept of batching. I'd love to take any other questions, and we can talk more about specifically doing it for social media.
Hearing all this, I'm starting to feel energized. I’m like, “I'm going to do this.” I'm one of those people that I get an immense amount of satisfaction from checking off the to-do things. For the readers, if you're one of those people that has 67 tabs open, you might need batching. I'll throw that out there. You talked through why batching is effective. You can work ahead and you can have the breathing room to connect with your people.
You also talked through steps that you use to batch. Talk to us a little bit more about when it comes to social media specifically. If you were to give our readers a high-level, simple couple of steps they could follow if they're new to batching, and they're getting super energized watching this and thinking, “I'm going to do this.” What's the best way for them to get started?
I love sharing this system because, for me, I was not posting on my social media until I started this. I would do it randomly. I would think, “This promotion.” It was reactive instead of proactive. I had become super proactive. Do you know what's easy now? Selling in my DMs. I don't have to try as much because it happens for me. I'm intentionally setting a runway up. I was able to fill up my one-on-one services with one Insta-Story post that was like, “I've got five spots. Is anyone interested?” I've been talking about it intentionally. I wasn't selling it but I was sharing it on purpose all month. When it came to it, I was like, “Let's see if this works.” I filled them up in a weekend. They were done and there it is.
When you're looking at your social media, I recommend you try to get ahead as much as you can. I know that people are reading this in September 2021. Take the time now to get ahead for October 2021. You've got a few weeks before the month ends. Spend fifteen minutes a day. I do it over the course of three weeks. I don't do them all in one day. I have three kids. I've got a lot of things that I'm doing. I'm not sitting and doing them all in one day. I can if I have the time. Most of the time, I do it over the course of a couple of weeks.
This is what I recommend you to do. I use Trello but you can use anything that’s a calendar for it. You're going to look at a couple of things. One, what are the promotions that you're going to be talking about in the month? Do you have an affiliate promotion going on? Are you doing some one-on-one services? Are you doing webinars? What are those things? You're going to put those in first because you want to make sure you've got that hard, “This is happening.”
How often do we skirt around the fact that we're selling something? It drives me crazy when people are like, “I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to bother people.” What you have is a gift that somebody is waiting for. They're waiting for you to talk about it. I had someone messaged me and DM me, “I'm finally ready. I'm glad that you posted this. I've been waiting for something like this and it came up.” People want it.
It's a win-win. It’s a win for you because you're selling your services, but it's a win for them because they have been dying with feeling overwhelmed and constant hustle mode. You come along and they're like, “Thank you.”
Content Batching Strategy: If you don't go through the steps to create systems for your business, then you don't even know what you can hire out.
I was scared in the beginning. I know that this is easier said than done. Will you repel people? Will they unfollow? Yes, but they're not your people. Once I was able to realize I'm going to post to share things that I know are going to help that ideal client that I'm trying to reach, I stopped caring about the people who didn't like it. Most days, you get the nasty DM and you're like, “Okay.” Overall, you can't.
Start with your promotions. If you're promoting something, you're going to want to have a hard post on your feed. I'm talking Instagram. This is also for Facebook in your Stories or a Facebook group. You first go ahead and calendar your dates out. You're going to go through and you're going to start with, “What day am I going to be promoting those things?” What you're going to do is you're going to think, “What are some ways that I could build authority and value for those things leading up to it? How can I serve the people?”
Warm them up on the topic so that when you bring it up, they're like, “Thank God. I was hoping she had something for me.”
Honestly, you want people messaging you and being like, “When are you going to open the cart to your course? Do you have any services open right now?” You want people doing that. If you start to let them know that, then they're going to be able to do it. I go through my calendar, hard things first. I then come up with about two value posts that lead to each promotion that I'm going to do each month. I post maybe 3 to 5 times on my Instagram each week. It depends. It's not a ton, sometimes even less. It doesn't matter that much, honestly, anymore on Instagram. I do like to get it out there.
I start with the promos. I come up with 1 or 2 value posts where I'm teaching whatever that topic is, and they are on a runway two weeks prior to that. My runways typically go 3 to 9 weeks depending on what I'm promoting and how far in advance I'm batching. I write down, “When am I doing those?” For me, I have a podcast. Every week, I post the podcast episode. I also will maybe share a personal post and I'll attach those in there. I fill in the gaps always with the lens of, “What am I promoting in the next month or so? How does this help bridge the gap from where my ideal customer is now to where I want them to be to say yes to me?” You know their objections.
If I know someone is going to say to me that they would like to work and take my course, for example, but they're like, “I don't know if I'm going to even have the time to take your course.” I know that, so I'm going to create a post that talks about three ways that they can fit in learning time as a busy mom. I'm going to write that post a couple of weeks out. I'm going to hit their objections head-on. I map those out first.
On Trello, you can make them in lists and look at them in the calendar. That helps because there are times when they overlap and you're like, “That's too many posts in one week.” There are others like PLANOLY. There are all these other things you can use. I use Trello for it. Batch one, calendar it out. What I noticed people do when they're not batching is, “I'm going to do this post on this day. Let me write the caption for this post. Let me make the image.” That's not batching. That's wasting your time.
Go ahead and batch while your brain is thinking about the dates. Once you've got 3 to 5 posts and you're like, “These are the ones I'm going to write. These are the general topics and the themes that line up with my content plan,” I want you to go ahead and I want you to write the captions for them. I always do captions before I do images. I will go in and I will write out all of the captions. This takes me the longest because I write deeper, long-form posts. I like to think, “What do I want my message to be?” You then batch ahead all of the captions that you're going to write.
That makes sense. Copywriting is a little bit art and science. Once your brain is in that mode, it's so much easier to continue in the same mode than it is to flip around.
You get into a groove. There's a saying we had when I taught English and it was like, “It's the start that stops us.” I would give kids sentence starters to start their paragraphs because it would help them jostle like, “I can start with because or between,” whatever the word. When you're in the zone, the first post is always the hardest to write. When you're in the zone, you're like, “This is great. This is a great idea.” You get in the groove and you do it. You batch all the writing. Maybe you leave it alone for a week and you come back to it.
When I'm writing, something that I'll do is if I have an idea and inspiration for an image, I'll put it in parentheses next to it. For example, if I had to post, I’ll do it on Friday so it’s my favorite podcast or whatever. I'll put in parentheses infographic because that would be a great infographic. If I know I have a picture that fits this message, I put lifestyle posts. When I do come back to it, I know what type of post I want to make. I do that while I'm writing. I'll come back to it and then I open up Canva and I start to make images.
I use templates for everything. I don't like to make images. It's something I don't do that much as myself anymore. My VA does a lot of my images for me because I'm not great at it and it takes me way too long to line up things. I don't know why it's challenging for me but I'm like, “I’ll let somebody else do this.” I get irritated at it. I've got certain templates.
For example, I do these Fave Fridays and they're always the same type of posts. I did one that was my favorite mindset podcast and one was my favorite planner resources or whatever I was talking about. It's easy to do it and then change the circle to a check or to a star, and then it's a different infographic but looks the same. Infographics are big right now with people sharing them that I'm trying to post a lot of them.
I had one I did that went viral and it was about different schooling choices for your kids. It winded up having almost 600 shares to the story. I was like, “This is crazy. I don't even know what to do.” It was a simple infographic. You want people to share it. I use Canva and make all the images. I'm probably irritated because I don't like making images so I walk away for a while. I'm like, “I’m okay,” but then I do the last part of it.
I love that you have the self-awareness to know, “That's not my zone of genius. I don't have to be the one doing this. Someone else can do that so I can focus on something I am great at, podcasting, writing, and coming up with the content ideas.” For the readers, do you notice her amazing energy? She has this energy. It's because she allows herself to live in her zone of genius and she's okay with letting some tasks go to other people. Everything she's doing is batched. How much more energy do you have in your batching versus when you're not?
Much more because I'm not reactive. I'm enjoying it. My business will be three years old in November 2021. It's still such a little baby. I hired my first person in 2020. I was doing all of it myself and I was afraid to hire out because I'm a control freak and I want it done my way. Honestly, it's challenging to hire people sometimes if you don't have your systems together. It feels like an extra job in the beginning.
We've got three employees on the team, four freelancers that do work for us, and I get to do things like this. I get to teach and train and do things that I enjoy doing. I wouldn't have known what they were if I didn't go through the steps of doing a time inventory and starting to batch and then noticing, “This takes me a long time.” It took everyone a long time. I realized it didn't have to take everyone a long time.
If you don't go through the steps to create systems for your business, then you don't even know what you can hire out, and then you don't know what you enjoy doing. I don't want to be pinning on Pinterest all day. It's not something I feel like I need to be doing. I needed to do it to know that it wasn't something that was in my zone of genius.
If you're reading and you're like, “Hiring is scary.” It is, but the amount of growth you can have when you systematize your business and then outsource to the people who are better. People are better than you are. We need to understand that and accept, “I'm not the best at everything.” That was what was holding me back. I'm a total control freak. I wanted it done my way, but my way isn't always the best and it's not the fastest. By letting someone else do that, I'm able to jump into a CEO role and it has exponentially grown my business.
I’m having this summit on September 2021. People have that runway to prepare for the holidays. You need that time to prepare. A little insider tip here. I've lined up all these experts to bring you guys these tips. I'll let you know the majority of them that I'm reaching out to and inviting to interview, their promotions are planned out through the end of the year already.
I can see in you the energy that you're emanating. It's clear that it's working well for you once you got brave enough to systematize and giveaway little parts of it. You've got it nailed. This is super helpful. You've shared tons of tips about why it's effective, the steps that you use, how you use it for social, and then some of the action tips to get started. I understand that you do have a free gift for our readers.
Yes, I do. I have made a Social Media Planner, it's on Trello. I mentioned it a few times because it's the way that I prefer to run my business systems. It has the Trello template, which you can completely copy. It also has a video where you can learn exactly the batching system I use. I teach it inside the freebie. I have the link for you, and you can go and snag it for free. If you're like, “I would love to get my social media done for the next month so during the next month, I can be present in the next month,” you can go grab it and get started on it right away.
For the readers, if you have 62 tabs open, if you feel like you're in constant hustle mode, or you feel like you're constantly reacting and treading water but never getting ahead, this is a super valuable gift. You can plan ahead, get ahead, be super prepared for next quarter, be present, enjoy yourself, and have the same amazing energy that Cara is putting off right now. Who's not loving that?
Be sure to scoop up her free gift. Pop over to the Facebook group because after every interview, we have a debrief and we break it down. How can we get into action? How can we start to implement something that we learned right away? Get into action because that's where the magic happens. We're purposely doing this in plenty of time to be ready for the next quarter.
Be sure to pop in, join the debrief, and let us know what you learned. What energized you? What action are you going to take? How are you going to use this to be so much more efficient on social and to have fun again? What I loved about what you shared with us, Cara, is that when you pre-batch and you're able to be present with your people, then on social, they're coming to you. How much more fun is business when the leads come to you instead of you having to chase them down?
It feels alive. That's what it is, yes, you have to put the work in advance to even get ahead a week. There are a lot of people I talk to that are like, “I can't even get ahead for this week.” By creating the systems, you can get ahead for a week and then start to get ahead for a month. We have all of our podcast episodes recorded for the entire quarter. That's how we roll over here because I want to enjoy it. If something happens, I don't want to panic and think, “Now it's midnight. I'm up all night and I don't enjoy my business.” That's what I want for everybody out there who's running one. Find a business that is aligned with you and have fun at the same time.
I also want that for all of you. Be sure to grab Cara’s super abundantly amazing freebie. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm super geeked about your topic.
Helpful Links:
✅ The Ultimate Trello Social Media Planning System - Cara's free gift
✅ Book a 6-Figure Strategy Session - Adrienne’s free gift for you
✅ Adrienne’s Entrepreneur Community on Facebook
Important Links
Facebook group – Purpose Drive Mom Community: Productivity & Time Management for Moms
Podcast – Purpose Driven Mom
Social Media Planner – Cara Harvey Trello
About Cara Harvey
Cara is a wife, mom to a 14 year old stepson, 5 year old daughter, 3 year old son, and a woman of God. She works as a productivity coach and her mission is to help busy moms take massive action on their goals and 3x their productivity without overwhelm or burnout. . She does this via her blog, podcast - The Purpose Driven Mom Show, virtual community groups, and e-courses that help women learn to prioritize their lives!