Why Task Batching Does Not Work All The Time

During an initial coaching session, a physician shared with me about the challenges she faced in charting. She was not able to figure out how to complete her charts on time to go home. Let us call her Kay.

Kay is a primary care physician who works for a large organization. She is out-patient based and sees many well-visits. Her problem is that she has tried different things and has not been able to leave work at a decent hour. She has utilized scribe, artificial intelligence for charting and dictation, among other things.

I asked Kay how her typical clinic day was like. One of the things she shared was that she used the batching technique to write charts. She would see three to four patients and then sit down and write all their charts, and then move on to the next few patients.

Task batching is a method used to group similar tasks to be done at a time. The idea is that, by doing similar things at a time, it keeps your focus in one place, which translates into increased efficiency and productivity. It works particularly well for something that involves a lot of preparation, such as baking. If you plan to bake 2 dozen cookies, it is much easier and more time efficient to prepare a portion of the dough that is enough for the 24 cookies, divide it into 24 smaller pieces, and bake them all in the oven at the same time. Imagine, instead of batching the cookie dough this way, you are making individual portions of the dough, one at a time. Then you bake each separately. Twenty-four times. How much longer will that take?

Task batching is also helpful to boost efficiency by minimizing task switching. Imagine when you are in the middle of writing a patient chart, and you get an alert that a new email message has arrived. You then stop writing your chart, open up the email window to check out who the message is from. You decide if you want to read it right away. If not, you switch back to charting. If you decide to read it, you open the message, finish reading it, then go back to charting, where you left off. There is both time and mental energy added to switching from charting to email and back to charting. Task switching may cost up to 40% of your productive time.

At first glance, Kay’s idea of batching patient documentation seems to be a good one. She sees 3-4 patients at a time, then goes to her office, sits at her desk and starts to write the notes. Why does this batching not work?

Not all task batching increases efficiency or productivity.

When you see three patients before charting, there are three times the patient information in your brain. That is three times the brain-draining power. As you are settling yourself to write those notes, you are spending more mental energy to separate the patients, to make sure you do not mix their information up. That in itself involves task switching, as you are quickly scanning each patient in your head and making sure that you choose the correct information for the chart in front of you. As you are switching from one patient to another in your brain while trying to write one patient chart, it is taking you more time and effort to complete that chart, compared to seeing one patient and doing their chart right away.

The way that Kay is batching increases task switching and actually decreases the focus on one thing at a time. When you are switching tasks more often, and when you are having less focus, you slow down. Your productivity is negatively affected.

A helpful solution for Kay is to see one patient and to complete that chart right away. This allows for focusing on one patient at a time. As you are only dealing with one patient at that given moment, it is less likely to mix up their information with another patient’s data.

For Kay, one example to batch is emails. Set times during your office hours to check emails, instead of checking each message in real time. This minimizes task switching. For example, you can set to check emails twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon.

The goal of task batching is to simplify things, decrease the repetitive preparation time and to increase focus. If the kind of batching does not achieve these, it is best to avoid it. Seeing one patient and doing their chart right away is more efficient than to tackle multiple patient charts at a time.