Leadership and Marketing Update from H. Leiner & CO.
Once you know you should be delegating, it’s difficult to know what to delegate. Either everything seems important for you to do or the opposite. How do you figure out what to delegate?
Go through your to-do list and everything you mark with one of the following T’s should be delegated:
- Tiny: These tasks are so small that they seem almost too small to care about. They only take at most a couple of minutes to accomplish, but all those pauses in your flow of work add up. Tiny tasks are booking a flight, adding an appointment to your calendar, or writing down a phone number.
- Tedious: These tasks are simple and mindless, so they can be done by someone else. If you can accomplish it while listening to music or talking on the phone, it probably fits into this category. Tedious tasks include entering data into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing files, or collating papers.
- Time-consuming: These tasks may be somewhat complex and you may need to step in at the end to make a decision or interpret the information, but a large chunk of the assignment can be done without you. Time-consuming tasks could be researching competitors or selecting appropriate data from a large spreadsheet.
- Teachable: These tasks are broader that encompass other smaller jobs and may be complex, but can be broken down into step-by-step instructions or explained in a way that will be understood by others. Teachable tasks include teaching the way you like your presentations formatted or the way to use a specific program.
- Terrible at: These tasks are not your strong points. More than that, you don’t feel you will adequately do the job even if you exert your utmost effort into it. Terrible at tasks could be a certain technological aspect of your organization that you can hire a professional to handle or typing an email quickly under pressure.
- Time sensitive: These tasks are extremely important and need to be done immediately, but you also have other tasks that are more pressing at the moment. Delegate these tasks so that everything can be accomplished at the right time. Time sensitive tasks are changing a plane ticket the day before a flight or calling customer service about an important order that has not yet arrived.
Put a little T next to the tasks that should be delegated. Then delegate them!
(Harvard Business Review)
