By Don Wetmore
Time Management
Don Wetmore
We all have 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. Subtract eight hours each night for sleep, and we have approximately 112 waking hours to accomplish everything we need and want to do.
That is our limit – unless we learn to delegate.
If we insist on doing everything ourselves, we limit our potential. But when we enlist others to manage certain tasks, we tap into their time, skills and expertise. The result? We can accomplish more without adding hours to our day.
Delegation is the process of using someone else’s time and abilities to increase our own results.
Some people tell me they cannot delegate because they have no staff. “I am the staff!” they insist. Yet we all delegate, often without realizing it.
Consider your mail. You could drive to the post office every day to collect it, but you choose to let a letter carrier deliver it. Why? Because you recognize that your time can be better spent elsewhere.
Think about a simple restaurant meal. Producing hamburgers, fries and drinks requires the combined efforts of farmers, manufacturers, drivers, distributors and restaurant employees. No one person did it all. Each contributed a particular skill to produce a result that would have been difficult or impossible to achieve alone.
That is the power of delegation.
Yet many people resist applying this principle to their own work. We take pride in doing things ourselves and often repeat the familiar expression, “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”
That may sound reasonable, but it ignores one important fact: We do not have unlimited time.
The real obstacle to delegation is rarely finding something to hand off. It is letting go. We may worry that someone else will not do the job as well as we would. But if we insist on doing everything ourselves, we become the bottleneck in our own success.
Here is a straightforward way to begin.
Each evening, during your daily planning, review tomorrow’s to-do list. Examine each task and ask yourself one question: “Is this the best use of my time?”
If the answer is yes, schedule it for yourself. If the answer is no, consider who else could manage it, what instructions they would need and what outcome you expect.
Delegation does not mean abandoning responsibility. It means assigning the task, communicating expectations and allowing others to do the work.
The next time your workload seems overwhelming, do not immediately ask how you can work harder or longer. Ask how you can work smarter.
You cannot create more hours in your day, but you can multiply what you accomplish by learning to delegate.
Don Wetmore is a certified business coach and the author of “The Productivity Handbook” and “Organizing Your Life.” Contact him at 203-394-8216 or ctsem@msn.com.