Productivity Tip: Delegate

Throughout our day we have dozen of tasks that, while needing to be done, often don’t contribute to our larger goals and can be a repetitive waste of time. These are also usually tasks that don’t need to be specifically done by us just as long as they get done. For some people these tasks may be things like household chores, laundry, cleaning the car and so on. For others it may be payroll, balancing a bank account, or answering phone calls. Whatever the tasks may be they contribute to a general waste of time and loss of productivity in areas that are more important to you or tie in to goals or projects we would rather be working on. Yes you may have to do the dishes every day but how much time is that costing you in hours you could spend working on your book, your business plan, or some other pursuit? How much faster might you be able to accomplish your goals and get larger projects done if you didn’t have to deal with all the minor nuisances that take time away from you daily?

A great way to deal with this problem is to apply the solution of delegation. Delegation is simply the art of convincing others to do a certain task or set of tasks for you so that you can spend your time doing work you find more valuable or productive. Delegation usually involves either paying, hiring, or some other means of having others do specific tasks for you. This isn’t a method of laziness or anything like that -it’s simply a way to make sure that your time is spent as productively as possible. If you’re a writer pulling in six figure book contracts but you can’t seem to get enough writing done in a because you’re so consumed with the chores you have to keep up with on a daily basis then you’re simply not being productive and you’re not focusing your time in a way that benefits everyone involved. You aren’t happy because you’re wasting time doing work that isn’t what you want to do and doesn’t produce any income, your publishers wont be happy because you’re not giving them a new product to sell, and your readers won’t be happy because they don’t have any new books to read.

The solution is to delegate. Hire it out. Find someone to clean your house for you. Pay someone to do your taxes. Get a personal assistant or a receptionist to answer calls and file papers. Whatever it is that’s getting in the way of you accomplishing all that you want to accomplish find someone else to do it for you so long as the task doesn’t require that you personally do it. You can’t pay someone else to do your push-ups so to speak but you can hire someone to take out the trash while you work on other, more important things. Take the time to delegate unimportant tasks and you’ll free yourself up to focus on what’s really important to you. ]