What Can I Delegate?
In your business, you can delegate a wide variety of items – I am sure you are making a mental list of all of the items you have to do or want to do.
If you were to look at your average day, what are the tasks you are doing that you wonder the most about “why” you are doing them? It could be inputting data into your system, it could be making text changes on your website or it could be calling your customers when their credit card is declined. Whatever it may be in YOUR business, you need to remember that it can always be delegated away.
The tasks that are most often delegated include those that are:
- Repetitive in nature
- Menial or low-thought items
- Tasks that do not require YOUR expertise to complete
- Tasks that you may not like to complete (and that’s okay!)
- Scheduled items that will require someone to remember to do them on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
Don’t delegate any tasks that you could just take away from your current workload. Oftentimes, people will delegate something that they don’t even need to be doing anyway. If you can eliminate it from your schedule, do that instead of trying to pass it off to someone else.
Don’t delegate things that YOU should be doing. These things include performance reviews, hiring and firing (unless you have a large company and you require a recruiter) and big company decisions.
When delegating, delegate out the end result and not the methodology. Sometimes people will delegate something and then spend a long period of time explaining how they want it done. If you just let the person doing the work determine the best way to get to the end result, he or she may come up with a faster way to do the job.
It also doesn’t make sense to delegate something to your assistant and then spend a long period of time explaining it because in that period of time, you could have performed the task yourself (defeating the purpose of delegating the task to someone else!)
The first step to really getting laser focused on what you need to delegate is to track your time. Most business owners can’t pinpoint exactly what they need help with so tracking time becomes a great evaluation tool for them.
What you need to do is use a time tracking software, such as MyHours (www.myhours.com), and punch in and out each time you do a different task. You need to do this for at least a week or two to really get a good idea of what you are doing and what you can delegate out.
The thing to remember is when you punch in and punch out of the software, make some notes in the notes section to remind yourself of exactly what you did for that task and anything else you may want to note about it for future. You should already, at this stage, be thinking forward to delegating away some of these tasks.
Once you’ve kept track of your time for a week or two, you need to then go back and analyze it.
Run the report and sit down with a print out of it so you can scribble on it and make additional notes. Here is a list of the things you should be making notes on:
Look at where you are spending your time
- What are you spending too much time on?
- What would be easy to train someone else on?
- What is taking up the most of your time?
Write down the items that you like and those that you don’t
- Which items make you lose focus or attention?
- Which items make you frustrated or impatient?
- Are there items that if you didn’t have to do any longer you would be extremely happy about?
Look at the things that you have to switch gears to complete.
- An example might be going from accounting to customer service to internet marketing.
- Determine how you can eliminate that and delegate out similar items / tasks to one person.
