Issue #5 Do More with Less
Question of the week: do you delegate effectively? When you delegate a task, does it reduce your workload?
Imagine if there were no delegation. If it weren’t a thing.
If delegation did not exist, then any company’s capacity would be limited to what one person could do. We would all work hard, producing as much as possible in the limited time we have available.
We wouldn’t focus on the work that we enjoy because we would have to do all of it.
We’d all be, in a word, freelancers.
Or gig workers.
Or hustlers (as in those who “hustle harder” to earn a living, not the more dubious kind).
But what if you wanted more than that? What if you wanted to create a business that worked for you? What if you wanted the business to work independently without you having to be involved 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What if you did not want to hustle?
You would have to invent delegation. You would have to figure out how to allocate work so that you wouldn’t have to do it all.
You could then assign work to different people based on their skills and objectives so that together you create an effective company.
And you can go on vacation from time to time.
Imagine how powerful you would be if you were the only one to know about delegation – you’d be able to do anything while everyone else hustled…
Here is the thing, that imaginary world is available now. You can create a business where others do their part of the work, where working together is more than the sum of individual contributions.
You can break out of gig work, freelancing, and MSP ownership hustling.
You can take a vacation.
You just need to delegate, and you don’t even have to invent the concept: it already exists.
Remember Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Workweek?” – it is a work about delegation. Heck, we’d argue that Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” is about delegation.
The key to getting more done is not cramming more into an overpacked day using productivity “hacks.” The key is delegation. And the difference between a gig and a business is the ability to delegate.
The problem, of course, is that delegation is not intuitive, and everyone struggles to get it right.
So, click here for some thoughts on how to delegate more effectively and how to get started… today.
Time management is for…
As we’ve said before, productivity tools are, well, let us put it this way: they suck.
They are all about getting you to cram more in, and do more with more. But at some point, that system breaks, there is only so much more you can give.
So, we are looking for the best ways to organize a day to get more done, and we came up with an astonishing result: those who get more done actually plan to do less.
Instead of cramming more in, they make space for breaks, buffers, and family.
This article from Ryan Deiss on the five steps to create a daily schedule to work smarter and not harder (notice the buffers and time for other things).
And then there is one of our favorites: Benjamin Franklin’s famous daily routine, which you can check out here. He also suggests two focusing questions that we think are powerful together.
Every morning he would ask himself
“What good shall I do this day?” (for focus and alignment).
End every evening, he’d ask:
“What good have I done today?” (for reflection).
Wondering whom to delegate too?
We love it when a theme comes together… we didn’t even plan this, and here it is delegation, daily routines, and great virtual assistants.
If you are trying to figure out your first step in building your team, why not try a virtual assistant? Or if you’d prefer a Business Implementor, then contact us here.
Around the Web
Are you using Google fully?
Check out this great post on how to use Google for more specific searches. It is a quick and thorough overview of some of the more powerful Google operators and how you can get better search results for prospecting or finding that muffin recipe that you made last year and just cant find again…
Read more here.
So what is YOUR daily routine?
