“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Those four simple words will absolutely devastate your productivity.
The average person’s life is littered with projects that never get finished simply because they were never actually started. Procrastination is to blame.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, seasoned CEO, or stay-at-home parent — procrastination is going to be your #1 hurdle to success.
In order to make the absolute MOST out of your day, you’re going to need to do one very important thing.
DELEGATE.
Delegate everything you don’t truly need to do yourself — trust me, more things fit under that umbrella than you realize…no less than 90% of your day can be delegated to someone else.
Is delegation without its flaws? Absolutely not. But those flaws are far and few between compared to the stress, disorganization, and overwhelm associated with procrastination.
Delegation can come in a variety of forms depending upon your situation. For me, delegation comes almost exclusively in the form of my team here at Less Doing. They help me navigate around the common triggers of procrastination…
- Boredom
- Lack of motivation
- Distraction
- Overwhelm
- Uncertainty of success
…and help me get things done. Are those completed tasks always perfect? Not always, but at least they’re a step in the right direction, a building block to something better.
If you refer to the above graphic, you’ll get a good visual sense of the levels of delegation. There is not one optimal approach and the level at which you delegate will depend on the task. A good way to begin using this strategy is by applying it to your inbox. Ask yourself, “Do I need to do this now? Can it wait? Can someone else handle it? Once you have determined those parameters, you can figure out how involved you need to be in the process. If your work environment is built on mutual respect, and you’re willing to give your ego a rest, you’ll be amazed at how little you actually have to oversee.
More importantly, when delegating all excess in my day, I’m creating the mental and physical space necessary to work on what I’m fantastic at — being a husband, father, and helping other people improve their lives.
As you start to get more comfortable with delegation, you’ll slowly notice your schedule freeing up as your day becomes less mired in the tasks other people can do. You’ll also notice that, as you prepare tasks for delegation, your focus will sharpen — you’ll start thinking and working ON your business, rather than IN it.
You’ll enjoy the headspace to honestly evaluate the state of your business (or your life) and where you want to go next. When you’re ready to make the leap from delegation amateur to delegation aficionado, be sure to employ tools that will increase your efficiency, including:
- Trello — the best workflow and project management tool out there
- Slack — a bastion of highly-effective asynchronous communication
- Evernote and Dropbox — cloud-based tools that allow you to store and share anything and everything surrounding your delegation
- Voxer — The greatest way to communicate with your team
When you start investing in delegation you’ll begin to find the focus, flexibility, and freedom that may have eluded you until now. Yay!
