| Why have a dog and bark yourself? |
One of the reasons why people fail to eliminate superfluous activities from their day is because it takes longer to delegate the task to somebody else than it does to do it yourself. If you wait until the task needs doing then it will never get delegated because it is always urgent at the time when you identify that you shouldn’t be doing it. The best way to overcome this damaging syndrome is to plan ahead to eliminate tasks from your day when they don’t actually need to be done. You need to go through an exercise to identify your value per hour and then construct your time management index. This will identify the tasks that you want to eliminate and the planning process becomes quite simple. What you need to do is to identify in writing up to three items a month that you are going to pass off to somebody else, identify how that is going to happen and set a date by which it must be accomplished. Once this is done with formality then identifying how to get these activities out of your day becomes virtually a routine task. A good example of this is one of my clients who had a program on his computer to generate business cards and only somebody with access to his machine could use it. Whenever business cards were needed it always seemed to be urgent and as a result he ended up producing them himself rather than passing the task off to them. We identified this at one of our regular meetings and he undertook that, by a specific date that he identified, he would remove the program from his computer, load it somewhere else and make somebody else responsible for it. My role in this was simply to be his accountability foil and to make sure that he followed through. It may sound trivial, but if you look at your day critically you will find that it is filled with those kind of things and you need to eliminate them in a way that is both structured and planned…otherwise you’ll just continue to do them yourself for eternity. To take the first step in eliminating them from your day, go through our Time Wasters exercise and identify all the areas where you could have a dog do your barking for you.
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