Top 10 Tips on How to Delegate

Delegation is one of the secrets of good time management. But many people are reluctant to delegate because it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. When people you are depending on forget important tasks or miss deadlines it can be more than frustrating - it can be positively damaging. So here’s my Top 10 Tips on how to delegate effectively. And if you have a tip which you think should be in the Top 10, then tell us about it in the Comments.

1) Ask yourself which parts of your work can only be done by you. Then aim to delegate as much of the rest as possible so that you are free to make the most of your own work.

2) Never delegate even the simplest task without saying when you want it completed by.

3) Where possible, get the person to set the deadline themselves. Make it clear that you expect them to keep to it.

4) Always put a follow-up reminder in your schedule or Task Diary to check that the work has been done. Everytime you fail to do this, you have lost control of that part of your work.

5) Always chase work immediately if it hasn’t been done by the time you requested it. If you don’t, they will think it’s not important.

6) Break down large tasks into stages and set deadlines for each. Spell out what should have been achieved at each deadline. Don’t say “Let me know in a week’s time how you’re getting on”. Instead say “Send me the draft for the first section by lunchtime Friday.”

7) Remember you can delegate upwards and sideways as well as downwards, and the same rules apply when you do.

8) When someone overruns a deadline don’t say “Why haven’t you done it?”. Instead say: “I’m not interested in why you haven’t done it. What I want to know is when you will have done it.”

9) Remember no one is going to give the work they are doing for you more importance than you give it. So if they think you don’t care about it, why should they?

10) Remember that people whose time management is bad tend to react to what is making the most noise at the time. The way to get them to give your work priority is to make more noise than the other calls on their time.

If anyone consistently fails to do the work you are asking them to do in spite of your keeping to these rules, then you should cease to use their services. You are not doing them any favours by ignoring their poor performance.

"Making It All Work"

It’s never very long before the subject of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” gets raised in discussion on this site. So it’s good news that, after a gap of many years, he has now written another book. I’ve just pre-ordered it from amazon.co.uk and I’ll be looking forward to reading it.

According to his website:

“Making It All Work” addresses: How to figure out where you are in life and what you need; How to be your own consultant and the CEO of your life; Moving from hope to trust in decision-making; When not to set goals; Harnessing intuition,spontaneity, and serendipity; And why life is like business and business is like life.

Noguchi System Update

A reader has asked whether I am still using the Noguchi filing system. The answer is “Yes”, but only for those documents which don’t fit easily into a conventional filing system. For these I find it a godsend.

Just to illustrate the difference, here are the most recently used file titles in my conventional system (for how I organize that, see File for Success):

• Personal Documents (where I keep my passport, educational certificates, etc)
• Pensions (a hot subject at the moment as I am within four months of my 65th birthday!)
• Wines (always a popular subject!)
• Receipt Vouchers - Volume II (business vouchers)
• Cars (all the documents, repair vouchers etc, for our two cars) 

I wouldn’t dare trust the contents of these files to the Noguchi system - I need them not only to be complete but to be in the right order within the file.

After using the Noguchi system for a bit over a month I have 48 envelopes. It never takes me more than a few seconds to find a document. Here are the most recently used:

• Latest copy of a charity magazine
• A letter from one of my pension providers (needs careful reading and consideration before being filed permanently)
• A proposal from a financial adviser
• Latest parish newsletter
• Personal credit card vouchers for current month
  
• New “Terms and Conditions” for my bank

Basically these are all the type of things which used to lie around because I couldn’t decide which file they should go in, or because I needed to read them in detail before filing them. Now the answer is easy: “Put them in Noguchi”. Result: they don’t lie around any more and can be easily found.

Further articles on Filing 

The Procrastination Buster Improved

In my article The Procrastination Buster I talked about how resistance to a task tends to be relative. To give an example, if you are faced with a choice between doing a difficult task and an easy task, the easy task will obviously be the easy option. However if you are faced with a choice between the same difficult task and another even more difficult task then the difficult task will seem to be the easy option.

In the article I developed this principle into a simple system of dealing with an open to do list. The idea is to work through the to do list comparing each task in turn with the next task on the list and doing the one which you are resisting the least. That way each task you do seems like the easy option, even though it may be quite difficult.

The main problem I found in dealing with a to do list in this way was that, as the list gets longer, it can take a very long time to work from one end of the list to the other. In fact if one is adding items fast enough, one never gets to the end of the list!

A simple modification makes the method work much better. Instead of comparing each item with the next item on the list, you compare the first item on the list (i.e. the oldest) with the last item (the newest).

So to illustrate, your list might read as follows:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call

You compare the first item with the last item. Which is easier, check email or return the client’s phone call?

You decide to return the client’s phone call. During the call various action items came up which you added to the list. So it now reads:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call
• Forward July forecast to client
• Ask boss about how to handle Project X

Once again you compare the first item with the last item. You decide to clear: your email. Once you have finished it, the list reads like this:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call
• Forward July forecast to client
• Ask boss about how to handle Project X
• Read Project Y report
• Investigate www.markforster.net

So you now have a choice between tidying your desk and investigating my website. Which are you going to choose?

What I have found is that because the list is being tackled at both ends, it tends to get less bogged down than the previous method I recommended.

If you’re someone who likes to work off an open to do list, then why not try this method out and see how you get on? All feedback will be appreciated.

Related article:

The “Georgette Heyer” System

Overcoming Procrastination Over Decisions

 This is the reply I sent to someone who wrote to me saying they had a problem with making even simple decisions:

 

Making decisions is a behaviour which can be learned, just like any other behaviour. You can train yourself to make big decisions by practising making small decisions.

 

Before you do that, a couple of principles:

 

1. There are no right or wrong decisions, only decisions with different consequences. You need to train yourself to stop looking for the perfect decision. Instead your attitude needs to be that you take decisions and deal with the consequences.

 

2. Doing nothing is a decision in itself. You need to train yourself to think that the choice is not between A and B, but between A, B and C where C is doing nothing.

 

So train yourself starting with small things. For example, what are you going to eat for supper tonight? Remember the choice is between a) having something for supper and b) having nothing for supper. How are you going to decide which to have? I suggest you flip a coin. That helps you to realise 1) there is no “correct” choice; 2) that doing nothing is a choice like any other and has consequences like any other.

 

If the “something for supper” choice comes up, then how do you decide what to eat? Again I suggest you decide entirely at random. Flip a coin, throw dice, whatever. What you are training yourself in here is again that there is no “correct” choice.

 

When you’ve got used to making simple decisions at random, then you can try a slight variation on this. Flip a coin and stick with the answer unless you really want to overrule it. That helps you to identify your own preferences in the matter.

 

Remember, the aim of this is to practise making decisions. Like any practise it takes a lot of repetition before the behaviour becomes learned. So don’t just do it once or twice and then forget about it. Consciously look out for small decisions you can make during the day and do it often.

Noguchi Filing System

A remark today by a reader in my Discussion Forum reminded me of something which had intrigued me in the past but which I had never followed up. This is the Noguchi Filing System. I was intrigued by it because it is in some ways similar to the filing system which I use myself and often recommend, though I developed this before I had heard of Noguchi.

In both systems the idea is that files are put on a shelf rather than in a filing cabinet, and the most recently used file is always replaced at the left end of the shelf so that files are in the order they were last used. This results in much faster retrieval of files because the most used files are always to be found towards the left of the shelf.

Where the systems differ is that I keep papers in fairly conventional subject files, while Noguchi suggests opening a folder (actually a cut-down large envelope) for every document.

I was very interested to know how this would work in practice. It is one of those counter-intuitive systems which can only be judged by trying it out.

So having armed myself with a large number of C4 envelopes, I started filing the Noguchi way this afternoon. And actually my first impression is that it works quite well, especially with the type of document one never quite knows what to do with. 

Looking at my shelf, from the left I now have the following documents each filed in its own envelope with a description written down the right hand edge, where I can see it easily:

• A leaflet giving changes to my bank’s standard tariff
• A pamphlet from my bank giving “important information” about my business account
• A pamphlet giving the Terms & Conditions for my business bank account
• My list of commonly used phone numbers
• A newspaper article about “Discretionary Portfolio Management”
• The latest copy of my Parish Magazine
• The latest weekly “pew sheet” from my church

Since I’ve only just filed these, they are not yet in “last-used” order, but I feel that I am now in control of them and can retrieve them easily. As you will have seen, none of these are the sort of thing which fits easily into a conventional file (which is the reason why they were lying around in the first place!) So far then, a definite improvement.

Good News and Bad News

Which would you like first? The good news or the bad news?

The good news is that Trafalgar (a US distribution company) will be distributing Do It Tomorrow this autumn and it will feature in their next catalogue. This means that it should be available in the States very soon.

The bad news is that the first print of How To Make Your Dreams Come True has sold out and it is not planned to reprint it. I intend to ask the publishers if they are willing to let the distribution rights revert to me so I can publish it as an e-book.

Dieting Update

It’s been a while since I posted on the subject of my diet. However I am pleased to say that it is still going well and this morning I weighed in at 17 lbs less than my starting weight at the beginning of the year.

The diet has been going much more smoothly than it did last year, when it collapsed largely as a result of holidays. I think this improvement is due to two lessons that I have learned:

1. Cheating. There is always a tendency to cheat on any diet. With my diet the result is the introduction of more rules than necessary - which of course leads to more cheating! The solution I have found is to have a rule that if I cheat during a day I am not allowed to weight myself the next day. I have to add one more rule anyway. This rule is surprisingly effective, because it stops me from cheating when I think I can get away with it.
2. Holidays. Holidays and diets don’t mix! There is nothing worse than trying to keep to a diet while holidaying in some gastronomic paradise. In my case last year it was Italy and Canada. The trouble was that I didn’t have any rule about what to do on holiday with the result that the diet collapsed and I never succeeded in picking it up again. Anyway my rule is now that I make no attempt to keep to the diet on holiday (defined as anything more than three days away from home). When I get home, I weigh myself the following morning and start the diet again from scratch.
   

One thing I have noticed again as a result of the diet is that I need much less food than before. This is due to the slowing of my metabolism. Most diet critics get very upset about this, but for the life of me I can’t follow their logic on this point. Surely having a slow metabolism is the equivalent of having a car that does 50 miles to the gallon rather than one that does 30 miles to the gallon. All other things being equal why would one want a car with higher fuel consumption? In the same way, in these days when we are all worried about rising food prices and shortages, why would one want to need to eat more food? It doesn’t make sense!

(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)

Related: 

Other posts about dieting

What can be done now?

I am often asked a question about how one choses what items you should put in the Task Diary for tomorrow. My answer is always that you should always be as up-to-date as possible with all current projects. Therefore any actions which can be taken now should be put in the task diary.

This adheres to the basic “Do It Tomorrow” principle that prioritising should not normally be done at the task level. It should be done at the project level.

What tends to happen is that when people get under pressure they tend to try to prioritise tasks. This is rarely very successful because all that happens is that tasks get put off to days in the future. But those future days are going to be just as full as today is.

Keeping on top of projects is the best way to ensure that you are forced to prioritise at the project level. If you can’t keep on top of all your projects, then you need to look at your current projects and decide which ones should be de-activated, either temporarily or permanently.

Before I wrote DIT, I used to recommend people to use the question “What needs to be done now?” with reference to projects. In full the question would be something like:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what needs to be done now?”

Nowadays the question I recommend is:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what can be done now?

The effect of the first question is to push action back until it needs to be done. This makes it very vulnerable to unexpected interruptions. Actually there’s no such thing as “unexpected interruptions”. Interruptions are a fact of life. Leaving action until it needs to be done tends to result in deadline pressure and over commitment.

The second question on the other hand has the effect of encouraging you to start action at the beginning of the time available for its completion. This gives you much more leeway if things go wrong (which they will). It is also a strong disincentive to over committing yourself.

Delays

There’s a slight delay in publishing the new seminar schedule and this week’s newsletter which it was supposed to be in. This is due to the fact that my back has decided to give out and any movement at the moment is agony!

Hopefully in a few day’s time I will be fully recovered.

Getting Back on Track

What do you do when the inevitable happens and all your systems for time management collapse?

Typically this happens when you get an unexpectedly high work load, or you go away for a period and fail to get going again on return. Or perhaps your computer crashes and it takes three days to fix - and everything else gets thrown out of the window. Or perhaps you’ve just goofed off for a day or two and are now experiencing the knock-on effects.

Under all this pressure, you tell yourself that you’ve got too much of a crisis to be systematic. In fact you may well tell yourself “I can’t get the system going again now - I’ll wait until things settle down a bit”.

This is of course exactly the wrong approach. When things are really tough is the precisely the time that you most need to be systematic. When you find yourself in a crisis, you need to tighten up on the system not let go of it. Because it will be the system that enables you to get through the crisis in good shape. 

Remember: When the going is difficult is when you need your system the most. 

It can however be very hard to get the system going again because often people don’t know where to start.

With the Do It Tomorrow system it’s easy - provided that you focus on the right place. And that is to get your Will Do list ready for the following day, or if possible even for the current day.

Everything else can be dealt with by making a Backlog of it. Make the Backlog the first item on the Will Do list and you are on top of your work again.

So, to sum up, when things get out of hand don’t try to struggle on and catch up. Declare a backlog, and focus on getting your Will Do list going again.

Related articles:

Getting Going Again 

Backlog of Backlogs 

Diet Progress Report

My diet is still going strong, and I am right on target having lost 12 lbs in the 12 weeks since the beginning of the year.

One problem that I am coming across is an increasing tendency to cheat. The trouble is that after one has cheated once it becomes easier to cheat the next time. Cheating of course is self-defeating in this diet as all that happens is that the rules get tighter and tighter.

So I am going to be really strict with myself from now on: NO CHEATING! 

(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)

Related: 

Other posts about dieting

Update on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 19:30 by Mark Forster

See my May 22 Update for how I overcame the cheating problem.

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Seminars

I’m just in the process of drawing up a schedule of seminars for the rest of the year. My current plans include running the introductory three-hour “Do It Tomorrow” seminars again, which I haven’t run since 2006, plus some more one-day follow-up seminars. I might possibly do both as a package for a reduced price. I’ll also be investigating the possibility of doing some teleseminars for those who are unable to make it to the South East of England.

I’m also thinking of doing a few seminars on other subjects. One subject which is particularly attractive to me is “How to Manage Other People’s Time”. This is a subject which will interest anyone who has ever tried to get other people to do things on time (or indeed at all) - that is to say, everyone!

Another possible subject is “Accessing the Unconscious Mind”.

I’d welcome suggestions for other subjects.

Meanwhile here is the feedback from the one-day “Do It Tomorrow” seminar which I ran last Thursday:

“A really good seminar that will start the process for me to get back to basics with my time management. I am going to start using the processes discussed straight away (and read the book at the same time!)” James Reed.

“A great seminar - everything fell into place. I now feel confident that I will be able to put some order and structure into my work/life straight away. The day also helped with personal goal setting and achievement. Confirmation that we don’t need to overcomplicate things.” Neil Herries.

“Very useful to implement the Do It Tomorrow system. Helped to focus on my particular problem areas. Self-coaching technique was also helpful.” Lorraine Wakefield.

“A very useful review and very good clarification of points I had been unclear on - fixed some holds in my own time management.” Mike Collins.

“Thanks for being patient with me. I hope I can put it into practice. It’s heartening that the system is designed for people who aren’t naturally organised and that you’ve kept it simple!” Dominique.

“Very good seminar going through a number of aspects of the book in detail. The seminar (I hope!) will provide a greater focus to getting things organised in my working life and, by default, my personal life.” Mark Reed. 

Layout and Advertisements

I’ve come to the conclusion that the amount of income generated by the ads on this site is hardly worth the effort of inserting them. So over the next few days I will be removing all advertisements on this site, apart from those for my own books, and returning the layout of the blog to multiple postings on the page.

Dialoguing

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that. 

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

Weeding the Task Diary

One of the problems with any time management system is that there is a tendency for the list of actions to expand until it becomes too large to be handled. This is because many of the tasks that you engage in result in your thinking of several others. For example, you might have a task for today “Investigate Program X”. That is naturally going to result in several further actions. Or you carry out the “next action” for some project, and that naturally leads you on to a further action with the same project. Although many tasks are one-offs without further action needed, they are outweighed by the tasks that lead on to further action or actions. This is just as true of the Task Diary in Do It Tomorrow as it is of any to do list.

You may also have random thoughts and ideas during the day which don’t arise out of other tasks. The best thing to do with these is to put them in the Task Diary to “think about”.

The result of all this is that the daily list of tasks in theTask Diary expands until it is no longer possible to get through it. When this happens some people try to deal with the problem by spreading the some of the tasks over the next few days. This is not a good idea as all it achieves is to disguise the fact that you now have more tasks than you can handle.

Although the “long stop” in DIT is the auditing procedure, it is much better to keep your Task Diary pruned so that you rarely or never need to go through this procedure.

A simple principle can achieve this:

Just because you have written something in the Task Diary doesn’t mean you have to do it.

It is a very good idea when you draw the line to close tomorrow’s list to go through the items and ruthlessly weed them of all items which are not 100 per cent necessary to your chosen focus. Everything that will disperse your focus or lead you off into sidetracks must go.

Doing this before you start on the list rather than after you are failing to get through it will strengthen your sense of achievement and focus rather than induce a sense of failure.

So to sum up:

By all means add everything you think of during the day to your Task Diary for tomorrow, but weed it thoroughly before you commit to actually doing it.

Related Discussions:

Task Diary

Task Diary and Spreading Out Tasks over the Week

Tasks That Do Not Need to Be Done This Week But Later…?

Related Article:

The Key to Keeping Your Work Focused

Site Changes

If you are a regular visitor to this site, you will have noticed that it has gone back to one blog posting per page and that the advertisements have reappeared. I am currently experimenting with various layouts to see whether advertisements on the site are worthwhile (my initial impression is that they are not). So I’d ask you to put up with the changes for a little bit longer.

Blog Comments and the Discussion Group

I thought I’d just draw your attention to one of the features of this website, which is that it is extremely interactive.

There are two basic ways in which you can contribute. One is by making a comment on a Blog entry, and the other is by joining in on the Discussion Forum. No form of registration is required for either, and you do not have to leave your email address or website details (though you can if you want to). You can either use your real name or a pseudonym. I’ve never yet had to remove an objectionable posting, which is a tribute to the readers of this website, but obviously I reserve the right to. What I have had to do is remove extended quotations of copyright material which go beyond the “fair use” criteria. So please watch this.

Comments on Blog Entries

Feel free to comment on any blog entry, however old. The button for doing so is at the top of the entry. All new comments are automatically drawn to my attention, so you can be sure I will read yours and will reply to it if I feel a reply is required. There is also an RSS Feed for blog comments, so the subscribers will be aware of your comment as well.

Discussion Forum

Also feel free to join in any discussion or to start a new one. Again I see all new contributions automatically and will reply if I feel a reply is required. Whenever a new posting is added to a discussion subject, however old, that subject is moved to the top of the list of subjects so your posting will be seen by other people.

The Key to Keeping Your Work Focused

Judging by the questions that readers ask in the Comments and Discussion Forum, people have a lot of difficulty grasping one of the major advantages of Do It Tomorrow.

This is that it provides a powerful way to check that your work is in focus.

The way it does this is by insisting that you have to be able to process one day’s incoming work per day on average. This is such an important point that I resist strongly all suggestions from users of the system that they should try to schedule some of their current work for dates further away than tomorrow. The reason I resist this is because all it achieves is to disguise the fact that they are not able to keep up with their work as it falls due. They will then be allowing their focus to disperse and the quality of their work will suffer - and so probably will their sense of well-being and control.

Remember that DIT allows a 4 to 5 day rhythm to your work. So if you get behind on your Will Do list for a couple of days, you can catch up within the next couple of days. This is perfectly ok, because the amount of time available on any one day is rarely going to balance exactly the amount of work to be done that day. But it must balance out over a fairly short period.

This is often a problem for people who have multiple projects to juggle. And it is in precisely this sort of situation that it is most easy to lose track of one’s focus. So with regard to major projects here are some principles which DIT offers:

1. Projects without deadlines are best handled one at a time. This is generally speaking the quickest way to get them on-line and earning you money (or preventing you from losing it!).

2. Projects with deadlines should be commenced at the beginning of the time available, not at the end of the time available. This allows you to take advantage of the “little and often” principle and prevents the project being disrupted by unforeseen circumstances.

3. You should aim to be up-to-date with all actions on all active projects. This means that all “next actions” relating to active projects should be in your Task Diary for tomorrow. That represent the real amount of current work which you have. As I’ve said above, any attempts to schedule some of this for further away than tomorrow will simply disguise how much work you have, and lose the benefits of DIT focus.

Related articles:

Dealing with Projects That Don’t Have a Deadline

Auditing Your Time Management