I once heard Stephen Covey say, “There are only two ways to get work done. Do it yourself or get someone else to do it. Masterful delegation is a major leverager of time.” Now we may not be as good as Huck Finn when he got those others to do his fence painting for him, but there are some specific strategies that you can employ when it comes to delegating appropriately. And by the way, technically Huck did not delegate, which the dictionary defines as “…to assign responsibility or authority.” He actually influenced, persuaded and convinced (one might even say tricked and manipulated) rather than delegated. So let’s see what would be useful and powerful if we were truly to delegate to others.

In my workshops on time management, the first thing I ask my audiences to do is to list the barriers and benefits to delegating. The barriers go something like this:

Section 1: Mission Statement (WHY) and Economic Model (WHAT)
Why should you have a Mission Statement or Big Why for your business?  What does it do for you?  What does it do for your clients?
Writing the Mission Statement:
    1.  What do you do?
 
   
    2.  For whom do you do it?
 
 
    3.  What value, benefit, or end [...]

Deciding where to start: Why do we do what we do when we do it? What criteria do we use for allocating our time? We have many different ways of deciding what we are going to do at any given point during the day. Following are twenty-one of the most common criteria we use to govern our time:

This month’s touch comes from The One Minute Millionaire, by Mark Victor Hansen (of Chicken Soup fame) and real estate guru Robert Allen. It’s the 23rd Aha, called Destruction is Creation:

THE QUALITIES/CHARACTERISTICS OF A GREAT PRESENTER…

Italian economist Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto observed in 1906 that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Later, he observed this noteworthy ratio seemed to apply to other parts of life, such as gardening: 80 percent of his peas were produced by 20 percent of the peapods. Over time, this concept has come to be known as the “Pareto Principle,” “The 80/20 Rule,” and even “The Vital Few and Trivial Many Rule.” Interestingly, another of Pareto’s most noteworthy and controversial theories is that human beings are not, for the most part, motivated by logic and reason but rather by sentiment.

Here’s my Five Step Process for doing your planning for the week. Remember, it’s extremely important to spend 30-60 minutes per week working ON your business, not IN your business. Take time on Sunday (my recommendation, though some of my clients do it on Friday afternoon) and follow these five steps to get the most out of your week:

Stage 1: Formulation

In this stage, you are doing all of your thinking and planning about your business. You put together business plans, budgets, marketing plans, recruiting plans, economic forecasts, etc. You commit to paper everything you can possibly think of about your business. You basically do a brain dump.

You have heard me say many times how important I think planning is. In fact, you might say I’m a nut case about it. I insist that you plan your week in advance every week. Well, I just read an article in the October 2006 issue of Money Magazine, and while they were referring to planning for retirement, the point is the same. Here is a direct quote from the article entitled “What Works in Retirement Planning:”

How many times have you heard someone say that before? In fact, how many times were you the one saying it, either out loud or to yourself? As someone who teaches time management principles for a living, and who coaches my clients on it as well, getting organized is one of the most frustrating, perplexing, and confusing subjects I can think of. In fact, I would estimate that 80% of my clients spend 80% of their coaching time on this subject alone. So what I will attempt to do in this article is give you some tips, tools, and techniques to help you become a master planner…well, at least a better one, how’s that? And as a result of being better at planning and using a planning system, you can increase your productivity and effectiveness and become more efficient at utilizing your time.