Elevate and Delegate: A Great Exercise for All

Elevate and Delegate

Emmet (is my 4-year-old son’s name and how this blog starts as he wanted to type his name to help daddy work).  Now that his attention is drawn to breakfast muffins after a 5-minute seek and destroy mission to find the letter “T” on the keyboard, I’ll tackle the topic at hand.  Elevate and delegate is an exercise we do with everyone at our office.  I think it is so valuable at work, and your personal life, that I wanted to share how it works here. 

I highly encourage every one of you to do two versions of this exercise.  One for your career, and the second for your personal life.  Many of you may have done something similar along the way, but even if you have it should be a regular (I suggest annually) exercise.

For example, here is a sample of my personal one and my work one.

Professional:

Love doing & Great          Like doing & Good            Don’t like doing & Good                Don’t like doing & Bad

Giving Financial Advice   Writing this Blog              Follow-up emails                             Dictating meetings

Personal:

Love doing & Great          Like doing & Good            Don’t like doing & Good                Don’t like doing & Bad

Hanging w my fam          Our finances                      House cleaning                                Doing my lawn

Now each category should have as many things as possible in them to give you a pretty good and thorough list. 

Love doing and great at

When you think about the love doing & great at you should get a feeling of energy or excitement as you write them.  These are the activities that bring you the most pleasure because:

A. you are great at doing them, and who doesn’t love being great at something, and

B. they fit the type of person you are. 

For instance, you’ll never find my “great at and love doing” something that is super detailed and analytical.  For me, I am much better at working with people and problem-solving.  So, all my “love doing” seems to follow a trend.  The goal here is to transform your personal and professional life to spend as much time here as possible (aim for 75% of your life in the top two categories).  If you can accomplish this successfully, you’ll be full of energy and excel to the highest degree. 

Like doing and good at

The second part of your 75% quota is in the “like doing and good at doing” category.  These things will also bring you lots of energy, but you’ll find there is a clear distinction between like and love, and good at doing vs. great at doing.  As for me, I love playing tennis and paddle, and I like running and working out.  Bet you can guess which one I would rather do 10 times out of 10.  These are activities you’ll keep doing at work and home that won’t drain you at all.  That said they’ll be the second thing you get to if given the choice.

Don’t like doing it, but good at it

Here is where the conversation gets really interesting if you ask me.  Now we are at the items that you are fine doing, but really don’t like doing.  In my opinion, now is the time to start thinking about delegating or outsourcing.  Even though my wife doesn’t believe it I am fine at cleaning, I just detest it.  I’m pretty sure if you ask her as well, she would relay the same message about her personally.  So, guess what we did to fix it?  You got it; we have a house cleaner come once a week to offload this responsibility. 

What in turn has happened once we started outsourcing this?  We are happier, our house is cleaner, we have more energy, and our time is better spent elsewhere.  If you do this at work as well, assuming in the position to, you’ll find that your weakness is someone else’s strength.  What drains you, gives someone else energy.  If you can start to segment your life accordingly, you’ll find it not only more fulfilling but also you’ll be more successful.

Don’t like doing and bad at it

Finally, the category we’ve all been waiting for.  These are the things we have to find a way to stop doing immediately.  Prioritize your life, your finances, your job duties so that you can as quickly as possible offload these responsibilities to someone else.  For instance, I simply don’t own a lawnmower and have not copy talked a meeting in ages.  This has freed me up to do more valuable things in my personal and professional life.  What are the things you need to stop doing immediately?  Is it taxes or your finances?  Is it putting together a specific type of report at work?  Remember your weakness is someone else’s strength. 

Elevate and Delegate: How to Delegate Effectively

Here is what I know for absolute certain, as I’ve seen personally and with almost 30 employees.  If you can constantly remove things from the hate list and spend more time on the love list everyone will benefit.  Not only will everyone benefit from the things you aren’t great at will get done better, but the things you are great at will have you living the most fulfilled life.

Little hint, if I polled our client base, I think you’d find over 80% of them when asked about doing their personal finances would say they don’t enjoy it and/or aren’t good at it.  Much like housekeeping or lawn care, there is a benefit to having one’s time back to focus on their most impassioned and loved items.  That is the key to success and that is how I know best to maximize your most scarce possession, your time.

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