10. Outrunning the Urgent – Part 4

Outrunning the Urgent – Part 4

If you’ve gotten to this point on the list of considerations, the task before you has to get done and automation is not an option.

Let’s look at how super-productive people would proceed from here. On to the third consideration…

3. Must this be done by me? Or, am I the right person to do this?

Most people are generally shocked at their own responses to the question “Does what I’m doing right now require my unique skill set; or is it possible that there are other people better capable of doing this?”. Shocked at how much time is being spent doing things that someone else could/should be doing instead.

In response to this consideration, Must this be done by me? Or, am I the right person to do this?
Kaira might very well come up with ‘Yes’ as a response. In that case, she could move on to the next consideration.

But if her response, perchance, was ‘No’, how is she to tackle Vishnu’s task that
a) Must be done
b) Must be done manually?

The answer could well be intelligent delegation.

Kaira could look at spending some time teaching someone else her PowerPoint tricks, and delegating these review tasks to them in future. Remember the Future Consequence example?

Often, the reason we don’t Delegate is because of a false belief that “someone else won’t be able to do it as well as I can” or that “it is faster to do it myself.”

In his book called Procrastinate on Purpose, author Rory Vaden introduces the 30x rule that states that it takes 30 times the amount of time it takes to complete a task in training someone to do that task. So, if a daily task takes you five minutes to complete, you should plan to spend at least a hundred and fifty minutes (five minutes multiplied by thirty) instructing a subordinate how to complete the same task. Now, the hundred and fifty minutes needn’t all be done at one time and could be spread over a few months as you help the subordinate master the task.

If this task were to take you personally five minutes a day for two hundred and fifty days in a working year, then that means you would spend 1,250 minutes per year on that task. Rather than doing that, however, if you decided to spend a hundred- and fifty-minutes training someone to do that five- minute task, and they instead did that task for you, then that would give you an annual savings of eleven hundred minutes per year. There’s a Future Consequence calculation for you.

So, what tasks are you hanging on to that you need to let go control of?

Next, assuming you have said yes to all the three considerations thus far, it’s time to look at the last two. We’ll do that in the next lesson.
In Conclusion

Once you know that the task in front of you cannot be eliminated or automated, you should spare a thought on whether the task at hand must be done specifically by you, or if you’re actually the right person to do it. Because most people find on reflection that a lot of their work that occupies their bandwidth does not require their specific skill set, and that they’d be better served allocating this precious time to other more important tasks.

If that is the case for you when evaluating the task at hand, you’d do well to look at intelligent delegation, wherever possible and prudent, of course.

Now, assuming you have said yes to all the three considerations thus far, that is the task at hand has to be done, it cannot be automated immediately or at all, and it must be done by you, it’s time to look at the last two considerations i.e. Must I do it now? And How do I protect/maximise time on what is my absolute priority?

We’ll do that in the next lesson.