Do you really know how you’re spending your week?
I ask because leaders I work with, who feel swamped, often don’t know. That’s what happens you spend a lot of time policing and “improving” others’ work, and fighting fires.
After doing the Time Tracker exercise I’ll describe here, one managing director discovered he was spending 48% of his time on admin, which is certainly not what he gets paid to do.
I recommend the Time Tracker to people who are starting to think about how, and what, to delegate.
Set your phone to beep every hour during your working day for two or three weeks, and jot down whatever you’re doing at that moment.
When you’ve got a good log of your actual activity, take some time to analyse it, calculating how much time you’re spending in each of four different zones:
- Things you are not very good at, but feel you must do;
- Things you are competent at, but don’t enjoy;
- Things you’re quite good at, but have no passion for;
- Things you excel at, and really want to do.
Number 4 is the realm of Unique Ability, which I talked about in my last post. The more time you spend in this zone, the more effective you’ll be. (As long as the things you’re doing relate to your organisation’s objectives, of course.)
Everything else is fair game for delegation.