Delegate to achieve more

One of the important ways to save time is to use help from others. Delegation of work is very important. But delegation is not easy. Lot of times we end up doing work which someone in our team can do the same.

Downward Delegation:

If you are in charge of team, you can delegate without hesitation. You should take all opportunities to delegate work. By training our team members on how to do some of the tasks we do we can free up some of our time. Lot of times we don't delegate tasks because we think it will take less time to do it ourselves than training another person. But once you train someone, it becomes easier to delegate.

Some things that speed up delegation are: Documentation, Hand on training.

Upward Delegation:

Upward delegation is sometimes needed when you are asked to do a task which you are not trained for and it comes to you since  you happened to be there. A task that is in domain of your manager or someone higher up is better done by them.

Peer-to-Peer Delegation

Mainly working in teams it is possible that we can delegate tasks to our team members. This should be done a little carefully. It should not look as though you are dumping a task you should be doing to another team members. This should be a mutual agreement. You can take up tasks that other team member is dumped but is not ready to do the task. In turn you can ask your team member to do a task that you need help on. By putting team goals as the focus we can delegate tasks to peers and get things done faster.

Delegation in personal life

Lot of times we need to delegate tasks to our family members also. I use this delegation sometimes. I take help from my wife to do things for me. I sometimes ask my daughter to do some errands.

Summary

Delegation helps us to leverage all available resources properly. I can't covert all aspects of delegation in this short article. But I will suggest you to consider this option if you find a chance. It can ease our stress and help us achieve more and it has lot more advantages than we realize.