Delegation is one of the most difficult skills for many entrepreneurs to pick up. There are a lot of reasons for this – the skills and traits required for long-term delegation make the subject of other posts. But what if we just need a little low-stress help on a temporary basis? We don’t need to…
Category Archives: Delegating
Worth Repeating – January Productivity Posts
Happy birthday to my New Leaf organizing and productivity blog! Begun in January, 2008, it’s now four years old! I’m dipping into the archives to offer you, my readers, a few yummy posts from those past Januarys. You know, since I can’t serve you cake digitally. In case you thought that clutter and excess stuff…
Delegating vs Micro-managing – can you tell the difference?
It’s natural for business owners to feel reluctant to delegate. After all, their name and reputation is often all over the work. If the person they delegate to doesn’t come through with top quality work, it’s the owner who suffers most. Still, learning to delegate effectively is essential to sustainable productivity, because you can’t work…
The forgotten "D": Delegate
You’ve no doubt heard it before. To be more productive, we must: Discard (whatever isn’t needed), Deposit (into files whatever needs to be added to the archive or handled later), and Do (what can be done right now). What about the “forgotten D”: delegate? Busy professionals sometimes lament that they aren’t good at delegating or…
Are you going it alone?
To cover long distances, ducks, geese, and pelicans (among other birds) fly in formation. By forming a V, they help one another out — a lot. One study determined that 25 birds flying in formation can travel up to 70 percent further than a solo bird. Take a lesson from the birds: make sure you’re…
How I interviewed a virtual assistant for my team
I’ve written before about virtual assistants and how having a partner — someone who has skills to complement yours, who owns their own business assisting others, and who works from their own office — can be a boon to solo entrepreneurs. After wasting more hours last year than I like to admit by trying to…
The Jump-start Meeting
Recently I was seated next to Laura Van Galen, the dynamic head of Bleu Marketing, a full-service direct marketing firm based in San Francisco. She described to me a practice she uses with her senior team, the daily jump-start meeting. Here’s how the jump-start meeting works: every morning each manager has three minutes to describe…
Recipe for productivity
Like a featured recipe in a cooking magazine, productivity has many ingredients. Some are obvious (oh, there’s beef in the beef stew!) while some are subtle (who knew that excellent doughnuts actually require a whisper of nutmeg??) We can leave something out, we can make substitutions, but the dish won’t achieve the same heights without…
The Ins and Outs of Burnout
In the past two weeks I have spoken with two professionals, both highly capable and generally cheerful people, who are facing genuine cases of burnout. We sometimes hear the tern “burnout” tossed around to indicate a variety of unpleasant conditions, so let me clear about what I mean. Burnout is not the same thing as…
We all do better with help: 8 professionals that can really make a difference
Your time is precious. There are some things that only you can do. These should get your best attention during your most productive hours. Others you can do, but don’t enjoy. These may include going to networking events and having face-to-face contact with your prospects, or making a corporate presentation where they’re expecting you, and…