We will then discuss it, and I will make a decision and tell you what I want you to do. At this point you are setting two critical expectations. First, you’re letting them know that you will have a conversation to discuss their findings. Second, you’re making sure they know you’re the one who will make the decision. This is where you set the boundary that the person is not authorized to take any action or make any decisions.
This is a great level to use any time you’re not ready to make a decision and need someone to gather information for you. Once the data is in, you can probably decide pretty quickly.
Delegation Level 3. Starting with Level 3, you’re giving the person more room to operate and participate in the problem-solving process, but you are still reserving the final decision for yourself. Here you would say, “Here’s what I need you to do. Research the topic, outline the options, and then make a recommendation. Give me the pros and cons of each option, but tell me what you think we should do. If I agree with your decision, I will authorize you to move forward.” Let’s break it down:
Here’s what I need you to do. Be explicit. The same rules apply here as above.
Research the topic, outline the options, and then make a recommendation. Just as in Level 2, be clear about the level and type of research you want them to perform. You’re now taking an extra step, though, by asking them to evaluate the options and actually pick one. You want them to make the decision, but you aren’t giving them the authority to implement it.
Give me the pros and cons of each option, but tell me what you think we should do. Here you’re asking them to show their work. In other words, they shouldn’t expect you to agree with their decision without first giving you the chance to see inside their thought process. This is where they’ll explain why they made the decision they did.
If I agree with your decision, I’ll authorize you to move forward. At this point it’s their job to convince you their decision is the right one. If they can’t, their research and arguments are both at fault. If they’ve done their job well, however, then you can and should give the final approval and authorize them to move forward.
This is a great option for delegating to future leaders you’re mentoring, because it gives you a safe opportunity to judge their decision-making skills without any risk. And you probably noticed that this is the level where you start to outsource your decision making. At this stage, you can make a well-informed decision on a complex topic in one simple meeting. What may have taken you a full week can now be knocked out in an hour.
Delegation Level 4. At Level 4, you want the person to evaluate the options, make a decision on their own, execute the decision, and then give you an update after the fact. You would say, “Here’s what I need you to do. Make the best decision you can. Take action. Then tell me what you did.” Sometimes you might want to add, “Keep me apprised of your progress.” You’re close to cloning yourself at this point, so the process should be getting exciting. Let’s break this level down:
Here’s what I need you to do. Same as above.
Make the best decision you can. You are explicitly asking them to make a decision, but they need to put the work in first. In other words, they’ll do the same research as in Level 3, but they’re doing it to inform their own decision-making process rather than yours.
Take action. Make it clear you expect them to act without waiting on you. This is the first time in the process where you’ve taken your hands off the wheel, so be sure it’s a person you can trust to act on your behalf.
Tell me what you did. I want to be clear here: This is not an opportunity for you to second-guess the decision they made. It’s done, and there is no going back. This step is simply about good communication and keeping you informed. It also gives you insight into the quality of their decisions, which is good to know for future delegation.
Keep me apprised of your progress. This part is optional and is primarily helpful for projects that have a lot of moving parts or will take a long time to complete. You could even be explicit about the type of updates you’d prefer, such as a weekly email or adding it to an existing meeting agenda.
This is a great level to use with growing leaders, because it empowers them with decision-making experience and gives you plenty of opportunities to evaluate how well they are doing. It’s also a useful level for assignments that aren’t mission-critical and for which you don’t have a strong preference regarding the outcome, such as having your assistant organize and execute Christmas gifts for your clients.
Delegation Level 5. At Level 5, you are effectively handing the entire project or task over to someone else and exiting the decision altogether. You’d say something like this: “Here’s what I need you to do. Make whatever decision you think is best. There’s no need to report back or tell me what you did.” Now you have cloned yourself. This is where you really start to see the benefits of delegation. Let’s unpack this last level:
Here’s what I need you to do. Same as above.
Make whatever decision you think is best. Like Level 4, you are explicitly asking them to make the decision after doing the research, evaluating the pros and cons, and exploring the best options.
There’s no need to report back or tell me what you did. This is really the only thing that makes Level 5 different than Level 4. With this statement, you are releasing them from any obligation to get back to you, and you are officially exiting the process.
Level 5 is where delegation magic happens. It’s perfect for when you have complete confidence in the person to whom you’re delegating or if it’s an assignment that needs to be handled but you really don’t care how it’s resolved. Examples of Level 5 delegation might be asking your marketing director to decide on a marketing budget for a new product launch or asking your facilities director to replace the furniture in the company break room.
Using the Five Levels of Delegation can transform your personal workload and reduce your stress while also giving your team members ample opportunity to up their own game by progressing through the different levels with you. It’s a win-win for everyone. I suggest implementing this process by walking your entire team through the five levels and explaining how you’re going to approach delegation from now on. Give them the big picture, and maybe even incorporate the levels by name into your company vocabulary. All of this will work to create a much safer, clearer environment in which everyone knows what responsibility they have in a delegation situation.
Buy Back Your Time
I want to close this chapter with one final word of advice. As I said earlier, people often don’t delegate because they think it’s faster or easier to do the job themselves. They’re right. It is easier to do a single task one time than it is to teach someone else how to do it and walk them through the delegation process and levels. But here’s the thing: most tasks are not one-time occasions. These are usually things that pop up often, pulling the leader away from more important work every time. So, while delegation does, in fact, take more time on the front end, it will save you an enormous amount of time every instance after that.
What’s more, you’ll probably get a better result. Just because you can wear all the hats in the business doesn’t mean they all fit. “By delegating and giving people ownership, they can take it to another level,” my client Matt told me. “And they can do it a lot better than I was doing. So not only am I not doing it anymore, I’m also getting a better product and the customer is getting a better end result.”
The result is that Matt’s business is booming. So is Caleb’s. For the marginal cost of delegating tasks outside his Desire Zone, he’s been able to dramatically impact his bottom line. “My Desire Zone activities are focusing on our clients and ways we can exponentially impact their business,” he said. “It’s not one of those things you can just check off a list. You really need to have margin and space to be creative.” Delegation allowed Caleb to not only serve his existing customers better, it also allowed him to launch new initiatives while still preserv
ing time for rejuvenation.
Time is fixed, but you can buy more. And you will simply never become free to focus on the things that really matter—your top priorities, your key relationships, your most important projects—until you learn how and why to delegate.
In the first section of this book, you learned how to Stop and create a vision for what your life could look like. In the second section, you learned how to Cut by eliminating, automating, and delegating everything outside your Desire Zone. Now it’s time to put all these things into action as we move into the final section of this book, Step 3: Act. There you’ll learn how to flip the switch on your new productivity machine and get it humming in the background, freeing you up to finally achieve more by doing less. This is the fun part, so knock out this chapter’s exercises and get ready for the final push.
PROJECT VISION CASTER
It’s time to finish the Task Filter worksheet you’ve been working on for the past few chapters. If you haven’t already done so, download yours at FreeToFocus.com/tools. By this point you’ve listed and categorized your daily tasks and marked which you can eliminate and automate. Now, what can you delegate? While you won’t be ready to outsource every remaining task, you can start to get a vision for where you’re going. Delegation doesn’t come easy or naturally to most of us; pay attention to any negative voices playing in the background, especially the objections we covered at the start of the chapter.
Next, pick at least one project or task to delegate today. Start by downloading a Project Vision Caster at FreeToFocus.com/tools. This will help you translate your vision for a project or task to paper so your team can see it clearly and execute it with excellence. Use the Project Vision Caster to prepare a team member for the responsibility, carefully choose the Delegation Level that’s appropriate, and hand it off. If delegation makes you nervous, don’t sweat it. Let the process be a learning experience for both you and your team member.
7
Consolidate
Plan Your Ideal Week
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.
ANNIE DILLARD
When fielding competing demands on our attention, we sometimes default to addressing two or more at the same time. Then we pride ourselves about our ability to multitask. The problem is, the human brain doesn’t really multitask. Instead, as journalist John Naish says, “it switches frantically between tasks like a bad amateur plate-spinner.”1
This kind of switching comes with heavy costs. When you jump between tasks, according to Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport, “your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.”2 Switching isn’t seamless. “Attention residue” gunks up our mental gears. One study by the University of California at Irvine found workers averaged twenty-five minutes to resume a task after an interruption like an email or phone call.3 By breaking our focus, switching also slows our processing ability. When we focus on one task, we filter what’s important for the completion of that task. However, when we multitask, we compromise our ability to decide what’s relevant and what’s not. We start wasting time by processing useless information, and that keeps us in a downward spiral of increasing busyness and decreasing results.
We all develop coping strategies. But if you multiply the impact of attention residue and irrelevant activity over an entire day of interruptions, the costs add up. Have you ever finished a hectic day wondering what you actually accomplished? That’s why. We stay busy, but we lose ground on the few things that matter most.
The solution is to design our work to focus on just one thing at a time. The principle is nothing new. Centuries before the advent of smartphones, email, and instant messages, Lord Chesterfield warned his son against the dangers of multitasking. “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once,” he said, “but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.”4 In this chapter we will apply Chesterfield’s lesson by learning to consolidate activities to keep your attention where it belongs: on one thing at a time. We’ll do this by discussing MegaBatching and your Ideal Week.
The Power of MegaBatching
Most of us have heard about batching. It’s the process of lumping similar tasks together and doing them in a dedicated block of time. For instance, you might set aside time each morning and afternoon to empty all your inboxes in your email, Slack, and social media. (You may recall that those actions are part of my workday startup and shutdown rituals covered in chapter 4.) Or you might save a week’s worth of reports or proposals to review all at once. Batching is one of the best ways I know to stay focused and blast through tasks. But even dedicated batchers don’t always leverage the technique for all it’s worth.
Several years ago I started batching on a large scale—what I call MegaBatching. I started with recording my weekly podcast. I used to research and record one new episode a week. It was sometimes hard to drum up the mental energy to produce. What should have taken me an hour or two would sometimes kill an entire day. But I found my team and I could prep in advance and batch record a whole season’s worth of shows over a couple of days. Suddenly, I was free from the weekly burden and saved significant time and money.5
I found the same thing with meetings. The average professional’s weekly schedule looks like a wild, mismatched splatter of meetings. They have no overarching strategy for accepting requests, which allows other people to dictate how they spend their days. But I couldn’t afford a calendar designed by Jackson Pollock. When I realized I was the only one who cared about my focus and productivity, I started putting rules around my calendar. Today, with rare exceptions, I batch all my meetings into two days a week. I schedule all my internal team-member meetings on Mondays, and I schedule my external client and vendor meetings on Fridays. That leaves three days in the middle of the week open for intense, focused work without my having to stop what I’m doing to run off to someone else’s meeting.
MegaBatching enables me to focus for an extended period on a single project or type of activity, churning out a ton of work quickly and with much higher quality because I’m less distracted. In those dedicated blocks of time, I truly am free to focus on the thing that matters most at that moment. This is more than grouping a few things for an hour’s worth of work. We’re talking about organizing entire days around similar activities to enable you to stay focused and build momentum.
Newport argues that we need extended periods of uninterrupted time to do our best thinking. That’s what he calls deep work. This gives you the time to immerse yourself in a project and stay there for long stretches of time. What would it look like if you eliminated all those distractions and gave yourself the freedom to focus on one type of activity—uninterrupted—for three hours, five hours, maybe even a few days at a time? MegaBatching enables you to do this. It gets you in the right environment where you can do your best work without having to switch gears. When you reclaim that momentum, you can do your work better, faster, and more enjoyably than you ever imagined.
Because this sort of work is usually done best alone, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier of Basecamp call this time in the “alone zone.”6 I’ve seen this model popping up in many industries lately. For example, Intel’s management created a program to allow their employees big blocks of “think time.” During that time, according to Wall Street Journal writer Rachel Emma Silverman, “Workers aren’t expected to respond to emails or attend meetings, unless it’s urgent or if they’re working on collaborative projects.” She reported, “Already, at least one employee has developed a patent application in those hours, while others have caught up on the work they’re unable to get to during frenetic work days.”7 By allowing employees to seclude themselves to focus on important tasks—even if they aren’t urgent in the moment—Intel and other companies are reaping the benefits of increased productivity, creativity, and even new product ideas.
That said, i
t’s important to note that collaborative work also yields significant returns when given the appropriate level of focus. MegaBatching collaborative time allows teams to stick with challenges long enough to get the breakthroughs they need to drive results. Whether alone or together, magic happens when we focus on important tasks.
I find it’s helpful to divide time across three broad categories of activity: Front Stage, Back Stage, and Off Stage. The metaphor comes from Shakespeare’s observation in As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.8
The world is a stage. It’s where we enact the story of our lives. We’re players, we have different exits and entrances, and we each play different parts—a dozen different roles any given day if we’re not careful. Let’s take each of these categories one at a time.
Front Stage. When you think of a stage, you probably imagine the front stage first. This is where the action happens and the drama unfolds—at least from the audience’s perspective. An actor’s job is acting, and he performs that role on the stage for all to see. The tasks for which you’re hired and paid constitute Front Stage activities. I’m talking key functions, primary deliverables, the line items on your performance review. For example, if you’re in sales, your Front Stage may be filled with phone prospecting, assessing client needs, or pitch meetings. If you’re a lawyer, it might be client meetings, court appearances, or contract negotiation. If you’re a corporate executive, it might include presenting marketing plans, leading high-level meetings, or casting a vision for a new product or service.
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