What could you accomplish if your staff was not focused on completing tasks, but on delivering outcomes for your company? That’s a game-changer, right? We’ll cover this in more detail in chapter four, but for now, let me just get your buy-in on the delegating concept. Ask yourself: Would my life be easier if my employees were empowered to make decisions, and I felt confident that they would routinely make decisions that would sustain and grow my business? Would my life be easier if my employees acted like owners?
It’s a no-brainer, right? The only answer is, “Damn straight, Mike! My life would be an endless string of awesomeness, bee-yotch!”
When your desired outcome is also their desired outcome, you are better able to let go and let your team do their jobs. And it will be okay. It will be more than okay. You’re going to be a delegating machine. You’ll be the Oprah Winfrey of delegators: “You get a project! And you get a project! And you get a project!”
If you’re going to save your Saturdays and your soul and scale your business, being acutely aware of what phase of the four Ds you are in is essential. Will you ever stop Doing entirely? Maybe not—but you will do a fraction of the work you do now, and you will transition to doing only the work you love.
Think for a moment about Jeff Bezos, the mastermind behind Amazon. On Thursday, July 27, 2017, the news broke that Jeff Bezos had unseated Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world. It was a momentary topping, as the stock market played back in favor of Bill Gates by the end of the day and Gates once again was the richest person on the planet.* Pick either entrepreneur. Gates and Bezos have both focused their energies on the Design phase from the get-go. But even today they do a little bit of the doing. You can bet your bottom dollar, when a major partnership is negotiated, Bill Gates participates in the deal. And when Amazon rolls out another game-changing product, not only does the design team test the prototypes, Bezos does a little test run himself. The Doing phase will never disappear fully for an entrepreneur; it will simply take up the least amount of time.
Deciding every little thing—you can kick that phase to the curb. You won’t stop Deciding entirely; you will just move from making minor decisions to making only the most critical decisions as the people to whom you delegate become more comfortable making decisions on their own. As for Delegating, because your business will evolve and change, you’ll have to dedicate some time for Delegating. You will delegate until you hire a delegator, whose Primary Job is to continually empower the team to make on-the-field decisions and protect you while you do the Design work. Reminder: This is not a switch from one phase to another; it is a throttle. The goal is for you to spend most of your work time controlling the flow of work and designing your company’s future. If you want your business to run like clockwork, as Gates and Bezos have done, you must concentrate the majority of your effort into being a designer.
THE 4DS—TARGET PERCENTAGES
If you want to improve your body or your business or anything for that matter, you need to know what you intend to accomplish and where you are today. Setting a goal of losing one hundred pounds is not a good idea if you only weigh one fifty. Clarity comes from knowing your ideal target and where you are starting. That is what we are going to do for your business in this step.
FOUR TYPES OF WORK
FIGURE 2
There are four ways in which people who work for a business serve that business. Every person in an organization is either Doing the work, Deciding for others about the work, Delegating the work to others, or Designing the work. As mentioned earlier, collectively I call this the 4Ds.
The 4Ds are being executed within your business and every other organization on this planet. This is true if your business is a company of one, one hundred thousand, or any number in between. And this is true for every single person at your company. From an intern to an executive board member, from the nice folks in C-suite to the sweet folks with feet on the street, everyone is working the 4Ds.
Each person in your organization is doing their own blend of the 4Ds, although you may not (yet) be deliberately directing it. Some people may be Doing work constantly. Another person may be Deciding what other people should be doing while Doing the work of ten people, and with the few seconds left trying to Design a forward-looking strategy. Sound familiar?
Collectively, the 4D work of each person combines to form a 4D Mix for your business. If the business is just you, the solopreneur, your own 4D Mix is the company’s 4D Mix. If the company is multiple employees, the aggregation of each employee’s 4Ds is the company’s 4D Mix.
The ideal mix for a company is 80 percent (Doing), 2 percent (Deciding), 8 percent (Delegating), and 10 percent (Designing). (See figure 3 on page 38.) Why does a business need to dedicate so much time for Doing? Because businesses need to do things that customers want, and that creates value in the marketplace; that’s how businesses make profit. The other 20 percent of that ideal company mix is spread over managing and guiding the business. For you to design your company to run itself, you need to master the mix. Simply put, you need to know what your company’s 4D Mix is as compared to the optimal 4D Mix, and then use the Clockwork system to continually optimize your business.
Critically Important and Helpful Shortcut: Analyzing for the optimal ratio can be arduous and time consuming. Since business is dynamic, it is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to constantly nail down that ratio. So the one thing you should focus on, above all else, is the big piece, and that is the 80 percent of Doing time. Is your company spending most of its time serving clients (that is the 80 percent Doing), but not all of it? If you are at 95 percent Doing, you can tell instantly that there is not enough Designing or other work going on because there is only 5 percent of company time left for the other three Ds. If the Doing is at 60 percent, that also tells you that you’re in trouble, since your business isn’t spending enough time getting things done. So if you simply track the Doing and target 80 percent, the other three Ds will often come into alignment. Focus on spending as much of the remaining 20 percent on Designing, and the Delegating and Deciding will often just fall into place, as long as you commit to empowering your employees to take ownership of their work.
OPTIMAL 4D MIX
DOING: ______ DECIDING: ______ DELEGATING: ______ DESIGNING: ______
FIGURE 3 (Note: This graph is not drawn with balanced increments to make the chart easier to read.)
Now that you know what the optimal mix is, let’s figure out where your business is right now. We ultimately need to evaluate how all the people in your organization are utilizing their time, but since you are the one reading this book and quite possibly serving the QBR (more on that later), we need to analyze your mix first. And if you are a one-person business, then you are the business. No matter how many employees you have, it is important you understand this process and what it reveals about your own 4D Mix. This process will help you understand how to evaluate your company’s 4D Mix.
Review the last five days you worked. If you maintain a calendar or task tracker, this may be relatively easy to do. To the best of your ability, write down each task you did and action you took for the five days we are evaluating.
On a piece of paper create six columns, titled Date, Activity, Start, Finish, Total Time, and Work Type (I also created a chart you can download at Clockwork.life). This is your Time Analysis Worksheet.
TIME ANALYSIS WORKSHEET
DATE
ACTIVITY
START
FINISH
TOTAL TIME
WORK TYPE
DO | DECIDE | DELEGATE } DESIGN
DO | DECIDE | DELEGATE } DESIGN
DO | DECIDE | DELEGATE } DESIGN
DO | DECIDE | DELEGATE } DESIGN
DO | DECIDE | DELEGATE } DESIGN
TOTAL TIME
DOING: ______ DECIDING: ______ DELEGATING: ______ DESIGNING: ______
FIGURE 4
Fill out the form by writing down each work task or action you took during each of the five days. To make the process as easy as possible, do your best to recall one complete day at a time, and then repeat this for each of the five days.
In the Date column, write the day of the activity.
In the Activity column, write a few words that describe the task or action you took.
In the Start and Finish columns, write the times you started and finished the task. (This is only necessary when you do an Active Time Analysis. Since you are doing this one from recollection, skip the Start and Finish columns, and simply fill in the Total Time you spent on the task.)
As the final step, categorize the task as a Doing, Deciding, Delegating, or Designing activity. Or if you are using the form you downloaded from Clockwork.life, simply circle the appropriate activity category.
If you don’t have good calendar records and are struggling to remember your last five days of work (welcome to the life of an entrepreneur), just complete the Time Analysis Worksheet as you go through the next five days. As you dig deeper into the Clockwork system yourself, and roll it out to your employees and colleagues, an Active Time Analysis is the most accurate approach. In this process, you will track the actions you take as you take them, ensuring you don’t miss a thing.
THE ACTIVE ANALYSIS
Hang on—I’m about to throw a bunch of numbers at you. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you may not want to walk through the woods to get to the Emerald City. For her, it was scary. For you, it may seem tedious or overwhelming. Percentages, percentages, percentages, oh my! I realize you might not be a business geek like me, who gets turned on by allocation exercises and analysis. But stick it out for me, would ya? You need this information to get where you’re going. (Which, incidentally, I hope is the great land of Oz, not the dust bowl of Depression-era Kansas. Why did Dorothy want to go back, anyway?)
Get a fresh Time Analysis Worksheet as described in step 1 above.
As you go through the day, write down the date and the activity you are working on, along with the time you started it. Then get to work on that activity. The moment you shift to different work, any work—including a distracting question from a colleague, answering an urgent email, or heading out to lunch—quickly jot down the finish time for the current task (even if it is not finished . . . it is just finished for the moment). Then write down the new activity (e.g., answering your colleague’s question) and when you start it. Then, once that activity is complete, fill out the time you finish it. Then do the same for the next task. Repeat for the entire day.
When the day’s work is done, make sure all the date fields are completed. A line from top to bottom is adequate and effective (this is a book on efficiency, after all). Then look at each task for the day and mark the type of work it is on the sheet: Doing, Deciding, Delegating, or Designing. Only choose one for each task. If you are unsure, choose the lowest of the levels you are considering (Doing being lowest and Designing being highest). I know this is laborious, but it is only five days of your life, it is very revealing (you may be surprised by the gap between your perception and reality), and it is a critical step in getting your business to run on automatic. You need clarity on where you are right here, right now, so that we can quickly move you to where you need to be.
Once the Time Analysis Worksheet is completed for all five days, add up the total time you spent Doing. Then add up the total time for Deciding. Then Delegating. And, finally, do it for Designing. Put the totals on the bottom of the form, and keep the form for future analysis.
With the totals for each of the 4Ds, create a gauge graphic (or fill out the one I created for you below or download one at Clockwork.life) that shows your 4D Mix. Calculate the percentages by dividing the total of each D into the sum of all 4Ds. For example, if you spent forty-five hours Doing, fourteen hours Deciding, one hour Delegating, and zero hours Designing, the total of the 4Ds (45+14+1+0) equals sixty hours. To get your Doing percentage, divide forty-five hours by sixty hours to get 0.75, meaning 75 percent. Continuing the example, Deciding is 23 percent, Delegating is 2 percent (both with rounding), and Designing is 0 percent. With the percentages calculated, fill in each D category at the bottom of the graph.
4D MIX
DOING: ______ DECIDING: ______ DELEGATING: ______ DESIGNING: ______
FIGURE 5
As the final step in the analysis, fill in the “pie wedges” for each D to represent the proper percentages in the graph (the 4D Mix). The wedges will show the distribution of your work types (the 4Ds). You can also download this on the resources page at Clockwork.life.
While each work type is necessary, many businesses are unbalanced. We will look at the entire business later, but for now let’s start by just looking at where you stand. And again, if you are a solopreneur or have a small business of five employees or fewer, either you are the business or you are a major part of the business. What do you notice? What are your realizations?
Many solopreneurs fall into the trap of having 95 percent or more of their time allocated to Doing. They are living in a time-for-money trap—the Survival Trap—where the only way to grow is by Doing more, but you can’t, because there is no time.
I’ve also seen solopreneurs trap themselves in a Design-heavy 4D Mix. Putting 40 percent of your time in Designing (which is way more than the optimal 10 percent) may indicate you are a dreamer, but it surely means you aren’t spending enough time Doing the work to turn those dreams into reality.
Warning! Since we analyzed only five days of your life, you may have analyzed a week where, for example, you were doing a quarterly tacking plan. I detail the tacking strategy in my book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, but the core essence is simple: tacking is a quarterly protocol where you observe the market around you and the influence it may have on your overarching goals, and then adjust your business strategy to realign with your Big Beautiful Audacious Noble Goal.
If you do your time analysis during a tacking (i.e., planning) period, your analysis is not representative of your typical allocation of time. Here is the deal: you can and should trust yourself. You know what your typical workweek is like, because it is the workweek that you live. So you have permission to go back to step 1 and write down what you think is a typical week.
The optimal 4D Mix, of course, works for multi-employee companies. For example, if you have two employees (you being one of them), the average of both your individual 4D Mixes constitutes your company mix. So, if your 4D is 50 percent Doing, 0 percent Deciding, 0 percent Delegating, and 50 percent Designing, and the other employee’s is 80 percent Doing, 20 percent Deciding, 0 percent Delegating, and 0 percent Designing, it is the average of each category that gets you your business mix.
(Note: I realize you may work seventy hours a week and your employee forty hours a week, and therefore more emphasis should be put on your percentages. But that level of detail does not do much at all to impact the results, so let’s not get that nitty-gritty. Plus, our goal is to reduce your time from seventy hours and get it way down. Remember?)
In this example, the company’s mix is 65 percent Doing (the average of 50 percent and 80 percent), 10 percent Deciding (average of 0 percent and 20 percent), 0 percent Delegating (average of 0 percent and 0 percent), and 25 percent Designing (average of 50 percent and 0 percent). So this business is 65/10/0/25. Compare that with the optimal 4D Mix of
80/2/8/10, and we can see we need to ramp up the Doing (getting things done) and reduce the Deciding for others (perhaps we outsourced to virtual help, and they need way too much direction). There is no Delegation going on, and we want about 8 percent of the time spent on empowering others to drive outcomes. Twenty-five percent of the time between these two people is spent on the Designing (vision and future thinking) of the business, which is too much (it should be around 10 percent).
If you have a large company with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, you can still do this exercise for everyone. But do it in groups by department and responsibilities. For example, say you have two hundred employees, and your accounting department has ten people. Have each person in the accounting department do a 4D Mix analysis. Then average out across the department. Now you will have the 4D for your accounting department. Do the same for other departments and then create charts for each department. Add up the department 4D Mixes to see what your company 4D Mix is.
START WITH 1 PERCENT
I realize the shift I’m asking you to work toward can seem overwhelming, especially if, at the moment, you can’t imagine how you’d free up any time to focus on Designing your business. This is why, as you begin this process, I’m asking you to set aside just 1 percent of your work time for Designing. If you work forty hours a week, that’s twenty-four minutes a week, rounded up to a half hour. If working sixty hours a week is closer to your reality, that can be rounded to just one hour of Design time. You don’t even have to block off an entire hour (or whatever your 1 percent equivalent is) for Design work; you can break up the time.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 5