Manage Time Better through Effective Delegation

When the English Poet Edward Young born 1683 in Hampshire, England first penned the words “procrastination is the thief of time” it’s thought he had in mind to charm a local lady while they still had youth left to share in each others arms. Whether this is true or not, deferring things until tomorrow is as common today as it was then, and that refers to implementing time management in business too.

Business owners and managers all have busy days. One moment they are cracking markets, the next they are lost in paperwork and repairing employee’s gaffes. Until business leaders design and implement effective delegation policies they will be stuck in this mindless loop forever.

Time is the most expensive input to most businesses yet some leaders still spend more time castigating an employee for being late than they do shaping and reshaping how their staff ought to spend time. Nature abhors a vacuum and this lack of effective delegation is soon displaced by what the people think they ought to do.

If you are frustrated by your firm’s performance and are wasting time fighting fires then it is time to take a few days out to create operations manual that helps you manage time. I am not referring to a template downloaded off the internet – I am talking about a home-spun one that’s built to steer your ship through any kind of weather even when you are not there.

I use the analogy of a ship deliberately because it is a generalised example. The captain (you) must chart the course the helmsman steers while the engineer must keep the motors running. As you trade along the coastline the purser manages the exchequer as the crew completes the maintenance cycle and chips away the rust. Everybody concentrates on the job set out for them and there are interfaces not overlaps - in other words a near perfect time management structure is in place.

This neat and tidy model is not always found in business because things may be a little harder to monitor than on an imaginary ship. Everybody sticks in their oar at budget time while sales and marketing perfect the art of duplication. Nobody tells the poor fellow in production about orders in the pipeline with the net result that chaos reigns throughout the mildest storm. And that is why as manager or business owner the fires sometimes rage around you too, as you do your best to back-fit order, and manage time on your employees’ behalf.