7 Reasons Why Delegating Is NOT Optional

For sure, every adult person was once a child. To be a busy person it means you are already an adult. Therefore, we can extend the statement and say that… Every busy person was once a child; not that we had any doubts about it. 🙂

Going back to your childhood, for sure you also remember practicing relay races at school. I can’t imagine a single child not playing this game. It was fun, but… did you ever think why the game was invented?

“A relay race is a track and field event in which athletes run a pre-set distance carrying a baton before passing it onto the next runner. Often, a relay team is a team of four sprinters.” as you can read in Wikipedia.

Now, let’s do a visualization exercise. Imagine that your job is the race, you are one of the athletes, the baton is the project you’re working on, and the team of four sprinters is your working environment. Why should you do it? Because your work is that field event that keeps you busy for such a large part of your day.

Why are we making references to this game and why did you play it in the early part of your childhood? The brief answer is… To show you, at a young age, that delegating helps you reach your goals easier.

Why should you sweat so hard to run the entire race when it’s easier to split the path into smaller portions and share your victory with your friends? What is victory good for if not to share it with others?

No one says that to delegate, it means that you are not able to handle that task. But… why would you do it by yourself when by delegating you would increase your effectiveness. Let’s see why this statement is true.

7 REASONS WHY DELEGATING IS NOT OPTIONAL FOR A BUSY PERSON

1. Choosing to do all the task by yourself, in a long-term analysis you will succeed to neglect the things that only you can do while you manage the tasks that others can help you with. Do you somehow want to prove that you are really the best in everything? Well… this is great. But… doing this, you will one day discover that you lost precious time, and you didn’t even have the chance to show how good you are in your exact field of expertise.

2. Each person is the best in a certain field, therefore trying to be the best in all domains will tire you out. Moreover, you will cancel from others the chance for them to prove their abilities.

3. After a while, you will lose your real motivation. There will be too many tasks to fulfill, you will be motivated for a certain amount of time by each of these tasks, but… you will forget the main motivation behind your project.

4. Instead of reaching your goals and keeping a short deadline for your project, you will succeed to delay its fulfillment using lots of time by not delegating some tasks. This will be similar to putting on the breaks on your path.

5. You’ll not only lose your motivation, but your coworkers will lose theirs also. This is something that you really want to avoid if you want to succeed. There are many people who quit their jobs because they lose their motivation or because somehow the job makes them bored. Seeing this from far away, seems to be a good thing for the one who is left. Less competition. But… is it really so? Think more.

6. You’ll turn down the productive flux, and progress will barely be visible. They say that more brains are better than one. Producing solutions and finding resources necessitates more than one point of view.

7. Don’t trap yourself into the self-governing cage. You will only succeed to add on your shoulders more than you can bare in a long term, and this will give you many headaches along with much stress. Believe me… you don’t want it!

Indeed, these are only 7 reasons extracted from an ocean of motives. What other reasons that prompt you to delegate the mandatory tasks inside a project would you add to this list?