Delegation

You just said Yes – You just said No revisited

Affirmative action, Delegation, Productivity, relationships

Everything in life has an opportunity cost.

For everything that you say Yes to , there’s something that you said No to , right there. Which could mean that you said Yes to a non essential task which won’t get you anywhere closer to your aspirations. This same time will not be available for you to do a task which could help you meet your aspirations.

I happen to be one of those people who aren’t able to say No easily. Which makes me among the biggest culprits of breaking this rule.

Then you should not be reading this post, because it is only theory, except the fact that I am taking affirmative action to get out of the habit. I have written about how I have eliminated all , but an extremely few apps, from my devices and stopped all kinds of alerts. So now I don’t say Yes to looking at all the alerts from different apps.

The other thing I am trying to measure is a “no” index everyday. This is where I specifically say No to things. I want to see how high can it be taken. Earlier I have tried other mechanisms of saying No, but each time I would do that I would feel guilty. So now I am trying to gamify this. On a weekly basis I am tracking the index like the stock market to see if my trend is climbing up or not.

Being a person who works very hard on relationships, I am now delegating the job of identifying and starting relationships with people to others in my team. I support them rather then get into the activity myself. There are glitches, it also takes more time and I have to do a lot of hand-holding, but I have a feeling its starting to show results for me, because now I don’t have to say Yes , to cultivating every relationship.

If you have found other practical ways to say No to more things, then please put it in the comments below, I would love to learn and practice more productivity methods.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Delegation to automated systems

Automation, Delegation

I don’t know who said it but its true we waste our life in days not years, we waste our lives in hours not days and we waste our life in minutes not hours.

So our life passes us by every minute of the day if we are not mindful about it.

There have been times in my life, a lot actually when I was wandering aimlessly not knowing what to do and wondering why the day was not ending. When I look back, it seems so stupid that I would do something like that.

Another thing where I used to end up spending a lot of small amounts of time was in paying bills. The electricity bill would come on a different date and the telephone bills on different dates and so on. Every weekend, every month I would find myself busy paying out bills.

Then I heard from Tony Robbins about batching jobs to improve productivity. I tried that and did succeed to a certain extent but since there were different dates o be monitored, the onus was still on me to figure out when to make the payment, before the last date.

My bank then started the facility of doing automated payments for all my utilities. That has created a major difference because now I don’t even have to think about paying of the bills. The bank monitors the last dates and makes the payments. Since my mind now knows that there’s nothing for it to do it just does not bother. So the Zeigarnik effect does not come into play.

When you delegate to people, you have to keep track and monitor. You cannot absolve yourself of the responsibility of the result that has to be achieved eventhough you have delegated the work to someone.

Bu when you delegate to automated systems, you just don’t have to monitor. That’s the advantage of computers. Once programmed they will keep doing the work repeatedly until the system itself gets spoilt, which is very rare.

Amazon, Bigbasket and other similar shopping sites do a similar activity when they prompt you in your monthly grocery shopping, so that you don’t have to remember individual items.

Once you get these small things which eat up the “minutes” in your life every month, you are able to save so much time. However if you end up spending those free minutes just moving around aimlessly then you have lost the advantage.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!