The Myth of Delegation
I learned from the title of a Forbes article that 9 – 5 was out and 1 – 6 was in. I was intrigued because I can barely get everything done working 9 – 5. (Or… really… more like 8 – 8, but who is counting?) How would I get the same amount of work done in 5 hours per day? 25 hours per week?
The first part of the idea is sound. We all waste time doing things that aren’t high priorities. If we boil down our work to what actually needs to get done, it probably would fit into fewer hours. Also, if we’re more productive at certain times of day, we should shift our schedule to fit those times. Someone who is not a morning person may get to work at 9, but may not really kick into high gear until 11. Why spend those first 2 hours wasting time when you can run errands and shift your work back by a bit?
But then the author lost me when she got to the meat of how she was managing to only work 5 hours. She delegated. She pushed off her work to other people, or, as she called it “outsourcing everything humanly possible.” Well, sure, if I hired someone to do the tasks I had to do, I would have oodles of time because someone else would be doing chunks of my job. If I asked my co-workers to take tasks off my plate, all I’ve done is move the task to someone else’s plate.
By that token, if I ate out every night, I’d save myself tons of time that I use on cooking. Ditto for hiring a cleaning service so I can save time on cleaning. An errand-running service plus a driver to get everyone to their activities. In all of these cases, I have taken my task and asked or paid someone else to do it. The task doesn’t go away — it just gets transferred to someone else’s plate, ensuring they have to stick to that 9 – 5 life while I get to enjoy the 1 – 6 world.
THAT feels like a larger time suck — playing hot potato with tasks. I’m waiting for the next part of the article which is “You could have 10% more money if you stopped outsourcing tasks you can take care of yourself.” The never-ending financial advice cycle.
7 comments
amen! I hear this all the time at work, and there are only so many tasks that I can delegate- some of them actually require me to do them. sure if you happen to have an assistant who isn’t busy and they can do the tasks you can be more efficient… but only so much.
I agree with the main point of this post.
But… the economics professor in me has to point out a couple of things. First off– if everybody outsourced X, the price of X would go up (in the short term– in the long-term more people would do X because the price would make it worth it for people on the margin and then we’d figure out how to get X more efficiently and the price would drop) . So in the short term, people doing X could choose to work fewer hours to make the same amount of money as before or they could enjoy the additional $$. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Second, comparative advantage means that the people doing X for their job are going to be more efficient at X. That kind of outsourcing is good for everyone.
These two points are to say, just because someone is outsourcing cooking/cleaning/etc. for 5 hours doesn’t mean that they’re forcing someone else to work 5 more hours so that they can work 5 fewer. The point is still taken on delegating to coworkers who presumably have similar comparative advantage to the person doing the delegating, but for cooking/cleaning/etc. Professional chefs and cleaners are faster and better than most of us who aren’t and would love to get more business. No guilt for that kind of outsourcing for those who can afford it and pay for it!
And yes, the next post is always definitely going to be “stop outsourcing to save money”. Because marketing is lazy and most people’s utility curves hit their budget constraints somewhere between outsource everything and outsource nothing, especially for folks who have time and energy to read financial advice in magazines.
For a period of time, my coworkers and I were all rotating through the group supervisor position while they were trying to hire a replacement. One of my coworkers was a supreme delegator. He came to me with a list of things to look up on a particular website, and asked me to take care of it. His office was a 15 second walk from mine. So, about 30 seconds after he returned to his office after giving me the list, I walked in with the completed list and said “In the time it took you to come to my office and ask me to do this, you could have looked the information up yourself.” I am not a fan of pointless delegation.
I try to delegate my work all the time, jokingly. But the only REAL way to do that is by becoming a complete slacker who does nothing, and I am ethically prohibited from sinking to that level. Not so for other people, unfortunately. 🙁
I’ll skip that article. The work I do professionally is billed to clients in tenth of an hour increments, and I am required to do a certain amount of “billable” work every year. So there is literally no way for me to “work smarter, not harder” and no benefit to me in delegating tasks that could generate billable time.
In my personal life, I already delegate most things that I reasonably can. I have housecleaners; I eat out (or have done meal delivery or grocery pickup); we use landscaping services and a handyman. So short of changing professions, I’m already saving time where I can.
I have the same thoughts you do. Going to spend some time with nicoleandmaggie’s comment.
The type of outsourcing Nicole and Maggie mention in their comment is where I find my personal sweet spot–those services that can do work much better and faster than I would, because of specialization. For example, we have a deep cleaning housekeeping service that comes every two weeks. We pay them about as much as I charge for an hour of my time for work. However, it would take ME about 5 hours to do all they do (I’ve timed it to determine for sure), and it would physically and mentally exhaust me, depleting me from the time I do work that pays much more (or, spending time with my family, quality time with my husband, “power hours” fixing household problems that only I can handle, etc). It only takes the service about 1.5 hours to do all that work. So, in that situation, outsourcing is a clear win-win scenario.
While I can (and do) at times delegate tasks to free myself up to perform tasks only I can perform because of licensing/skill set at work, part of my job is to be available during certain specified hours, so regardless of anything else, I have to be present.
That being said, there are definitely times in my personal life I’ve recognized that the time I’d spend doing something vs the money I’d spend hiring someone to do it makes it worth it to delegate. I hire a cleaning service about every 2-3 months to do the deep cleaning, because they charge less in money than it would cost me in time for the work. My husband and I pay an accounting firm to do our taxes because our return can get complicated and the cost of sacrificing half of our extremely limited together time (we work opposite schedules) to deal with that is higher than what the firm charges. So I get the idea, but also accept that it’s not possible in all situations.