Not every project or task you take on at work, especially those others ask you to do, requires your immediate attention—or your action at all. But it’s not easy to decide if the workload on your plate is work that you need to be doing at this moment, writes Sabina Nawaz, a global CEO coach in Harvard Business Review.
To aid in the process of deciding what tasks should be delegated to someone else and what tasks you need to get cracking on Nawaz has a list of questions:
• Why is this task necessary? Ascertaining “why” can ensure critical jobs are prioritized and aligned with the big picture while others are delegated or left undone.
• Does it fit into my “time portfolio”? Create a portfolio for your most precious resource: your time. One way to start is to divide your core activities into categories and consider how much time you should be spending doing each type of work every day. By creating a time budget for big work categories, you become more mindful about the responsibilities to which you attend.
• What would happen a month from now if it isn’t done? Thinking about this can help avoid effort being spent on things that are not of consequence in the big picture.
• Who wants this task done, and who is the right person to do it? Figure out who can take on this task, then, liberate time through delegation and allow your teammates to appropriately own their work.
• How often do you give more importance to a task than it is actually worth? This is another way to liberate time.
• What’s the story I’m telling myself? If many of your must-do items originate from a must-do story about how you want to appear to others, trim them down.
Read the full story, where Nawaz uses examples from one of her coaching clients to illustrate how to better manage time at the office.
