Eliminate - automate - delegate: free up your time for the important things

If you ask any small business owner how they are, 9 out of 10 times the answer will be some variant of “busy”.

However, “busy” doesn't mean “effective”. When we are busy doing the wrong things, often the outcomes are worse than if we didn’t do anything at all.

I have had many conversations with business owners and team members who know that they are delaying really important stuff because they are too busy. This makes no sense when the things taking up this time are of far lower importance than the important one being delayed. Unfortunately, while we all know that this is logically true, in practice it is very difficult to escape the pull of the “urgent but not important”.

As a business owner, this requires a level of discipline and mindfulness to ensure that you are prioritising correctly. When deciding what to do with a task, categorise in the following order of precedence:

• Eliminate
• Automate
• Delegate
• Do

Elimination

This is perhaps psychologically the most difficult phase for many business owners. Every task seems like it must be done, but in reality a huge portion of our time is spend doing work that doesn’t need to be done.

The good news is, the risk of us cutting essential tasks is low. Our natural inclination is to keep too many tasks that should be eliminated. The late Peter Drucker states “if one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.’ Somebody will tell you if you cut too much before any serious harm is done.

Example: many management reports are a complete waste of time, listing only “vanity metrics” that contribute nothing to the bottom line. These reports should be entirely eliminated.

Automation

The next phase, automation, should only be considered if the task is considered essential. Fortunately there are a growing number of tasks that can be automated, greatly reducing the amount of human labour involved. Automated tasks require less management, are more reliable, and to the extent that they do not require human input, error free.

If you are not technically minded, a digital transformation consultant can help you review your work flows to see where automation is appropriate.

Examples for this include payments, many email communications and a wide range of repetitive tasks.

Delegation

To be able to scale a business, delegation is a critical skill.

Any tasks that is essential and cannot be automated, but can be done to an acceptable level by someone else should be delegated. If you find that you cannot delegate, either (1) you have a trust issue, (2) you haven’t invested sufficiently in your team or (3) you need to hire capable people.

The bar for delegation should not be that another person can do the task better than you (although hiring people smarter than you is a trait of a great manager). They merely need to be able to do the job to a satisfactory level. If another person can do the job 70% as well as you could, delegate.

The hardest thing for many business owners is to delegate decision making, but it is one of the most important. If you are bogged down in making many inconsequential decisions, you are not working on the critical ones for your business growth. Jeff Bezos claims that he makes only three decisions each day - these are the decisions that will radically shape the future of the business.

There are many decisions that are best made by a member of your staff. Anything that is routine or operations focussed should probably be delegated. If the decision is reversible at an acceptable cost it should be delegated.

Examples of these would include routine purchasing, managing minor staffing issues, and even extend up to substantial decisions within the training and competency of your staff and contractors.

… and the rest

If you are effective at elimination - automation - delegation you should be left to work ON your business, not IN it. You can then look at the direction that your business is going, potential threats, new opportunities and improvements in systems and processes.

If you feel that you can’t get to this place, the problem is not with your staff, it is with you as the business owner. Either you don’t have the right people on the bus (improve recruiting) or you haven’t given them the tools to do their job effectively (improve training and processes).

If you can pull this off not only will you have more time for family, recreation - you will be continually improving your business, your people will be more engaged and productive and your business more successful.

If you find this process overwhelming, this is not a journey that you need to travel alone. Reach out to your business coach, who can give you an objective view of your business and assist you to pull the pieces together.

This is an article for Business Blindspots Tasmania. To ensure you receive our regular updates from expert business advisers across a range of areas follow our LinkedIn group.