With delegating, the first and most important thing to bear in mind, is whether the task is appropriate for delegating in the first place. If, for instance, you can do it better and more quickly than other people, it may not be appropriate to hand it off to someone else, and vice-versa. However, if you need to manage your time better it is a viable option. Below is a guide to how to delegate effectively:

• Explain the tasks clearly and precisely. You are the one who knows exactly what the job involves, they don’t. It’s up to you to transfer that information thoroughly.
• Remember the basic rules of productivity: explain why you are doing it and what you want the outcome to be. Just because you are delegating the task to others does not mean that they don’t need to know these details as well.
• Likewise, timeframe the task. When you delegate, you don’t then want to worry about when you will hear progress reports or how quickly things are moving forward. It allows you to be aware of progress without constantly hovering around the project.
• Explain why you are giving the task to the persons involved, what they can get out of it and what their boundaries are. This way they are clear about what is expected of them as individuals/as a team.
• Give the people you delegate to the responsibility of the project. If you are telling people exactly what to do, micromanaging the project and not allowing for any initiative that is not delegating. Rather than seeing it as doing a project for someone else, it becomes personal to them with all the responsibilities and expectations that accompany it.
• Give recognition! The key is to be positive and when criticism is required be constructive with it. Let them know where things are going wrong and discuss together how it can be rectified (if you just tell them how to fix it you are no longer delegating, as mentioned in the previous point).

Organization:

1. Something that has been made into an ordered whole
2. An organized structure for arranging or classifying
3. Orderliness by virtue of being methodical and well organized

GTD allows for you to organize your thoughts into actionable projects and encourages you to get everything off your mind. The mind is not an organizing tool, you can’t rely on it to remind you about things when you need it to, it doesn’t neatly put everything into neat little compartments; you need a system that takes all this content out of your mind and organizes it for you, whether it be on paper or on a laptop.

The system needs to be quick and simple to use. There is no motivation to use something that is a burden. You want to be able to take it out and write down your thoughts in seconds (yes, seconds!). If you have to wait for something to boot up, go through loads of menus to get where you want or flick through hundreds of pieces of paper then the system will fail.

Likewise, the system needs to be accessible. Thoughts can occur at any time. If you are walking down the street or sat in a cafe how are you going to make notes if your system is so cumbersome you had to leave it at home? Similarly it should not be overly reliant on technology.

In last Monday’s post I discussed the vertical map/horizons of focus. I mentioned the importance of the 20,000ft level and how understanding your roles & responsibilities influences your map above and below. In this post I will take this level and expand upon it, discussing how I define my roles & responsibilities, work out the projects and requirements of them, and how I monitor my performance.

Roles & responsibilities determine the quality of your life in the here and now. If you are doing everything you want to do in your life that fulfills all your needs and is at the least moving you towards all your wants then one can assume you are in a comfortable position. Depending on how far you want to take it, you could argue that every action you take in your life can be attributed to a role or responsibility. In an abstract level one can assume that we have a high level role as a functioning human being on this planet with all the responsibilities that that entails.

Roles & responsibilities can be split into two types. Firstly you have responsibilities to yourself, such as your personal growth, your social life and your health. Some can come out of necessity, some can be from choice. For instance, some people are content with a small social life, while others will not feel complete without an extensive network of friends and colleagues.

Secondly there are external roles & responsibilities to others, such as by being a friend, a family member, a parent, and typically the most significant one, to your job role (note the difference between that and career which would be personal growth in your potential field of expertise).

How much you choose to actively monitor your roles & responsibilities can be a mixture of necessity and desire. If you feel satisfied with your contribution as a family member (ie you visit your parents on a regular basis) it is not necessary to track it. If for instance, however, a family member was to become ill and it was down to you to look after that person, your role as a family member would expand and take on new depths as a result (you may even consider your ill relative as a seperate responsibility).

The first template I currently use to manage my roles is this one (A4 size). Each role is split into on-going goals and projects. The former includes those things that needs to be done on a regular basis. If they are not being done then your responsibilities are not being fulfilled. For example, if I have a responsibility to my health, an on-going goal would be to go to the gym regularly. The projects section is essentially your basic 10,000ft GTD project. Taking the health responsibility again, a project would be to book to see a doctor for a check-up. The distinction between these two needs to be clear as they have differing consequences. For example, imagine doing all the basic requirements of your job such as going to meetings, briefings etc yet not acting upon the projects that your superiors give you? Imagine further, doing only what your manager gives you and nothing else regarding your job role?

Secondly and perhaps optionally, I took another feature I came across in Your Best Year Yet by Jinny Ditzler (previously mentioned in my productivity cycle post) and created a further template (A4 size) that allows me to monitor my performance in my respective roles. Write down your roles around the circle at each spoke and judge yourself between 0 and 10. Don’t judge it on amount of effort or time expended because some roles ask more of you than others. Ask yourself if you did as much as you could have done on your role over the period (I currently judge this period as weekly and do it during my review but this may be too short a timescale for some).

Organize IT recap for 08th April 2007:

• As promised in last week’s recap, I have brought together the two Clutter 101 posts I did and made a PDF out of them for easy reference. Check it out here. Likewise I have also started putting up my printable templates I use for GTD. Both of these sections can also be accessed via the sidebar
• If your computer is on the way out and you are considering getting rid of it, then you want to give some careful thought to properly wiping your hard-drive because a format simply won’t cut it. Check this article out for details.
• This post is an excellent guide on how to create a “Firefox OS” and covers using primarily Google apps like Gmail and Google Docs to do all your work online.

In part 1 of this Get Creative series I looked at the five basic tools required to get your creative juices flowing. The fifth point was finding an inspiring location and in this post I will present you with five places you can go to get that spark you need:

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