A perspective on time management

 

One day, few friends were informally discussing. The topic was the traffic condition on roads. One of the guys said, I don’t drive the car. He could not take the risk of driving the vehicle himself in such difficult traffic conditions. Another person in the group had exactly opposite view. He was not comfortable taking the risk of leaving the driving to someone else.

 

Risk or the perception of it is entirely a subjective issue and changes from situation to situation and from person to person.

The first person probably knew his limitations and trusted a full-time driver more than himself. The other probably trusted his own abilities more than anyone else. Can this be an issue of knowledge or confidence? Someone may know his own weaknesses and accept the same – someone may know his strengths. Someone may be overconfident about his own abilities – someone may be lacking in self-confidence.

 

The first person was looking for convenience or wanted to do some other work like reading or talking on phone while commuting. The other probably was a control-freak and did not want to leave the control in someone else’s hands.

 

Very often, entrepreneurs have to make choices about what work one does oneself and what tasks one delegates. An entrepreneur is usually juggling many tasks and mostly running short of time. Certain important tasks remain pending resulting into long-term problems for the enterprise. The reason for the same often is related to delegation of tasks.

 

The basic principal of time management is to use most important and costliest resources for tasks yielding the most. The yield in this question pertains to achievement of organizational objectives.

 

Among all resources, the most important one is the time of the entrepreneur – once gone, it cannot be regained.

 

Entrepreneurs and businesses leverage this rare commodity – they borrow the time of various people and channelize the same towards meeting organizational objectives. One such leverage is delegation of tasks.

One has seen many entrepreneurs struggling to decide what tasks to delegate. The example used in the beginning allows us to examine the thinking behind such decisions. The mental 7checklist that one goes through includes following questions:

 

  • Should I do it myself

    • Do I know the task to be completed?

    • Am I comfortable doing it?

    • Do I love to do it?

 

  • Can I trust someone else other than me?

    • Will the other person maintain the quality and efficiency as I would?

    • What will be the productivity of the person(s) to whom the task is delegated?

    • What could be the cost of delegation?

 

  • What is the downside of delegation?

    • Can there be legal issues?

    • Will I lose control over

      • My business

      • Processes

      • Employees

      • Clients?

This is not an exhaustive list, but only a sample of what a lot of people think of.

 

There is a deep emotion that leads to such thoughts. Some of the biases are:

  • Overconfidence or lack of confidence

    • We touched upon this in the driver’s example in the beginning of the story

    • There could either be overconfidence in one’s own abilities, which may lead to lack of trusts on others’ ability

    • Many entrepreneurs start their enterprises in areas of their own technical expertise. Having expertise in one’s own business is a good idea, but it has the downside of causing overconfidence.

  • Value of time

    • While considering the costs associated with delegating the task to someone, entrepreneurs (especially self-employed persons) fail to assign any value to their own time.

  • Downside protection

    • The question of downside is a risk-management issue.

    • Many risks can be managed properly through well-placed systems and processes.

    • One also needs superior understanding of various scenarios, which allow one to build processes to take care of the risks that may be present.

The difference between a successful entrepreneur and an unsuccessful one is that the former considers various scenarios and more questions while building the enterprise. The latter often goes with gut feeling or thumb rules.