Although they face various practical and internal obstacles, knowledge workers who eliminate or delegate nonessential tasks can gain up to a day a week for value-added work and can boost personal and organizational productivity.
What’s Inside?
Knowledge workers often fill their days with nonessential tasks. The authors believe a simple intervention program could dramatically free up their time and allow them to pursue more important work. They report on an exercise that helped several executives save an average of eight hours of work time a week and provide the same tool for readers to use.
How Is This Article Useful to Practitioners?
Especially in today’s reduced-spending environment, many knowledge workers find themselves being asked to do many administrative-type tasks while still needing to maximize their high-value contributions. The authors find that this challenge confronts professionals across companies, regions, and industries. The reasons workers have trouble shedding unimportant tasks include wanting to look and feel busy, receiving their own supervisors’ busywork, and not fully trusting those to whom they can delegate because of strict compliance needs. This last point should particularly resonate with financial professionals.
The authors’ “intervention” tool helped 15 executives identify each task’s value to themselves and to their firms, the extent to which it could be delegated, and whether someone else could do it. The results were very encouraging; on average, these executives freed up 20% of their time a week.
After the executives ranked their daily tasks on four measures, the intervention tool helped them delegate, drop, or restructure away low-scoring tasks. The four measures/questions are:
- How valuable is this activity to the firm?
- To what extent could I let this task go?
- How much personal value do I get from doing it?
- To what extent could someone else do it on my behalf?
Of course, to be successful with the intervention tool, the worker must possess or develop effective delegation skills and the ability to say no.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
Although the four questions seem intuitive, few professionals probably follow a discipline of asking them regularly. Firms should encourage or even require their leaders and knowledge workers to think through their work formally to identify areas in which better delegation might enhance productivity. Unfortunately, firm size can preclude successful delegation. Many small investment advisory practices require professionals to wear several hats because they cannot or will not hire more workers or outsource the work. For such professionals, 20% time savings likely remains idealistic, but it is still sensible to make the effort.