Delegation Dilemma
By Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
We all have 24 hours in each day, 7 days each week. (You probably knewthat anyway.)
If you multiply that out and if my math is correct, and Isuspect it is because I’ve done the calculation a few times before, thattotals 168 hours in a week.
But then we have to subtract out time forsleep. Let’s use 8 hours per night, 7 nights per week (I know that mightbe high for a lot of people and maybe low for others, but we do spendabout a third of our week dead), or a total of 56 hours. Subtract that56 hours from 168 and now we’re down to only 112 hours per week toaccomplish all we wish to do.
If we chose to do everything ourselves, we will limit our potentialbecause we are always hitting our heads on a ceiling of 112 hours. Butwhat if we could plug into someone else’s time stream? What if we couldget others to do things for us? Wouldn’t that increase our results? Youbet. And all I’m talking about here is the concept of delegation.
Delegation is when you plug into someone else’s time stream when youdon’t have the time or the expertise to do something, thereby increasingyour own results.Many feel they do not have the opportunity to delegate. “After all, Ihave no staff at work. I am the staff!” some will tell me. Yet, we areall delegators.
Most have mail delivered to their homes. Any of us couldgo to the post office, rent our own postal box, and then each day take atrip to the post office to retrieve our mail. But most of us have madethe decision that that is not the best use of our time so we have theletter carrier deliver our mail.
Maybe you went out for lunch yesterday at Burger King. You got ahamburger, fries, and a drink and paid $5 for that meal. How many peoplewere involved in the production of that lunch to your plate? Probablyhundreds, if not thousands. Someone had to plant the wheat to make thebread, someone had to pick the tomato to make the ketchup, and someonehad to drill the oil out of the ground to power the delivery truck toyour local Burger King. And if you paid $5 for this meal, everyone inthis chain had to share in that $5, perhaps in fractions of a penny.And I’m not trying to stretch delegation to some unreasonableapplication.
This is exactly how the world worked up until about twohundred years age. All throughout the history of the world, if youwanted something, you had to produce it yourself. You wanted food? Youdidn’t pop over to your favorite restaurant. You had to grow it or killit yourself. You wanted housing? You didn’t visit with your local realestate person. You went into the woods and cleared the land and builtit.
In fact, if you look at the development of individual personal wealthfrom whenever they began to keep track up and through about 200 yearsago, people 200 years ago were not a whole lot better off financiallythan their ancestors. And then from about 200 years ago to presenttimes, individual economic wealth shot up through the roof because theIndustrial Revolution permitted companies to mass-produce inexpensiveproducts for the marketplace. This required payment of relatively goodwages to workers so that they could afford to buy these products, socompanies could make profits and produce more products.
If you and I had to do everything ourselves, create our food, clothing,housing, transportation, education, etc, the average person wouldprobably lose 95% of what they have now or retain a mere 5% of what theyhave achieved.So the question is not whether or not you delegate. We all delegate inways that you perhaps had not considered.
The better question to ask is,“How far do you want to go with it?” because delegation is the key toopen the door to great success as we are forever hitting our headsagainst that ceiling of 112 hours available to us each week.
