I have known the importance of delegating for a long time, but breaking my leg made me finally do it for work. I went back to work a couple days ago. As I promised myself, I would be working again three weeks after the surgery for my break. But instead of trying to hike five miles in the sand myself, I delegated the actual monitoring to a qualified person who was thrilled with the opportunity to do the work. The job entails walking on the beach monitoring the breeding activities of the western snowy plover, a threatened bird that nests in the sand. This was the twenty-eighth season I have done this work and in the past fifteen years I have always done most of the work myself. I knew I should hire someone to help me long ago to free me up for other things, but it took a broken leg to get me to do it. And it feels great!
We can all benefit from delegating certain responsibilities or tasks to other people to free up valuable time for ourselves. I am not saying dump all the crap you have to do on someone else, but I am willing to bet there is something taking your time that someone else wouldn’t mind doing. Tina is out monitoring plovers right now and I am freed up to write this blog and do some art today. And yesterday she said she couldn’t believe I was paying her to do the work. Everyone is happy.
Do you wish you had more time to create your art, spend time with your kids, put more energy into your business, or just relax? Are you spending hours doing things that someone else would do for a small compensation of some type? Freeing up some time is a liberating feeling. Delegate something and start owning more of your time. It is like getting more hours in a day and more days in a year. If you think you need to do everything yourself, don’t! And don’t do something stupid like break your leg to figure it out!
We are all the artists and architects of our own lives. Take control of it!
