Which work assignments you should delegate

During the week, we get dozens of notifications from Telegram, Skype, and email work contacts. These messages concern various tasks which have to be done if not immediately, then in the future. Our instinct is to jump at the new assignments. Consequently, we often find ourselves distracted from things that require our maximum performance. The workload can be so overwhelming that we have no choice but to delegate some of our responsibilities to coworkers.

Delegating tasks is easier once you find work that can be given away

Giving up some of the assignments cleans up the working schedule, gives more time for top priority work and helps in building stronger relationships within the team. There are six types of tasks you can give away with little to no worries:

• Small assignments

Tiny tasks don’t seem like a big deal until they start piling up. They are less urgent and important, easily neglected. These include social network marketing and other daily tasks. They are not that time-consuming but can be a handful if postponed long enough.

• Dull tasks

Those are the assignments which don’t take a lot out of your schedule and aren’t that complex. This kind of work can be easily handled by anyone. For example, if you are tasked with printing the newest version of business cards for your company, ask someone else to do it.

• Time-consuming tasks

Delegate only important and complex work that doesn’t require your initial involvement. All you have to do is to see how most of the work is done, give approval or directions for the final steps of the process. If you are a web designer, you can delegate tasks of changing the look of a website’s single page to your subordinate.

• Tasks you can teach

This type of work, although bearing some risks, can be given to other colleagues with proper supervision and quality control. For example, you can teach someone how to send bulk emails from a CRM database.

• Stuff you aren’t that good at

If a task is beyond your capabilities and you have zero competence in a particular field of work, better appoint the job to more skilled coworkers, Otherwise, you will perform poorly. So the next time you need to, for example, work on a legal document, ask for help from a legal expert.

• Immediate tasks

You can be assigned multiple tasks which have to be finished as soon as possible. Appoint the most important and urgent of them to several people so all tasks can be finished simultaneously.

For the next couple of weeks write down all tasks that fall into the aforementioned categories. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who you should assign them to. Your main goal at this point is to determine work that can be appointed to coworkers. You'll become a pro at delegating tasks at work in no time.