How to Avoid Burnout and Delegate Like a Pro - Part 1 of 2

How many times have you thought about quitting? 🤬

How many times has your head fallen into your hands in remorse over how much you dislike what you're doing? 🤦

How often do you feel like you're on the edge of burnout? 😩

If you feel burnt, tapped, frustrated, or just done with everything on a frequent basis, I'm prayerful that this article will give you hope.

If that's you...keep reading. If not, read it anyway; you already opened the email.

Today, I want to talk about how you can delegate and focus uniquely on what you are best at and love to do.

Replacing Mediocrity with Excellence

We were never taught how to think critically about our roles, responsibilities, and goals, so we never take to heart how important delegating is to the longevity in our work.

But (and this is a big BUT), if we continue doing all the things we don't like and are not good at, we will remain mediocre.

You must figure out how to spend most of your time on your unique ability, or you'll be mediocre and hate your work for the rest of your life.

Freeing yourself of frustrating, time-consuming, and easy tasks is the fastest way to seize the next opportunity.

You need time to get the most important things done. 

This is how successful CEOs, Founders, Executives, and Leaders thrive – they stay hyper-focused on what they do best and enjoy most. 

It's that simple.

The (Modified) Eisenhower Matrix 

To get you hyper-focused on what you do best and enjoy most, we need to accomplish two important tasks:

1. Determine "what" to delegate (what I address in this article).
2. Learn "how" to delegate well (what I plan to address next week).

If you can accomplish these two tasks, you'll learn a skill set that will pay dividends for the rest of your life.

The good news for you today is that determining "what" to delegate is quite easy. So, let's start with that.

To get us started, let me introduce you to a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix.

If you are unfamiliar with the Eisenhower Matrix, this tool is remarkably simple in helping you determine what to do with tasks by determining whether they are Urgent & Important.

• Urgent/Important: Do it now.
• Not Urgent/Important: Schedule it, but not now.
• Urgent/Not Important: Delegate it to your team.
• Not Urgent/Not Important: Delete it; there is no point in doing it.

Like I said, pretty simple.

Here, though, I recommend a slight modification—an additional filter to evaluate your tasks.

For longevity and overall success, it's important to enjoy and excel at what we do. The Eisenhower Matrix doesn't go far enough in this area, so I added a small but important step.

After categorizing your tasks as Urgent or important, you want to rescan the list one more time and determine whether you are "Good" at each task and whether you "Love" doing it.

Even Important or Urgent tasks may be better delegated to a team member instead of holding onto them because, over time, they will erode your joy at work, causing frustration, burnout, and lethargy.

What to Delegate

It's important you evaluate your capacity and workload on a frequent basis.

• Are you working too much?
• Are you doing things you hate?
• Do you feel angst about doing certain tasks?
• Are you finding yourself apathetic about work?
• Are you stressed about work, even while not working?

If you answered "yes" to any of these, you need to run this exercise and determine what needs to be delegated to someone on your team.

Here's how:

Step #1: Determining Capacity & Tasks

The first step in delegating is understanding your current situation. This starts by either tracking (recommended) or estimating your current time and capacity.

Take two weeks and track your time every working day in 15-minute increments.

(I recommend two weeks because one week tends to be short enough to miss some realities of your schedule, and tracking more than two weeks is exhausting.)

However, the more data you have, the more accurate the outcome of this exercise.

After running the exercise and categorizing your tasks, you should end up with something like this:

In this example, you'll notice that although the desire is to work no more than 50 hours per week, it takes 60 hours a week to get everything done.

This is a clear sign to delegate and delegate quickly.

Step #2: Categorize Your Tasks Using the Matrix

Replicate the modified Eisenhower Matrix on a notepad and begin to categorize each of your tasks.

To help with this, let's define Urgent and Important.

1. Urgent tasks require immediate attention. They are the tasks that scream for our attention and typically need to be done right away. These are often reactive and may include crises, deadlines, or problems that need instant solutions. The pressure to complete these tasks is high.
2. Important tasks contribute to long-term goals, values, and mission. These tasks might not require immediate attention but have significant long-term benefits. They are proactive and strategic, focusing on results that drive personal and professional growth, success, and well-being.

Once they are all categorized, skim through the list one last time and move any tasks based on whether you enjoy them and are good at them. 

You'll end up with something like this:

As you can see, this example has about 37 hours of work that absolutely need to happen, BUT a whopping 23 hours of work able to delegate!

The end result of delegating and deleting tasks would yield 13 hours of new, freed-up time to focus on the most important and enjoyable tasks.

Now, stopping here would not solve your problem, as you still need to delegate the work.

This is what I plan to discuss in next week's article.

For now, start tracking your time and figure out your current capacity and task list. This exercise alone will help you see the light at the end of the tunnel.

💡