The Art of Delegating for Time-Crunched Lawyers
This article originally appeared on Law.com
Given their tendencies toward perfectionism, it’s hard for many lawyers to delegate work to others. You’ve undoubtedly had the experience of having too much work on your plate and have contemplated delegating at least some of that work to others, only to find yourself thinking, “It will take more time to delegate this task to someone else, so I might as well do it myself.”
We have all been in this position, and it may prove true in the moment—it probably is faster for you to do it yourself. But in the long-term, which is what you should be focused on, it’s better to get someone else working on that which must get done, but not necessarily by you.
For example, let’s assume that there is an administrative task that you must complete every day. This task takes you 10 minutes to finish, but it would take you 10 hours to delegate responsibility for the task to someone else, such as your assistant.
While it’s easier and faster for you to complete the task on any given day, by investing 10 hours to train your assistant to do it for you, you will start realizing a positive return on that investment in a few months. Not only will you have more time—an hour every week—but you will have more mental capacity and clarity as well.
You’re one person, no doubt a highly capable one, but like all of us, you’re constrained by the laws of physics. Delegation is one of the few ways to scale yourself beyond your physical constraints—the ability to be in more than one place at one time, the ability to focus on more than one thing at one time—to get more done. Think about it this way: Delegation is a way to buy yourself more time that would otherwise be spent doing mundane tasks, so you can sell yourself more time to focus on what really matters.
By learning and practicing the art of delegation, you will be in a position to use your most valuable and finite resource—your time—to your best advantage. Delegation does require you to slow down long enough to get someone else up to speed on what needs to get done, but in the long run delegation is a catalyst that allows you to operate at your highest potential.
One of the primary obstacles to delegation is lack of trust. Some variant of “I can’t trust someone else to get this done right” type of thinking is what leads many lawyers to be over-stressed and overworked because they have a belief that it’s not possible to delegate. However, the sophistication of the task shouldn’t mean you can’t delegate it, because any big, complex task is accomplished through a series of small steps. Think of the task as part of a hierarchy, with the most challenging, sophisticated parts at the top. Those are the ones you should focus on, and the way to do that is by delegating everything else.
Delegating effectively requires you to think through three challenges: first, how to select the work that can be delegated; second, how to pick the right person to do it; and third, how to manage the delegation process. The process of delegating can thus be reduced to a checklist, involving the following steps:
Sort the tasks that can be delegated. Evaluate the tasks on your plate, particularly those that are recurring, to determine what can and should be delegated.
Determine who can work on what types of tasks. Identify people you will rely on, whether in or outside of your organization, who can take on the tasks specified in the previous step.
Create a process. The odds are, because you’ve done it so frequently, the way you go about completing the task is in your head. Get the process out of your head and onto paper. Create a checklist if possible.
Define the task. Precisely define the task and what is expected in a clear communication with the party being delegated to. You cannot expect that the task will be successfully implemented if it is unclear or poorly defined.
Transfer the task. Train the person who is responsible for the task being delegated.
Evaluate. The last step is to evaluate the implementation of the delegated task and assess how things can be improved.
Provide feedback. By evaluating the work, you will be able to make corrections, if needed, and also provide valuable feedback to the person you have delegated to. Over time, you may find that the person you delegated to is doing the work better than you ever could have.
If you work at a law firm with lots of internal resources, there is no excuse for not delegating aggressively. When I look back at my time as an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, I cringe when I think about how little I delegated and how much easier my life would have been if I had. I shared an assistant with another attorney. There were plenty of paralegals ready to pitch in to help. We had proofreaders, technologists, marketers and other resources at our disposal. Yet I failed miserably at taking advantage of those resources.
I fell victim to the “if you want it done right, you better do it yourself” mentality, despite the fact that there were specialists who were better at most things—like proofreading—that I tried to do myself. If I had delegated more, I could have focused more of my time and energy on the things I did best, instead of struggling through tasks I didn’t enjoy and wasn’t all that good at.
If you work at a law firm that doesn’t have these types of resources, delegation is still critical, but you may have to invest some of your own resources to get the help you need. If you do, it will be money well spent. From freelancers to virtual assistants, there are people who are great at completing tasks, often administrative in nature, that you don’t want to do or shouldn’t be doing because your time and attention are better spent elsewhere.
These outside resources can help busy lawyers overcome what researchers call “time famine”—the feeling that arises when you have more work on your plate than time necessary to complete it. Ashley Whillans of the Harvard Business School conducted a study involving thousands of participants in which she studied how people can overcome time famine. The study concluded that “spending money to buy time was linked to greater life satisfaction, and the typical, detrimental effect of time stress on life satisfaction was attenuated among individuals who used money to buy time.”
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If you’re too pressed for time to fit in business development, there’s a simple and straightforward solution: Buy back more time by delegating.Looking for more? Check out these related posts:
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