There’s a surprising secret to ‘winning’ at working-parent life and I’m about to tell you it:
DELEGATION.
If you can master the skill of giving other people some of your workload, the Juggle Struggle of family, life, and work becomes even easier.
Let’s break this down into 2 parts;
Part 1 – What I mean by delegation, and why delegating is different from ‘asking for help’
Part 2 – How to delegate
Part 1
Delegation – what am I talking about here?
In my book, delegating is when you re-distribute tasks on your to-do list to other people. You are successful at delegating if you don’t end up doing the thing you asked someone else to do.
Let’s give a really basic example; your child needs a haircut. Booking the haircut is on your list, and you are carrying the mental load. But should you? Do you have any unique or special skills that require you, and only you, to do this task? I think not – someone else could book the haircut. You give the task to them, and they do it. And you don’t do it – you don’t correct it, but it gets done. That’s delegation.
How delegating is different to asking for help
I think it’s important to clarify the difference between ‘asking for help’ and delegating.
“Can you help me with xxx?” can be a little bit vague, and also keeps some of the responsibility on your shoulders. If you’re asking for help, you’re asking for someone else to do some of the work, while you also do some of the work.
Delegation on the other hand is much more specific; “Please book a haircut.” and more importantly removes all responsibility from your door. You’re giving the whole task to someone else, not simply sharing the load.
Part 2 – How to delegate
So now that we’ve established that delegating is key to making the juggle less of a struggle – let’s look at how you should go about delegating. It might feel a bit weird, especially if you’re not used to doing it, but as with all other habits, the more you practise it, the more you’ll see the benefits.
Pick a task to delegate
As I mentioned above, I think a good rule of thumb for this is choosing a task that needs to be done, but not necessarily by you. If anyone could pick up and do the task, it’s a perfect candidate for delegation.
Sometimes we overthink delegating; “I can’t give this person this task to do because they don’t know how to do x part of it.” We assume that our specialist knowledge on all of our to-do list tasks mean that we have to do them ourselves. But that’s not true if we’re honest with ourselves.
If you can show someone else how to do a task in under 5 minutes, that is a great use of time. Show them once and you can delegate that task on repeat!
Be as specific as possible
When you are delegating, make sure you are as clear as you possibly can be about the task that needs to be done and the outcome that you want.
If we take our haircut example above, we can make this ask more specific by adding extra details like location:
“Please can you book a haircut for [child’s name] at ‘fabulous children’s haircuts’.”
And a timeframe:
“Please can you book a haircut for [child’s name] at ‘fabulous children’s haircuts’ next Saturday afternoon.”
And helpful hints:
“Please can you book a haircut for [child’s name] at ‘fabulous children’s haircuts’ next Saturday afternoon. The booking portal is on Facebook.”
Now the person who you are delegating the task to knows exactly what’s expected of them, and what the successful completion of the task looks like.
Set a reminder
If you’re early in your delegating career, you may not trust that the tasks you’re throwing out there are getting done.
If that’s the case, even after you’ve delegated the task, it will rattle around in your brain like an echo until you get an update on whether or not it’s been completed. That’s no good, as it’s taking up valuable brain-space you could be spending elsewhere. It also kind of defeats the point of delegating the task in the first place if you’re still going to worry about it getting done afterwards.
I’ve found that setting a simple reminder on my phone really helps with this. I can empty the thought out of my brain knowing that either:
- I’ll get an update on the task from the person I delegated it to – OR
- I’ll get a reminder to nudge the person in case they haven’t completed the task yet
Either way, the task won’t fall through the cracks. Plus if you do end up having to remind the person to complete the task, they’ll know for next time that you do actually mean it when you give them something to do.
Show gratitude
Once the task is completed for you, make sure you remember to say ‘thank you’. Manners come for free, and people are much more likely to respond positively to you if you’re grateful for their efforts.
As for who to delegate to, you can try this with:
- Your other half
- Co-workers
- Parents
- Friends
- Even your kids (yes, even if they’re young; “please put those toys back in the toy cupboard for me before dinner, thank you.”)
The more you try this out, the better you’ll get at it, and best of all, the less things you’ll have to juggle all by yourself. Nobody thrives doing the juggle struggle alone – share the load.
Juggle Struggle blog 