By now, you’ve heard me tell you that you must be delegating; you must be outsourcing your phone calls, emails, bookkeeping, and formatting to a Virtual Assitant, and you must be outsourcing your errands and organizing to a Personal Assistant. Maybe you’ve tried to follow my advice, but you’ve found that it has not saved that much time overall, because you still have to manage the new person.
That’s because you have made a grave mistake.
You must practice Complete Delegation, or it’s a waste of your time.
What do I mean by Complete Delegation?
Let me give you a specific example. When I first hired a personal assistant, each week I would create a grocery list, a Target list, and an errand list. That took me a while, sometimes 15-30 minutes, if not more. I was frustrated, because I didn’t really feel any less stressed. Yes, I didn’t have to go to the grocery store, but I spent almost the same amount of time coming up with the grocery shopping list!
I read an chapter by Jack Canfield in his book Success Princples, where he talked about delegating grocery shopping, and realized I had made an error. Up until then, my assistant was responsible for the task of purchasing groceries I listed on the the grocery list. But, I needed to completely delegate the entire grocery shopping process to my assistant, and make her responsible for the end result — my family having the food we need for the week.
For two weeks, I had her keep track of what we got, and then make up a master grocery and paper goods list. Now, each week, she spends 30 minutes going through the house, making an inventory of what we need. Now, I don’t spend any time on re-delegating this to her over and over. Now, I really feel like this responsibility is off my plate.
Have you been making the same mistake? From everything from filing and paperwork to chores and errands, see if you are delegating the task over and over, or if you are practicing Complete Delegation. BTW – this works not just for assistants, but also for husbands and kids. 
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I'm Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, a writer, teacher, and coach.