Delegating tasks. At work we’re now short-staffed, and I’ve had to pick up work from a couple people.
Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I’m most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?
It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.
My Econ 101 class talked about this when they discussed comparative advantage and opportunity costs. Even if the other guy will do what you want done inefficiently (compared to you), what really matters is what each of you would be doing instead. If you have something better to do and they don’t, then it’s more efficient overall to let them go ahead and do something poorly than let that task take up your own, more productive time.
Yeah. It pains me to say that I understand the principle, but that I always seem to be able to convince myself that just this once I should go ahead and knock out some other semi-trivial task outside of normal working hours. Later it seems obvious that I have not internalized the lessons of Micro 101.
I think there’s some ego-stoking going on—“I am the only person who can be relied upon to complete this task properly! Step aside, mortals, and I will wow you with my productivity.”
How to fix it? Cthulhoo’s comment below seems like a good start—I find that I trust certain people to get things done correctly, and that I should endeavor to work more closely with other co-workers a few times in the hopes of expanding the “trust” circle.
Of course, I run the risk of adding more to the “don’t trust” circle. Did you know some people use Copy and Paste from the Edit menu? With the mouse? Every time? It hurts me to watch.
Of course, I run the risk of adding more to the “don’t trust” circle. Did you know some people use Copy and Paste from the Edit menu? With the mouse? Every time? It hurts me to watch.
Your standards are too high.
My father is one of the most generally competent people I know, but he’s also a one-finger typist. He once tried to get help in a tech support chat room, and the support person kept thinking he was AFK because he typed so slowly.
I have a similar problem. I just tend to divide people in two categories: trust / don’t trust. I’m perfectly fine with delegating tasks to people in the first group, but have a hard time to convince myself to delegate something to people in the second group (even something so simple that a monkey could have done it).
Delegating tasks. At work we’re now short-staffed, and I’ve had to pick up work from a couple people.
Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I’m most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?
It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.
My Econ 101 class talked about this when they discussed comparative advantage and opportunity costs. Even if the other guy will do what you want done inefficiently (compared to you), what really matters is what each of you would be doing instead. If you have something better to do and they don’t, then it’s more efficient overall to let them go ahead and do something poorly than let that task take up your own, more productive time.
Yeah. It pains me to say that I understand the principle, but that I always seem to be able to convince myself that just this once I should go ahead and knock out some other semi-trivial task outside of normal working hours. Later it seems obvious that I have not internalized the lessons of Micro 101.
I think there’s some ego-stoking going on—“I am the only person who can be relied upon to complete this task properly! Step aside, mortals, and I will wow you with my productivity.”
How to fix it? Cthulhoo’s comment below seems like a good start—I find that I trust certain people to get things done correctly, and that I should endeavor to work more closely with other co-workers a few times in the hopes of expanding the “trust” circle.
Of course, I run the risk of adding more to the “don’t trust” circle. Did you know some people use Copy and Paste from the Edit menu? With the mouse? Every time? It hurts me to watch.
Your standards are too high.
My father is one of the most generally competent people I know, but he’s also a one-finger typist. He once tried to get help in a tech support chat room, and the support person kept thinking he was AFK because he typed so slowly.
I have a similar problem. I just tend to divide people in two categories: trust / don’t trust. I’m perfectly fine with delegating tasks to people in the first group, but have a hard time to convince myself to delegate something to people in the second group (even something so simple that a monkey could have done it).