My name is Marie Levey-Pabst andI help parents reclaim their time energy One of the ways I do that is byteaching a class called delegate and delete.
I wanted to hop on here todayto talk about three ways to delegate both tasks in your life (like household tasks) but also the mental load that sort of mental burden we carryof remembering, noticing, planning.
All of that.
So there are three pretty concreteways to delegate.
First of all just important to know what delegation is.
To delegate something means to ensure a task to somebody else.
It literally means to say “I’m supposed to do this thing, but instead I’m going to have you do this thing instead of me” All right, so it means to give the task orget the job or give the responsibility to somebody else.
So usually wethink about delegating in terms of literally having another person do it.
There’s actually three different ways to delegate.
1) is to give a task orsomething to another person like another person beside you.
2) is toactually give it to your future self and I’ll talk about some strategies for thatbut to treat almost your present self and your future self is different people.
This really helps alleviate the mental load of remembering.
3) is todelegate to a system so not another person but a system who will do some ofthe work for you.
We’ll talk about all three of those really briefly today.
Thefirst one is delegating to other people this is what we think of most commonly.
So it’s when you ask somebody else to do something.
Sometimes at work that means saying “okay after a meeting we have all these action items.
Joey, you do this or Margaret you’re going to do this” Whatever it is.
At home that can mean saying which partner is going to do which thing or delegating certain tasksto your children like a their backpacks ready when they’re old enough.
What Ifind however is that many people think aboutdelegating TASKS.
So they’ll say “okay you’re in charge of cooking and I’min charge of the dishes” but they don’t necessarily delegate the MENTAL LOAD For example for a while and still I tend to do most the meal planning in ourhouse.
Then there was one week I just couldn’t do it.
So I asked my partner, my spouse’s, I said “oh can you be in charge of dinners thisweek” He said “of course I can do that! You’re busy it’s fine” Great, all great.
Mondayrolls around and he says “what’s for dinner?” I said “well you’re charge of dinners as we planned.
” He said “oh I thought you were going to tell me what to make.
” So he had no problem cooking, no problem to all that, but we didn’t communicate well that I wanted todelegate not just the task but the mental load as well for that week.
So when you’re delegating to another person it’s really important to beclear: Am I delegating a task to you? Am I taking care of the mental load ofremembering and planning but you’re doing the task? or Am I delegating all ofit to you? Right and you can go either way.
Another thing that we do in ourhousehold is we have a cleaning list so I’m in charge of knowing what needs to be cleaned and then we delegate the tasks share the task of cleaning but I do thethinking about it.
It’s one way to do it It’s also really important if you’redelegating a task or a job to another person this is important.
(I love youtype-a folks you are my people) but when you delegate a task to the person you don’tget to judge how it’s done.
This is hard This is so hard.
This is why it drives menuts there’s some things in our household that I’m not in charge of and my partner is and he doesn’t do it in the way I woulddo them as soon as it makes me twitchy But we have to let that go because atsome point you have to say either I’m delegating it completely and letting goof it or I want to be in charge of it But we can’t have it both ways.
So justto remind you we have to kind of let go that judgment a little bit when we delegate atask and often thats one of the hardest parts for folks.
Okay so that was number onedelegating a task to another person Number two is delegating something toyour future self.
All right so this is actually very helpful because a lot oftimes we are thinking about things we need to do that, we’re not going to doright now.
We’re going to do them in a week or two weeks or in a monthBut yet we still let them hang around in our head.
We still kind of remember themor think about them and if we really want to let go of them one way to dothat is to delegate them to our future selves.
So you can literally do this bysaying you know in a month I need to pay this bill and make a reminder.
I useGoogle Calendar Put up post-it on in acalendar write it down somewhere on a calendar so that the system willremember for you and remind you when that day comes up to do that thing, to paythat bill.
So that’s one way to do it to literally delegate the task to yourfuture self.
Another way to do is actually to delegate the thinking toyour future self.
This is often overlooked.
So if you’re trying to figureout something to do and one example for me right now is my kids room.
We’retrying to rearrange it when you a better system for it but honestly it’ssummer we’re not inside that much I don’t want to deal with it right now.
So what I dois actually set up a reminder in Google Calendar in February 1st of 2018 It says”think about a kid’s room” that’s all.
It’s set to remind to my future self tomake a decision and do some thinking.
I want to think about it right now I wantto look at the room and wonder about it right now and think I should be doingthat Ot’s delegated to my future self notjust to do but actually just think about So delegating to your future self by usinga calendar is really helped.
Number three is delegating to a system.
All right, thisis especially good for the mental load Quite frankly this idea of usingreminder system to remind you to do stuff and think about it is one way to delegate to the system.
What you’re delegating is the remembering part – part of themental load is remembering so you’re delegating that to GoogleCalendar or whatever reminder system you use.
Another thing to do is to doplanning, like when you’re thinking about a bigger project or trying to figure outsomething to do some planning in a system and then the system holds it foryou.
So I actually use a notebook and I have projects lists.
I hopeyou can see this but I have project lists and what I do is when I’m figuringout a project whether it’s my kids birthday or rearranging a room orsomething for work I write it all down all my notes and my thinking about it inone place and then I come back to it later.
But what I’ve done is I’ve takenthe mental load of planning and remembering and it’s in the notebook soI leave mental load.
I still have to do the tasks, right, I can’t tellyou all the tasks but the mental load of thinking, remembering, noticing, planningthat all lives in the system not in my head.
Ok so just to recap three ways todelicate you can delegate to other people but then you can’t judge how theydo the work.
You can delegate to your future self and you can both delegatetasks and also thinking work.
Last you can delegate to a system you can usea system like project sheets which is The Organized Parent system or you canuse systems like reminders to actually do some of the remembering planning and thinking for you.
All right, know it was a long video today but I want to make sure you really understood the delegation is not just about having another person do a thing.
There’s a lot of pieces there.
But all of them would bereally really helpful and lifting up the mental load One more reminderthat coming up in September I’m going to be running the organized parentworkshop as well as many others helping you manage the mental load so I’ll leavea link in the comments I’d love to have you join me for these workshops we’rereally going to be focused on letting go the mental load put in the system so youcan maximize time and energy on the things that matter most and minimizetime energy on the rest thank you so much for watching.
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