Giving Instructions

One of the things I've been concentrating on is outsourcing. My pattern has been that it is easier to do things myself than to ask for or hire help. I'm a fairly competent person, and a fast worker. No matter how fast a worker, however, at a certain point you can only accomplish so much if you're doing it all yourself.

At that point you either have hit the ceiling of what you can accomplish across the board or you have to learn to leverage the labor of others.

This first started several years ago while I was at a Travel Technology conference. I have found that conferences allow me time to rise above the forest for a while rather than being surrounded by the trees. It became crystal clear to me that if we were going to grow, I was going to have to get better at allowing employees to book more of the business and I was going to have to focus on developing the staff. No matter how productive an agent you are..at a certain point you're going to hit the ceiling of what you can do. To grow further you must allow others to work for you.

For a control freak, this is not an easy thing.

Eventually, I am applying this to other areas of my life as well. I have recently started using an off shore personal assistant. I am gradually identifying and assigning tasks so that I am managing other doing the work rather than doing it all myself.

So far I have found giving directions to be a substantial challenge. Most of the problems that have come up have been as a direct result of me failing to give good instructions.

Last night Philip and I went to open house at our daughter's middle school. In science class they had just done an activity where one student wrote the directions for making smores and the other student had to exactly follow the directions. The results were often comical.

I wish I'd done that in 8th grade...maybe I'd know how to give better instructions today.