Juggling Fire and Task Management

Just because you can do everything on your own doesn’t mean that you have to do everything on your own. You’re managing and prioritizing and executing so many tasks throughout the day that it’s almost the same as juggling fire. It looks really cool, you have to be really talented and experienced to do it, but sooner or later you’re going to get burned.

When you’re juggling fire, dropping one item may ignite everything else and cause everything around you to go up in flames.

Take a look at all the tasks you’re managing.
Which ones can only be handled by you and which ones could be delegated to others?

Now look at the list of tasks that you said could only be handled by you personally and reevaluate the list in a more brutal manner. If you had to cut that list in half, which tasks could you really assign to someone else to complete?

Sometimes you think that you can’t delegate a task because it’s such a big undertaking. That usually means that you need to break it down into smaller, more manageable (and more “delegatable”) chunks. You may still be left with some of the elements you need to handle personally — but chances are 50% or more of the tasks can be given to other internal team members or outside vendors/consultants to do the bulk of the work and then return the components to you for review and evaluation prior to putting everything together for the final project deadline.

Juggling fire is exciting and looks really impressive from the outside, but it’s really easy to get overwhelmed, overheated, and over extended. If things go awry you’ll lose your focus on giving a great performance and end up in a stressful reactionary mode where all you’re trying to do is not set everything on fire.

Share the burden and you’re a lot less likely to get burned.