Avoid being the “neck of the bottle”

Note: The “neck of the bottle” in Spanish is a part of the process that slows down the whole process itself.

Last week,  I made myself the following questions:

Do you frequently postpone extremely important tasks that only you can undertake for whatever reason (there’s something more urgent, you have headache, you broke up with your boy or girlfriend or your belly itches)?

Are you one of those many who say “wait, I’ll do it, to me it’ll just take me ten minutes” and then it takes a whole eternity (maybe even a bit longer) until you finally get it done?

My own answer to these questions were  “more than I’d like and should”, specially taking into account that I’ve been working for a while in the subject “learning to delegate” (one of most difficult lessons to learn as an enterpreneur). If you also answered also “yes” to these two questions, congratulations! you are also a perfect specimen of the “neckus bottlelensis” (and therefore you are welcome to the club and that gives you the right to share some beers with others like us).

But don’t worry, like almost every disease, this one also has a remedy. And here I’d like to propose some questions that could help finding solutions to this problem:

1) Is this task (that you and only you can do) really so important? Are you sure that your co-workers have to necessarily wait for you?

2)  Is there anyone else who could do this job? (I know this might sound as a repetition but, are you really, really, really sure?)

Back to my own case, very often those things that seemed crucial to you are not really necessary for your colleagues to move forward with their tasks. I also came to realize more and more that there are very few tasks that cannot be delegated.

It is true that to some other person it might take 3 days to do what for you it would just take you a couple of hours. But is also very true that very often the days go by and the task is still pending. In that case, not only haven’t we accomplished our objectives but also we denied another person the chance to learn how to do this task which would allow us in the future to concentrate in more important things.

When trying to find a way to prevent this problem from happening again I reached the following conclusions (I hope their helpful to anyone):

1) Take your time to plan your tasks and identify which ones are truly necessary to finish a project.

2) Delegate as much as you can (but not so much that you “overload” your colleagues).

and 3) if there’s a task that only you can do, be as executive as possible. Try to clear quickly any obstacle that could slow down the rest of your team and avoid procrastinating tasks that can become “necks of the bottle” (specially if the time you’ll invest in clearing out this task is small than the one it would take you to leave it for a later moment).

And to me, even more important than this, is to constantly remember that your mission as enterpreneur is to  facilitate the job to the rest, not to make it more difficult.

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