I waffle about whether I should scale back consulting and focus on making my own things, or if I should keep on consulting because the team clearly needs my help. Mostly I lean towards doing my own thing. Life is short. Although you can buy someone else's time, you can't actually buy yours. But actually it would be good for me to learn how to build processes and systems that will do the work that I want to do even if I don't always have large blocks of good focused time. The time commitments of consulting and the mental distraction of other projects are great constraints to learn how to work around.

I want to figure out how to make sure that the things I would work on during core time still happen even if I'm not focused on them. Mostly I want to get better at packaging what I know, learning more from people, and learning more on my own. I'm really happy with the virtual assistant team that I've been putting together, and we're going through my backlog of tasks at a steady clip. As I get used to delegation, I'm sure I'll figure out a coherent process for pulling it all together, making sure that none of the effort is wasted because of my inattention.

2014-02-04 What systems do I need to put into place to do awesome

What would wild success look like? I imagine that even if I spend some of the time thinking about other people's work, I'd have enough notes and background processes that I could pick things up again easily when I come back to focus on my own work. It would be amazing to get that packaging and publishing process all sorted out, and the podcasting process too. For example, I might answer someone's question in email or a Google Helpout. If I can capture that and send it through the process, maybe I'll get a nicely formatted other-people-focused blog post at the end of it. Likewise, I might start with a series of sketches reflecting on a question I'm curious about. I can record a short video segment talking my way through the sketches, and then someone else could take that reflection, write it up as a blog post, and then translate it into tips that are useful for other people–another blog post.

2014-02-04 Thinking about idea development and possible blogging flow

I don't want to delegate the core parts of sharing, but there are lots of non-unique things that I can gradually chip away through delegation or automation. If I can set up those systems to make it easier for me to get stuff out of my head and into multiple forms that other people can use easily, I think that might be worth the investment of time and money. Who knows? Maybe other people will find the processes useful too.

2014-02-02 A path for learning to delegate or outsource

If you've been reading about my experiments in delegation and you're curious about joining me on this adventure, maybe the path I've sketched above can help you get started. There are lots of small, well-defined tasks that you can easily outsource on micro-outsourcing sites like Fiverr.com. When you're comfortable doing that, you might want to find an agency so that you can assign a number of tasks without having to hire specific people each time, and you might even move up to having your own assistant or team. I'd love to help you get to the point where you're experimenting with it yourself. Then I can learn interesting things from the way you delegate and the processes that you have. Leave a comment with your questions or thoughts, or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com .