Hot on the heels of yesterday's post about money and priorities, I thought it might be interesting to ask: How much help do you have in your life? Do you have a killer assistant at work whom you rely on for a lot of gatekeeping/scheduling needs? Do you have a cleaning service, lawn service, snow removal service, etc.? Do you use a personal shopper? Is there a paid caregiver in your life, such as a nanny or au pair? Do you have an unpaid helper like a parent or sibling, either for childcare or meal prep or scheduling? Do you regularly use virtual assistant services? Do you have a personal assistant or chef, or have you found other ways to get help with those tasks, such as hiring someone local to meal prep for you or keeping a subscription to a meal delivery service? How about a personal trainer, or a headhunter who's been extraordinarily helpful over more than just one job?

{psst: Check out this discussion over at CorporetteMoms, where there was a much bigger focus on childcare helpers.}

We've talked about a lot of this on the blog before, but I'd love to hear about your current situation… some of our previous discussions include:

• How to Hire an Assistant at the Office (and How to Delegate To Your Assistant)
• I Tried To Use Virtual Assistants to Delegate Family Tasks – Here's How It Went
• How to Hire a Personal Trainer
• How to Hire a Cleaning Service
• How to Level Up Your Childcare
• How to Upgrade Personal Services
• How to Hire a Housekeeper or House Manager (inspired by this amazing Medium article listing all the help a self-made millionaire has at home)
• How to Use a Personal Assistant (with tips from a friend who actually used to be a personal assistant to a a wealthy businessman)
• Have Your Parents Helped You In Your Career? (This was a fun discussion, based on a study that found that post-college, 75% of parents were reminding children of deadlines and making appointments for them.)

Readers, I'd love to hear from you, though — how much help do you have in your life, from nannies to work assistants to personal shoppers or trainers or others? What has made the biggest impact? Has it changed through the years, e.g., before or after children, marriage, certain jobs, or more?

Stock photo via Stencil.

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We haven't talked about how to delegate in far too long — and I'll bet a lot of your own systems and tools have changed in the past year or so, so let's share delegating tips!

What's working for you now in terms of delegating your work? For those of you who have been working from home more often (or working with assistants or bosses who are working from home more often), how has that dynamic changed the delegation flow?

What tools are your favorite, and what have been the biggest things you've been able to delegate and get off your plate?

Some of our previous posts on point:

• favorite tools for working from home
• tips on working from home
• Feeling slammed with personal tasks? I tried hiring using virtual assistants to delegate family tasks.

Readers, what are your best delegating tips? What tasks are you delegating right now, and what tools (and services) are you using?

Stock photo via Deposit / ivelin.

The post Delegating Tips: What Tasks Are You Delegating Right Now? appeared first on Corporette.com.

Ladies: let's talk about the art of delegating work to your secretary, assistant, or another third party. More and more I feel like knowing how to delegate is key to success in work and life — you can't micromanage everything. Besides, if you bill by the hour, remember that your client doesn't want to pay, say, $500 an hour for someone to photocopy something! 

So: what tasks do you delegate? How did you learn how to delegate, and what are your best tips for women thinking about what they should assign to others? (Previously: we've talked about how to show your appreciation to a great assistant, and when to fire a bad assistant, as well as apps like Fiverr that let you delegate some things to third parties.)

For my $.02, for working women with an assistant, I'd seriously look at delegating tasks like:

• scheduling calls and conferences
• booking conference rooms
• booking travel
• photocopying
• entering handwritten changes (to be reviewed by you later on a redline)
• transcribing dictated documents/emails/letters
• taking notes / processing notes so they're part of the file
• expenses
• entering time sheets
• filing

For people working with a direct subordinate, such as a 4th year attorney assigned to manage a 1st year attorney on a case, you can expand further. Remember, this is part of how your subordinate will learn and grow; no one likes a boss who won't delegate.

(Note though, that if you're vaguely senior to someone, rather than a direct manager, there's a really fine line with assigning work. When I was just starting out I once had someone who held the same title as me (but had been there about a year longer) try to assign me some of her work… which I didn't appreciate.)

• doing a first pass on documents, emails, briefings
• doing research for important points / fact-checking research someone else has done
• following up with clients to ask questions or clarify things

In your personal life, of course, you can delegate a ton as well, freeing time up for other things. For example:

• hire a cleaning service or cleaning professional
• hire a travel agent
• send your laundry out to be done

Lately I've come to look at internet shopping as a form of delegation. Instead of heading to the store to pick things out I (sometimes) pay for them to send me things for my review at my own schedule. It's hard to pay for shipping sometimes, but whether it's $6 from a clothing store or $100+ from a furniture store, it's worth it to me.

Ditto for ordering groceries online. It costs more than going to the store, but I'm effectively delegating the act of walking the aisles, hunting for ingredients, and lugging the groceries home.

Ladies, what do you delegate to an assistant, whether to an assistant or secretary or in your personal life? 

Pictured: Shutterstock / Snezana Ignjatovic. Originally pictured.

The post How to Delegate: How to Start Delegating Work To Your Assistant appeared first on Corporette.com.

When your boss won't delegate, how can you move to the next step? But how can you grow your own skills when working with this person? When I got this question from Reader E a while ago, I knew just the woman to ask: Jodi Glickman, the author of Great on the Job: What to Say, How to Say It. The Secrets of Getting Ahead. (both book and blog), and a fellow Northwestern alumna. I hope you all enjoy her guest post today! – Kat

Here's Reader E's question:

Can you do a feature on how to deal with a boss that is not good at delegating work, does not “have the time to teach” and believes it is easier to handle the matter herself, has issues letting go of important matters or bringing in the associates to work on such matters and etc. when one has been at the firm already for a good amount of time? Would love to hear the feedback you and the readers have other than the obvious answer of switching firms.

The reason your boss won’t (or can’t delegate) is that she’s too busy to think about putting you to work and she’s convinced it will take more time to get you up to speed than to do the work herself.  So, you’ve got to prove her wrong by showing that you can indeed add value and that you bring real skills to the table. (Multiple Choice, originally uploaded to Flickr by CoreForce.)

Before you think about walking out the door, consider using the multiple-choice strategy when you offer to help. Instead of simply asking: “how can I help?” try offering to help out with two (or more) specific tasks:

Jane—I know we’ve got a lot to prepare for next week’s meeting- I’d be happy to draft an agenda or prepare a briefing memo in advance—which would you like me to start on?

The multiple choice strategy makes it harder for her to say no—if it’s clear that there’s a lot to be done and you demonstrate that you’re ready and willing to take on specific tasks, she’ll be more likely to give you the go-ahead. This approach also shows that you’re in the loop—you have a sense of what’s going on around you and you’re aware of the challenges that lie ahead.

If this strategy still doesn’t work—then think in advance about how you’d actually help with those two or three specific tasks and go to your boss with your plan of action. For example, when you offer to put the agenda together, have a sketch in hand of what you think the agenda should look like. Or, give her your preliminary thoughts on what the briefing memo should include. By doing some initial work, you’ll give her a sense of your thought process and demonstrate that you’re smart and you’ve got good judgment—both of which should go a long way in helping her to start offloading more meaningful and challenging for you.

Finally, once you do start getting some meaningful work, be sure to show her the continued benefits. Let her know that you’re working hard to make her life easier (or better) and continue to challenge yourself. Also, be sure to acknowledge that you appreciate her guidance and support. If and when you need additional help or guidance with new tasks, state clearly that you expect the benefits to far outweigh the costs. For example, you can say,

“I’d appreciate sitting down and taking up ten minutes of your time to review the memo—I know once we make sure I’m moving in the right direction it will save us both considerable time and energy on the backend. I want to be as efficient and effective as possible.”

(L-1)

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Reader E wonders what you can and should ask your assistant or secretary to do — and what is off limits. Great question!

I have been fortunate and I find myself a busy exec at a consulting firm at a young age. I am working 60-80 hours a week and just learning how to leverage my assistant. She is helping me with my expenses and time entry, but I suspect she and I could both get more out of the relationship. I've grown up in a world where I can do almost everything myself (like book travel) but I'm struggling to manage my work/life balance. I could use help with just about anything but as I dive into the world of asking for help, I don't want to find myself at the other end of the spectrum where I'm asking too much or being inappropriate. Advice that outlines do and do not categories or mentions creative ideas might be most helpful.

{related: how to delegate}

Congrats to be a busy exec, and a special congrats on getting what sounds like a competent and helpful assistant — they can be hard to come by, so treat him or her like gold! (And apologies in advance for every time I say “her” meaning the assistant — in addition to being Reader E's situation, it's easier to type than “him or her” every time!) 

(Pictured:  Screencap from Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. We're right on top of it, Rose!)

Oh, and PSA: here's when Adminstrative Professionals' Day is:

Update: Administrative Professionals Day is April 24, 2024. Some great gifts to get for your administrative professional (other than cash, of course) include:

{related: how to hire an assistant}

How to Delegate Things to Your Assistant

For my $.02, you can delegate the following sorts of things to your assistant, depending on your job:

1) Expenses / time sheets / other simple data entry. This is what most people will use their secretaries and assistants for, and in some companies — particularly where an assistant is shared between four or five people — that may be all that he or she is asked to do.

2) Grunt work like photocopying, mailing, faxing, scanning, even typing things that can't be OCR'd (or proofreading things that have been OCR'd).

{related: how much help do you have in your life?}

3) Liaison activities. This is where your assistant will start to be more useful to you: have him or her act as a liaison with colleagues, clients, and opposing parties, to schedule conference calls, meetings, and more. Give her access to your calendar (there are ways you can set up a “shared” calendar in Outlook, if memory serves, that lets you only show her *some* of your activities — same with Google Calendar) so she doesn't have to run in to check with you every time.

4) Filtering. You can absolutely ask your assistant to screen calls and even emails. In fact, with a lot of senior people it's difficult to get an email to your target without having it filtered by the assistant first. (I once worked with a Big Wig who, in addition to needing filtering, just wasn't comfortable with email yet — his assistant got all of his emails and would print out the important ones, and he would then scribble a response on the printout and hand it back to his assistant to be typed.) 

Depending on what your work entails, you can even have him or her skim different publications and flag any stories that might be of interest to you. For example, when I was 22 and a very junior editorial assistant at a magazine, I read 30 magazines on a weekly basis for the EIC and flagged different stories that I thought might be of interest to her, either for a story idea for our publication or from a “you should know what our competitor is doing” perspective– similarly, I now have my virtual assistant read a lot of the RSS feeds that end up in the Weekly Roundup.

5) Dictation/transcription. I truly believe that there is a lost art to dictation, and I never quite mastered it, try as I might. As a lawyer, I primarily found it helpful when I had been reviewing cases, treatises, and other documents like deposition transcripts and more where I would find big chunks of text that I wanted to use in the draft of whatever I was writing but didn't want to type them — so I would dictate them. I tried it both with my assistant at the time and the speech-recognition transcription program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and there is a learning/teaching curve to both.

Personally, I found Dragon more helpful because I could see what I had said aloud almost immediately which made proofreading easier, whereas with my assistant it may have been a few days before I saw the transcribed notes. I'll also note that transcription jobs can vary in difficulty: if you're writing a one-page letter using simple, regular words it's going to be a lot easier than if you're taking notes on an arcane area of law with a lot of terms of art, or if, say, your consulting work involves medical or pharmaceutical terms or acronyms.

6) Research for work-related things. For example, let's say you need to create a number of posters for a presentation — your assistant can call Kinkos and see what the deadline is, what format the image files need to be in, what the cost variations are, and so forth. Similarly, if you're having a work-related lunch you can have your assistant call different restaurants to see who has a table available at a certain time or date; same for work-related travel arrangements.

7) Things your assistant thinks she can do that will assist your professional life. If you're dealing with an assistant who handles everything you give him or her very well, take her out to lunch to thank her, and talk about how you can better use the relationship. For example:  “You've done an amazing job with everything I've given you, and I can tell that you're capable of more. What else have you done in the past? What else might you think that I could give you to do?” Your assistant might also use this opportunity to tell you what jobs she hates doing, or what she wants out of the relationship (maybe she's studying to do what you do in the future; maybe she wants more flexibility with her schedule, like longer lunches or earlier nights) — listen to her, and if you can, accommodate her on at least one or two items.

{related: here's what happened when I used virtual assistants for personal tasks}

Things You Shouldn't Delegate To Your Assistant

1) Personal tasks. At least in most situations that I've been in or witnessed, the secretary/assistant's job is not one of personal assistant. You should not task her with things that have no relation to the job at hand: booking vacation flights for you, picking up a box of tampons, or even getting you coffee on a regular basis. (Although, if a client came to your office, I wouldn't hesitate to ask your assistant to get the client a cup of coffee.) If you have that rare assistant who is happy to get you a cup of coffee on a regular basis, or is willing to pick up personal items for you at the drugstore — again, treat him or her like gold: I view all of that stuff as “above and beyond.”

{related: how to use a personal assistant}

2) Anything that crosses into YOUR job. For example, it's one thing to have your assistant print out pages from 5-10 different websites or scan/photocopy pages that will help you do an analysis for your job — it's another thing to ask your assistant to do a rough draft of that analysis herself.

{related: how to tell your boss you're not her personal assistant}

Readers, what else do you use your assistants or secretaries for? What do you consider off limits in terms of secretarial tasks?

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