Why It's So Hard to Delegate and Why You Need to Do It Anyway

The benefit of freeing your mind to concentrate on the important stuff is smart business, if you can actually do it.

No matter how well you think you multitask, your brain can only handle so many things at one time.And the more tasks you're trying to accomplish, the less likely you'll do them all well.

That brings me to this question: What do entrepreneurs use brainpower on that they should delegate to someone else?

Me as a micromanager

I suffer from the same syndrome. My company is now more than a decade old, well established, and has a dependable, trusted team in place.

Despite this, I still want to know about every transaction my team is working on -- no matter how trivial or peripheral. Even though I've written before in this space about trusting your team, the micromanager in me wants to keep tabs on everything.

That's the case even though I have team members whose jobs specifically are to keep track of those things -- team members who are doing an exemplary job.

I know it's a waste of brain space and I fight it all the time, but it's a fierce, ongoing battle.

 Free Your Mind

All this begs another question: What can you let go, and how do you train yourself to do this?

This question is essential for fledgling, or less-experienced, entrepreneurs, especially those whose companies are in their early days and have minimal staff.

Much of it is a mindset. Entrepreneurs tend to be creative, big-picture types, but I've found a surprising number of them are incredibly detail-oriented as well. You might even call them control freaks.

I don't have a magic pill, a secret formula, a cellphone app, or a wizard's magic that can get you to stop wasting brain space. You have to decide for yourself what's valuable and worthy of your brain cells and what's not.

Maybe the best way to accomplish your goal is with a virtual brain dump. Think of all the work-related topics that are using bandwidth in your mind, then write them down. Place them in order from most important to least important.

Which items on your list could someone else do? Those will be the things to drop from your mind.

This process isn't always easy, and you might not fully trust your judgment. If that's the case, doing the above exercise with a trusted senior employee could be helpful; there's no reason you have to go it alone.

To summarize, less is more. Focusing on a smaller number of high-importance issues will always work better than being a jack of all trades, master of none.