What do you do with items at the top of your backlog file? orientate, if someone asks you to do a piece of work, what are your choices? Well as with so much in life, the real secret is to ask the right questions, the right questions, of course, likely to lead to the right answers. And the first question to ask about the piece of work, whether it's at the top of your backlog folder, or given to a Thresh is what would happen if someone else did. This is a marvelous question, particularly in organizations because it opens up the possibility of delegation. delegation is an efficient way to spread workload around a workforce.

It uses your resources effectively and Also opposites offers the opportunity to train and develop people to increase your trust to increase their skills. So, option one, what would happen if someone else did it? And if the answer is that it could be done as well, or better if someone else did it, then the solution is to delegate. The second question to ask is, what would happen if I didn't do it yet? What would happen if I did it later? And if that leads to an acceptable answer, then the alternative is to defer the piece of work and very often, that's highly efficient way a piece way working.

Because deferral allows you to save work and do multiple pieces of work that are perhaps small, but similar together. It means being able to gather together pieces of work and resources you need to do them and be more efficient. It also allows you to do work when it suits you at a time when you're at your prime for doing it. It allows you to make way for more demanding work when you're in a better, stronger, more resourceful frame of mind. So the second question is, what happens if I do it later? And the strategy is to defer it.

The third question is perhaps a little unusual will happen if I didn't do all of it. We often take on pieces of work, particularly in organizations. And the way that we do it is determined by the way it's always been done. Often we join an organization and we take on a responsibility that someone else has been discharging. They show us how to do it, and we do it the way that it's always been done. We never question it.

A friend of mine once told me about a situation where she found herself in where her regular monthly report which would typically take a one to two days to prepare was getting was coming near you. Her workload workload was going sky high. So what did she do? She reluctantly pared back the standard of her report to the bare minimum that she thought would be acceptable. Smart graphs and diagrams were replaced by simple tables of figures, long paragraphs of explanation, replaced by bullet points highlighting key factors. A 30 page report was reduced to five pages.

You know what happened? She sent it out, knowing that it wasn't the kind of quality of report that her directors were used to. And how did they respond? They liked it. They liked the shorter, more concise, quicker to read, easier to digest report. per month months, she had been spending one to two days preparing a report we She could now prepare in half a day.

And not only was she saving three quarters of the time, but she was preparing a report, which was better suited to the needs of her constituency. So, the question is, what would happen if I didn't do all of it? And the strategy is to diminish the task? Perhaps the best question to ask is what would happen if I didn't do it at all? That's the ideal, isn't it? Because sometimes, if you don't do it, nothing will happen.

There'll be no problem. And if that's an acceptable outcome, then drop the task entirely. So it's only if you can't delegate it, you can't defer it, you can't diminish it and you can't drop it. That you take the final option. You do it. So there we have it.

Five ways to deal with any task and five questions to unleash the power of choice