Here is a cute business lesson I heard a while ago:
A crow was sitting atop a ladder, doing nothing all day long. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?”
The crow answered: “Sure. Why not?” So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, and did nothing. All of a sudden, a fox appeared and ate the rabbit.
Moral: If you want to sit around all day doing nothing, you must be sitting high up the ladder.
Every Manager loves having people working under them to pass off all of the boring work to. They say that the higher up you are, the less work you have to do. On some levels this is true but the gravy ride does not last forever. I am in a situation where I can see both sides of this situation. I am working directly under the CEO of my company and I get his leftovers but I also have teams working below me so I get to do my fair share of dumping.
My boss dumps anything involving computers or technology to me. This is very time consuming for me but it is also very educational. The more I work with computers, research and fix problems, the more skilled I become. I mentioned in an earlier post that taking on extra responsibilities at work opens up new luckortunity in future. Taking on all the technical aspects of my office is what ultimately started me out with this blog.
On the other hand, since all of this work is so time consuming, it prevents me from doing some work that I could otherwise be taking care of.
There are some smaller tasks that are boring and time consuming that I usually pass on to someone else in my office.Lately I realized that I was getting rusty at these tasks and when I did do them, I ended up taking much longer than I should have taken to complete them.
There is a trade off for everything and there are not enough hours in the day to do everything so here are my general rules on dumping:
1- Learn as much as possible by doing things yourself, unless it takes away from productivity and your bottom line.
2- Always give over jobs such as data entry that don’t use any real skill.
3- Even when pressed for time, always devote some time to learning new skills and keeping up with change and technology.