Would You Rather: A Fun Way to Think About Delegating

Have you played the game ‘Would You Rather’? It’s one of my 6-year-old's favourite games to play on the way to school or during long car journeys. One of his favourites is, ‘Would you rather be a bad bee or a good wasp?’ His answer is always ‘a good wasp’ because he doesn't want to sting people and wants to stay alive forever. A pretty good answer, I think. What would your answer be?

The reason for this blog post is that I thought the ‘Would You Rather’ game could be a light-hearted way for business owners to help them delegate the right tasks internally within their team or externally to a freelancer, such as a Virtual Assistant.

Delegation sounds easy, but passing tasks to someone else requires a lot of trust and communication. Still, if you learn to delegate, you’ll be amazed at how much more you can achieve.

Steps to Effective Delegation

1. Make a List of Tasks:

List all the tasks you complete on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
List all the one-off tasks you’ve completed recently.

2. Put All Your Tasks Into Four Preference Categories:

Love doing
Like doing
Don’t mind doing
Hate doing

3. Use ‘Would You Rather’ for Uncertain Tasks:

If you’re unsure which preference a task falls into (e.g., Love or Like), compare it against another task already in one of those categories. For example, Would You Rather track expenses or brainstorm creative ideas? Whichever task wins falls into the higher preference category.

4. Delegate the Tasks You Hate:

Take all the tasks in the Hate category and play ‘Would You Rather’ to discover which task you should delegate first. For example, ask yourself, ‘Would You Rather do task A or task B? Would You Rather do task A or task C?’ etc. The first task to delegate is the one that lost all the Would You Rather questions.

So why not give it a go?!