It is a simple fact that I am terrible at delegating.

I have a very hard time giving work to someone else to complete. Even when I’m trying to think of tasks to delegate, when I am purposely trying to trim down my workload, I have trouble delegating.

But now I have a secret weapon.

Last week, on my company’s anniversary, I hired my first full-time employee. Cara doesn’t have an official job title yet, she is a jack-of-all-trades. I hired her because she is smart, flexible, likes variety, and because she is the best delegator I have ever met in my life.

Cara takes delegating to a whole new level, not because she is lazy, but because she is efficient. She is willing to do anything if it has a purpose, but if it is useless busy work, she’ll be happy to explain why. If she’s working on a project that can be outsourced to someone else who is not fully occupied with work, she’ll demonstrate how that makes sense. She is also excellent at training other people (which is a big part of delegating). Cara is a master delegator.

In the one week since Cara’s worked with me, her delegation skills have already begun to transform my business. And watching her thought-processes has given me some really good insight into why every person in every business should start delegating more today.

1. Teaching a job to someone else shows you where there are holes in your logic or where you’re taking too many steps. As I’ve begun to explain process-oriented work to Cara, she asks me questions that point out unnecessary steps or reveal a better way to do things. Today I was explaining how to check something from the admin section of a Web site. To do so involves a separate URL, login information and instructions on how to access the data. That process works, but Cara asked why we couldn’t just find the information from the public Website. Turns out we could, and that saved us about 10 unnecessary steps. Just by explaining the steps and having someone ask a question, we saved time and streamlined a lengthy process.

2. Feeling like you have to do something is a lot of pressure; it’s easier to think more creatively when you aren’t stressed with looming projects. I have a to do list that stretches for pages in my notebook. There are many items on that list that have been there for months. They are always on that list, always in the back of my mind; projects that I need to tackle but haven’t been able to get to. If there is a project that has been on your to do list for more than two months, think about delegating it. You aren’t getting it done, so at least some progress will be made if you give it to someone else.

3. Giving away something old and established makes way for something new and innovative. I have a number of repetitive projects that take up a portion of my week every week. These things are always there; kind of like during college on the weekends when I could not ever relax because I knew that there was a book to read or a paper to write. By delegating those kinds of projects, your mind has more room to be creative and to spend time on less process-oriented problems.

4. Establishing processes allows you to delegate and to increase your output in multiples. It’s fairly obvious that it is much easier to outsource something if there is a process for how it gets done. By creating processes around work, and figuring out how to get other people to help do the work, there is another benefit - the total amount of work that you can get done increases exponentially. An good example is the human powered search engine Mahalo. The site employs Guides who help to create pages that can be searched. There is a process to creating those Mahalo pages, and by making sure that everyone who works on the site knows the process, the site can grow faster as new Guides are added.

5. Freeing up extra time will allow you to write that blog post that you’ve been putting off for a week (or longer). More time for other work is the most obvious reason to delegate.

(BONUS) 6. Believing that you are the only one that can do a task isn’t helpful for you and isn’t helpful for your business. And it’s probably not true. This is the most common protest made by over-achievers and perfectionists who think that they can do the work the best or the fastest or without any help. And this notion is dangerous because trying to run a business completely alone will not work. And in most cases, it’s better to get 80% of the work done at 80% skill level than 40% of the work done at 100% skill level. On top of this, it’s usually not true that no one else could do the work.

When this article first came out, I printed it out and tacked it to my bulletin board at work because of this section:

“Moving into any new position requires that you get rid of the stuff from your old position. This means delegating. It means getting over the idea that you were indispensable on any of your old teams. You can’t do you new job well if you’re still doing your old job.

Delegating your old job should take three days. You find people who are taking a step up when they accept pieces of your old job so that they are excited. You give them an explanation of how to do it and tell them where to go when they have questions.

You are going to tell me that one day is not enough, that you have a very complicated job. But think of it this way: If you died today, your job would be delegated in a couple of days.

Delegating is not enough, though. You have to stop caring. If you are no longer on a project because you got a promotion, then you have to stop obsessing about how the project is doing.”

I try to keep that advice in mind, but I’ve already admitted that it’s a challenge for me. If you’re bad at delegating, try these seven tips to becoming a better delegator. But whatever you do, start delegating more today.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

I am a firm believer that it’s important to celebrate milestones. Anniversaries, birthdays, project launches - in my opinion, they all need to be marked and noted, with proper gift giving, eating & drinking, and celebratory toasts.

Today is the first birthday of Pure Incubation. To celebrate, I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner. But perhaps the most fitting tribute was that today was also my first full-time employee’s first day of work. Today I spent four hours out of the office in meetings, but even so, we got more done today together than I get done in most days of working alone, even when I put in 12+ hours.

The timing was coincidental, but it turns out that a new employee was probably the best gift that I could have given Pure Incubation on its first birthday. Here’s to many more (birthdays AND employees)!

Just a quick note for those of you who read my take on Cara Austin’s debut CD and asked me to let you know when the CD was back in stock at Amazon.com - they are available now. Or you can find it at the Web site: www.CaraAustin.com.

Get one while they last!

When I started my career, the Internet didn’t yet dominate publishing to the extent that it does today. There was a lot more paper being pushed around, and my first two “real” jobs - at Let’s Go travel guides and Network World magazine - were both print-based.

The thing that I liked the best about both of these jobs was the feeling of accomplishment that I got when something was finished. At Network World, we put the magazine to bed every Friday afternoon, and were free for the weekend. Monday morning, the issue would appear in the office, all our hard work evident in the print publication. Let’s Go was much the same way, although on an extended scale. We would work through the spring semester and summer, and at the end of the year, the updated and improved travel guide book would be released. An entire book, with your name on it, to prove that you worked hard and produced something great. (I just checked and now that book is 10 years out of date and available to buy for $0.35!)

With my current work, I relate this publishing experience to launching a new Web site. Or a new feature on a Web site. Or a redesign. Or a blog post. There are so many more milestones with the Internet because things are fluid - if something isn’t working, it can be changed easily, so I am quicker to approve and launch something. But there is still a thrill that I get when I create something new and see it live.

Today I get to tell you about some new stuff - and I am excited. I hope that you check everything out and let me know what you think.

First, my blog has been redesigned. If you are reading this post on RSS reader, come to the site and check it out. The redesign was done by Allyson Nickowitz - she’s great and incredibly talented. Not to mention that she managed to get me to sit through a photo shoot!

The Web site for my new company is now live, as well. I hope that this helps explain a bit more about what I’m doing with my business for anyone who is curious.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in the Cara Austin music project from the beginning, and Cara’s first song is now available for free download at her Web site. The CD should come out sometime in December.

There are other projects that I have in process, but they are not yet ready for prime-time. More announcements on future launches will be coming soon.

For some reason, people love Halloween. I’m not sure if it’s just that creative people like Halloween because they can let their inspiration flow, or if it’s something else, but I know a lot of people who LOVE LOVE LOVE the holiday. It’s not my favorite, personally. But my sister-in-law Michele loves it. And she and my brother Matt throw the best Halloween party every year. I dressed up this year as Princess Fiona, the wife of Shrek. I picked the costume purposely because I have a Halloween day event that a lot of little kids will be at, and I wanted them to be able to recognize who I was and not run away. I’m not sure if I will be successful because I scared Matt and Cara with my green makeup – Matt kept looking at me and saying that I was freaking him out because I didn’t look like myself.

Anyway, I didn’t really know exactly what Fiona looked like before I dressed up, so I found pictures on the Internet to model my costume after. A good way to find image of the person or thing that you’re dressing up as is to use Google image search. That’s how I found my model. But there are a lot of other tools that you can use if you’re looking to create a last-minute Halloween costume. This post from Lifehacker gives a list of places that you can go to print your own mask. If you have the clothes that your character would wear, but just can’t make yourself look like that person, it’s an easy (and low-cost) way to “disguise” yourself. There are also a number of sites that help with inspiration if yours is lacking – two that I came across are Costumzee and Costume Idea Zone, which also provides some handy idea for the reluctant party-goer.

The foliage is at its peak here in Massachusetts, the Red Sox are heading to the World Series, the weather is in the 70s…and on Saturday I went to Russell Orchards with Chris and some friends for our yearly pumpkin purchase. What could be better than that? If you live in the area or are anywhere close to Ipswich, MA, I highly recommend a trip to Russell’s. They have fresh produce, apple picking (in season), farm animals (including the largest pig that I have ever seen – Big Boy is his name), hay rides, and to-die-for apple cider donuts. Cara picked out the ugliest pumpkin that she could find and was determined to use the stem as a nose, so she got on the Internet to see what patterns she could find. There are a slew of pumpkin-carving resources online, including Pumpkin Masters, which has free patterns, tips & tricks, a $15,000 contest for the most original carved creation and the latest tools (does anyone really need a battery-operated pumpkin carving saw?!) She finally decided that she wanted her pumpkin to look like the book cover below and delegated most of the work to Chris. Here’s the model and the final product.

My friend Cara is just about to release her debut CD – Send Me – and the Web site just went up online. Check it out at www.CaraAustin.com. When you’re there, sign up to be notified when the music is available and to get free downloads. I have been lucky enough to be working on this project as it unfolds, and I am happy to say that I think it’s great – the music is excellent! I can’t wait to hear the entire thing once it is released. Right now it looks like that will happen sometime in November.

It seemed like it would be an interesting thing to look at, plus, since many of the sites are in foreign languages, it was also a good way to use the Babelfish translation service (I’ve been curious to see how good a job it does). So here are the top news stories in 10 countries (plus the U.S.). All translations were done using Babelfish.

U.S.: Troops take back control in Myanmar  

U.K. & Ireland: U.N. envoy heads into Myanmar maelstrom  

Australia: Crowds taunt soldiers in Burma’s Rangoon  

Brazil: Gripe aviária pode ser transmitida de mãe para filho  
Translation: “Aviária grippe can be transmitted of mother for son”
Melissa’s translation: Mothers can pass bird flu to their children

Italy:  Iraq, cominciato il ritiro dei primi soldati Usa
Translation: “Iraq, begun the withdrawal of the first USA soldiers”

China: ??????????????
Translation: “China official gazette commercial bribe leading case”

Netherlands: Rij groener!
Translation: “File Greener!”
Melissa’s Translation: I have absolutely no idea what this means, but there was a picture of a car with the heading “Green Center” next to this headline if that helps at all.

France: Huit ans de prison dans le procès du bus incendié à Marseille
Translation: “Eight years of prison in the lawsuit of the bus set fire to in Marseilles”

Korea: ??? ????? ?? “6??? ??? ???? ???
Translation: “Song the pure Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade minister “6 person conversation written agreements which it pushes oneself who is possible $$ln”
Melissa’s Translation: Again, I have no idea what this means except possibly that Babelfish doesn’t do such a good job with translations of Korean to English?

Spain: Las potencias demoran hasta noviembre nuevas sanciones a Irán
Translation: “The powers delay until November new sanctions to Iran”

Russia: ????? ?? ????? ???????????
Translation: “Pressure in Burma is strengthened”

When I originally copied and pasted into the system that publishes my blog (Wordpress) the Chinese, Korean and Russian characters displayed properly. But when I tried to save, they changed to question marks…I left it that way here on purpose to illustrate just how far we still need to go with international compatibility.

~Today’s view: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1455852395/