2. Hand it over

Here’s another way to be more efficient without sacrifice: Stop doing all the work yourself. Delegation is key to managing your time.

Wetmore used to be a managing partner at a law firm. He was spending all day answering questions and managing problems for staff and colleagues. He got out of the muddle with two techniques.

First, he simply asked people to hold their questions until after 4 p.m. Folks were often able to solve the issue before the end of the day without him.

Second, he used “reverse delegation.” Say a manager had a “monkey on her back” trying to work around a conflict in scheduling seminars.

Wetmore’s impulse was to say, “I’ll take care of it.” But “after a day or two [of taking all the monkeys] you become a zoo keeper. If you allow people to come and dump on you, they will dump on you. People want to go the line of least resistance. Instead ask, ‘So what do you think? I have confidence in you.’ Most people that practice that reverse delegation thing find they can eliminate a lot of those things they’d otherwise get caught up in.” Wetmore calls this “reverse delegation” because staff are expected to find their own solutions, not just perform pre-set tasks.

Asking your staff to solve problems doesn’t just reduce the load on you; it also builds their confidence and means they will be more likely to affect positive changes in the practice.