Eliminate before you delegate. Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient’? Now you’re playing with your own dough. It’s something I want you to get comfortable with, and this baby step is small stakes. Did I mention to eliminate before you delegate? For example, it is popular among executives to have assistants read e-mail. In some cases this is valuable. In my case, I use spam filters, autoresponders with FAQs, and automatic forwarding to outsourcers to limit my e-mail obligation to 10-20 e-mail responses per week. It takes me 30 minutes per week because I used systems—elimination and automation—to make it so. Nor do I use an assistant to set meetings and conference calls because I have eliminated meetings. If I need to set the odd 20-minute call for a given month, I'll send one two-sentence e-mail and be done with it. Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems. The Menu: A World of Possibilities I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. — BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, South African cleric and activist Te next question then becomes, “What should you delegate?” It’s a good question, but I don’t want to answer it. I want to watch Family Guy. The truth be told, it is a hell of a lot of work writing about not working. Ritika of Brickwork and Venky of YMII are more than capable of writing this section, so ll just mention two guidelines and leave the mental hernia of detail work to them. Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined. If you’