From the course: Time Management Tips

Dealing with overlapping responsibilities

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Dealing with overlapping responsibilities

- Working with a partner can sometimes help you be more productive, but sometimes it can be very distracting. When I use the word partner, I'm referring to any kind of situation where you're sharing responsibility with one or more other people such as spouses working together or co-managers or actual partners within a business. The idea behind creating a partnership is that by spreading out the work among many people, we're going to get more work done. However, what can also happen is, well it's something that I learned while playing volleyball back in the day. Now, it may not look like it, but I used to play volleyball a lot and one thing that I learned was something called the hubby wife serve. The hubby wife serve is where the server on the other team puts the ball right between two people. If you serve the ball down the middle like that, there's a high likelihood that both players say, "You've got it," and that results in no one getting it and a point for the other team. Sometimes the opposite also occurs where both of you say, "I've got it," and you run crashing into the middle resulting in bumps, bruises, confusion, and perhaps slightly damaged egos. One way to avoid experiencing these effects in your partnership is to make sure there are clearly and cleanly defined responsibilities. For whatever reason, many of us feel we don't need to have a formal conversation with a partner or that it feels too restrictive to pin people down and maybe will make the relationship less friendly if we do this. However, I find the opposite to be true. If we take time to clearly define responsibilities, it helps maintain a better relationship because we can be clear with each other and not step on each other's toes. If you're in a partnership situation, I recommend scheduling a little bit of time, maybe an hour, maybe 90 minutes, to have a conversation about what are your partner's roles and what are your roles. Simply take a piece of paper. Put a line down the middle and put your responsibilities on one side and their responsibilities on the other. Then you can both refer to this document and use it as a guide to avoid overlapping or confusing responsibilities. What if you and a partner are working on multiple projects? You may want to consider delegating on a project-by-project basis. For instance, you can delegate the leadership responsibility of project A to partner A and the leadership responsibility of project B to partner B and so on. This gives you the freedom to ask the other partner for help, but it's clearly understood between the two of you that the person who has the project assigned to them takes the lead. It's their job to make sure the project gets completed and to ask for help when needed. The other partner doesn't rush in whenever they see a perceived deficiency. Creating divided responsibilities also has the bonus effect of helping both of you be more focused and staying focused is the name of the game when it comes to productivity.

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