You’ll be aware that on your to-do list you probably have a number of tasks which you’d like to delegate, but don’t really want to assign in their entirety because there are lots of permutations.

If you read the 4 Hour Work Week, or pretty much any other business or sociology book, you’ll have come across the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle which states that

• 20% of X will consume 80% of Y (eg one of the five paragraphs in a press release is going to take much longer than the others to write)
• 80% of A will be generated by 20% of B (eg 80% of your income will be generated by 20% of your clients)

Now that we can proceed with the weight of maths and science behind this point, let’s take an example:

Say you want to book a flight from London to Kashmir to go skiing in the Himalayas. You want to be sure you’re getting the best deal, with the fewest changes, the best airline, and so forth. If you’re new to working with you’re PA you’ll be harbouring doubts that they’re going to represent your interests as well as you’d like, and may just find you a pretty cheap flight, but not the very very best flight, like you would if you were looking (though we do this for a living, and have to keep you happy else we’ll not have any clients!) but in the interim we can earn your trust.

The task “book a flight from London to Kashmir” breaks down thus:

• Set dates for travel, and their flexibility
• Determine the route options
• Select the best airline (ie which won’t go bust whilst you’re out there)
• Find the most suitable permutation, by date, by price, by airline, and by route

This will take you a reasonable amount of time to research for yourself, whereas if all the information were presented to you on one page, clearly broken into recommended, alternative, and eliminated options, it would take you just a few minutes to choose one.

So when you next have something to do, remember that you can delegate just small chunks of it, leaving you to make the important decisions.