5 tips to prevent important tasks falling through the cracks

So how do you prevent the important (and even the not-so-important) tasks falling through the cracks?

Shweta Jhajharia founder of The London Coaching Group has six tips, including a great free tool that can help every business get more control:

Stop Doing Everything Yourself

Share the load with people who are stronger in areas where you are weaker. The work will get done, the stress will be less, and your business will reach new heights. The following tips will help you do this.

Give Away Your Low-Skill, Low-Fun Tasks First

All your tasks sit on a spectrum, from low skill to high skill and low fun to high fun.

The tasks to delegate are the ones that sit in the low-fun and low-skill quadrant.

Why? Because these tasks are:
· Easier to train for

· Cheapest to hire for

· Create the most distractions

Match the Correct Person to the Role

Before you start hiring, you must define the role along with the responsibilities and the desired output.

You should then match that against a few key considerations:

· Do they have the right skills for the job?

· Does their personality type match the tasks that they’ll be doing?

· Are they enthusiastic about the job?

Develop a system

Introducing a system is absolutely critical if you want to ensure no job falls through the cracks. It will also you help you manage your team.

1. Define the outcome. Ensure your team members know exactly what is expected of them.

2. Timeline everything. Start with when the final result needs to be done and then backtrack.

3. Ask them to recap. Hear it in their words and make sure they have understood and are on the same page as you.

4. Include a touch point in your diary. Mid-way through the project check in and make sure everything is on track. If you wait until the end – it may be too late to catch an issue and deal with it.

5. Install a task management system. For example, Asana or Podio, or for smaller companies, a basic spreadsheet can be used to manage tasks.

Document everything you do

Create concise but comprehensive documentation and it will feed back into your business by making the training of new hires a breeze, ensuring your business runs without interruption.

Remember to keep it concise and simple:

· Limit yourself to one-page documents.

· Make use of checklists and bullet points.

· Create how-to videos using a camera or software like Jing that lets you do a video screenshot of what you’re doing on screen.