Use the 4Ds rule as a filter for all the assigned tasks to you and you will be surprised with how much time you will save to yourself.

1. Don’t do it

The first thing you need to do before you start working on any new task is to question its need. By doing this you are protecting yourself, your team, your company and your product from wasting your efforts and time on something not really beneficial.

You should be able to have strong and valid answers to the following questions:

• Why do we need to work on this task?
• What will we lose if we decided not to work on it?
• What value does it add to the business?
• What value does it add to the customer/user?
• Is the return of investment higher than the cost of production?

If you managed to answer the above questions, then you can go forward to the next D.

2. Delay it

The second thing you need to do is to question the urgency of this task and to understand the actual priority of it among the existing ones. By doing this you are protecting yourself, your team, your company, and your product from dropping everything you are doing right now and work on something that can wait, interrupting your team workflow, deprioritizing another task that is more urgent and valuable to the business, and protecting your image as a manager in front of your team.

You should be able to have strong and valid answers to the following questions:

• Why this task is urgent?
• Why do we need to work on this task now or the required time?
• What is the value that we will gain by doing it now not later?
• What is the value that we will lose by doing it later not now?
• Why this task is more urgent than the other tasks in the pipeline?

If you managed to answer the above questions, then you can go forward to the next D.

3. Delegate it

The third thing you need to do is to question the need for you, not your team, to work on this task. By doing this you are protecting your time for being wasted on something that can be delegated to your team members, allowing yourself more time to work on the tasks that no one else but you can do, become more efficient with your managing your time, and not to have an unnecessary feeling of being overwhelmed.

You should be able to have strong and valid answers to the following questions:

• Why should I specifically work on this task?
• Why shouldn’t I delegate this task to another team member?
• What is the difference in the delivered quality if I worked on it vs another team member?
• What is the difference in the delivery time if I worked on it vs another team member?

If you managed to answer the above questions, then you can go forward to the next D.

4. Do it

The fourth thing, unfortunately, you need to do is to do it yourself on the required time with the best quality.

Simple and effective!

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