Importance of offloading work

If you are like me, you like to do everything on your own. I am a firm believer in the saying — “If you want something done right then do it yourself”. But as I am growing older, I have realized that this is not a very scalable approach. If you don’t learn to offload your work to others, to accept some help, you are going to burn yourself out quite easily.

Teaching someone how to perform a task will always take longer than doing it yourself. And that is the reason why I am reluctant to share work with others. Moreover, I don’t feel that others will share my sense of ownership and responsibility towards the work, which makes it hard for me to trust them.

But like anything else in life, you sometimes have to try and fail a lot before you discover something new. I have found that if you look for the right people, it is definitely worth spending the time training them. These are generally people with a desire to learn new things, and the willingness to ask questions.

I will admit that these people are hard to find. Overall I think my experience of offloading work hasn’t been that great, as I have come across people who have just been a pain in the ass. But the right people that I have come across has given me hope. It has changed my perspective on my career a lot.

Earlier, I always wanted to be working alone in the long run, maybe as a freelance contractor. But now, my goal is to create a team. The dream job would be where I don’t have to actually code anymore, just guide other people to do it.