4 Tasks Of The Buyback Loop
The pain point will come. I am telling you this now so that you can anticipate it. If we wait until we are too deep into the pain point, then we will delegate from a really negative place. It’s hard to find the right person to help us out if we are looking at the task as the worst thing ever.
We don’t just want anyone to take over the task. It’s still our dream, and our job is to protect it. But we also don’t need to wait for the perfect person to come along. Because the longer we wait, the more we sit in the pain point. You can see how that cycle can become pretty toxic quickly. Remember, when we are looking to delegate, that someone doing a task at 80% of our standard still frees up 100% of our time. We don’t need to pick a random stranger off the street to take over, but we also don’t need to wait for the top Harvard graduate in the field most closely related to our dreams to show up on our doorstep. There are four types of activities that we need to think about in the buyback loop, and we need to be careful so that we hand off the correct ones. Our goal is to improve the quality of our lives while not allowing our dreams to suffer.
1. Replacement
These are tasks that are really important to our dreams that also kind of suck the life out of us. These tasks may make us a lot of money or they may be big chunks of the puzzle that get us to our dream. We do have to give these tasks away to someone else. Anything that is hurting our love for our dream needs to be pushed further away so that we can keep the love alive. But we must be careful with these because we can’t have the quality drop too much.
For me, one day, I am pretty confident that I will feel this way about social media. Right now, I am enjoying it, but I fully expect to hit a pain point because it’s something that I am not very good at and takes a lot of creative energy, which I would much rather put into my writing. But nowadays, social media is essential, and I have to have a following for my dream of publishing a book. So when I hand this off, I have to be incredibly careful that it is to someone qualified who knows how to speak my voice.
2. Delegate
These are the menial tasks that are just sucking the energy out of us. These tasks somehow take up the majority of our time. Even if they are completed quickly, we feel so drained after that they might as well have taken a longer time. These are the ones we can find someone at 80% capacity to handle for us. These things need to be done because collectively, they are really important, but individually, they can feel pretty minimal.
In my case, this is stuff like the technology side of things. I hired a team to design and manage my website. When I tried to do it myself, I was getting so frustrated. I didn’t know how to do anything and didn’t really have the right hardware to do what I was trying to do anyway. Since I’ve been so behind on writing lately (I’m at a coffee shop getting back on track before Ireland now), I’ve been uploading all the posts. But this means that I have to think about it, make sure that I follow the specific instructions that my team laid out, and triple-check my work. I’ve gotten quicker at it, but I always put it off until late at night (which you may have noticed), which really isn’t helpful for my goals. It’s so much easier to just write and send it off to the team because they handle everything and, frankly, do it way better than I ever could.
3. Production
These are the essential tasks of our dreams. This is the heart of where we make our money, impact, or whatever other fruit our dream produces. And these things light us up. This is why we got into this dream to begin with. This is what we fell in love with, and this is where we should spend the majority of our time. It’s where we want to be anyway.
This is my writing, and one day (hopefully pretty soon) will be my coaching calls. I love writing. I love talking about dreams. I love sharing this magic with the world, especially military spouses, who all have incredible things that they should be encouraged to bring to life. And I know that I will feel the same way about my coaching calls. Whether it’s in a written or verbal form, I love this topic, and I feel the magic here. This is the heart of my organization and will always bring the biggest income and impact.
4. Investment
The investment activities are the ones that light us up but don’t bring a lot to our dreams. These are important because they make us well-rounded people. We do need to have lives outside of our dreams. We need to exist in the real world, not just the one we dream of. These activities may not make much money or directly impact our dreams, but they are still essential to our lives.
For me, it’s traveling and my family. My husband and I are preparing to leave for Ireland in three days (it might actually be the day this post goes up). This is going to be a dream come true. We’ve both always wanted to go, and in both cases, our siblings have already visited. This was our original honeymoon plan, but COVID, training, and deployments put a pin in that. It will be a dream come true, and I’ll get to share about that here, but I know that you care more about your dreams coming true than mine (which is valid and goes both ways). And the other piece of that is being with my family. I am the kind of person who talks to her family almost every day. Moving closer is a dream come true, and being able to show up for the big things like weddings and graduations is as important and life-giving to me as showing up for the little things like improv shows and Sunday night dinners. It all brings me to life, and it’s part of what makes me feel incredibly lucky for everything I have.
Two of these activities we should delegate, and two of them we hold close to our chest. We have to protect the integrity of our dreams. We have to defend ourselves. And we have to do everything we can to bring our dreams to life. That’ll mean bringing in other people along the way. It means trusting others with our dreams. And it means keeping us in the magic. Because the magic was there when we started, and it’ll be there when we finish. It’s our job to make sure that it sticks around in between.