How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

YOUR COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
Sometimes you’ve worked out what’s most important and your first steps are
clear, but you’re still left with too much to do in the hours available. For this
problem, let’s turn to an old economic concept called 
comparative advantage
,
first articulated by economist David Ricardo in 1817—but often misunderstood.
Here’s how it works. Imagine England and Portugal can both make cloth and

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wine (and imagine that you’re Portugal, while England is one of your
colleagues). Portugal is a better producer of both products. So should Portugal
just do everything, while England does nothing? No, because Portugal has got
limited resources. (Just as you have limited hours in your day.) And it’s not that
England can’t make cloth and wine at all. It’s just not quite as good at it as
Portugal.
Should both countries make both products, then? Well, no, not if they can
trade with each other. England is “okay” at making both wine and cloth, but
Portugal is “exceptionally excellent” at making wine and merely “very good” at
cloth. The gap between Portugal’s and England’s prowess is larger in
winemaking than in cloth production, so we say Portugal has a 
comparative
advantage
in wine (and not in cloth). The upshot? With limited resources,
Portugal should focus on what it’s most uniquely talented at doing: making
wine. If Portugal does that and England focuses on cloth, Ricardo showed, the
two countries will together produce more cloth and wine by specializing than if
each tried to do both.
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This logic of comparative advantage can be a great help in prioritizing our
work when we’re overloaded. We so often get pulled into tasks that we should,
by rights, be asking others to help with. We tell ourselves that they’re not quite
as experienced or knowledgeable as us, or that it will be quicker if we just do it
ourselves. But there’s a massive cost to this way of thinking. By being unwilling
to delegate tasks that others could reasonably help with, we fail to make progress
on the important or tricky things that 
only
we can do. U.S. president Teddy
Roosevelt knew this. He could type faster than his personal assistant. But
however good his typing, his comparative advantage lay in more presidential
duties, where his capabilities were more unique. So that’s where he focused his
attention, while delegating his typing to his assistant. The result was better for
the country, without a doubt.
So look at your work for today, and ask yourself:
Which tasks truly fall into the category of those only you can do?
Which tasks could someone else do moderately well (even if not quite as well
as you)?
Anthony works hard to isolate the things that don’t really need his talents.
“Everything in life can 
feel
important, but you can’t do everything. So I had to

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learn to let go of things, and it was ridiculously hard to do at first.” He says that
what made it easier was talking openly with his colleagues about what was on
his plate, what was on theirs, and discovering where they could divide and
conquer more effectively. “I realized there were things I enjoyed doing and was
good at, but that others could take on—like writing the company’s blog, or
posting company tweets. Meanwhile, there were other things on my to-do list
that only I could do, that hadn’t been getting done. Finally, I had the space to
work on them.”