A while back, I was reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity when I came across a quote from Benjamin Franklin that stuck with me: “I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time… I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I should like to give myself and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness—leisure to read, study, make experiments and converse at large on such points as may produce something of common benefit to mankind—uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.”
What struck me was Franklin’s desire to become “master of my own time.” He wasn’t looking for freedom so he could stop being productive. He wanted freedom so he could devote more of his time to reading, studying, experimenting, thinking, and pursuing ideas that might “produce something of common benefit to mankind.”
Then I read Ron Chernow’s Titan, his biography of John D. Rockefeller, and encountered essentially the same idea.
As Standard Oil grew, Rockefeller deliberately tried to extricate himself from the administrative details of the company. To do that, he had to delegate authority and develop capable people around him. One of the principles within Standard Oil was essentially this: train your subordinate to do your job.
For Rockefeller, this eventually became a necessity. At one point, he was described as being close to a breakdown because he was trying to do “the work of several men with the strength of one.”
So Rockefeller built a strong management team and increasingly freed himself from the daily operation of the company. Later he said, “I felt that at 50 it was due me to have freedom from absorption in active business affairs and to devote myself to a variety of interests other than money making, which had claimed a portion of my time since the beginning of my business career.”
And then, most recently, I started reading Franklin’s Autobiography.
Suddenly, the quote I had encountered in Slow Productivity had a larger context. By 1748, Franklin had built a successful printing business. But instead of spending the rest of his life consumed with running the printing office, he entered into an 18-year partnership with David Hall, a trusted employee who had worked with him for several years. Hall took responsibility for the operation of the business while Franklin continued to benefit financially from it.
Franklin described what Hall did for him in one simple sentence: “He took off my hands all care of the printing-office.”
Now I understood how Franklin could become “master of my own time.” He had developed someone else who could carry responsibilities that had previously required him.
And that brings together something I’ve now encountered in three different books. Delegation doesn’t just take work off your plate. It creates capacity for higher-level work.
That’s an important distinction, especially for lead pastors, department heads, and others who lead organizations. The goal isn’t simply to work less. The goal is to free ourselves from responsibilities that others can be developed to carry so that we have greater capacity for responsibilities that require our particular leadership.
There will always be what Franklin called the “little cares and fatigues of business.” They matter. Someone has to handle them. But if they consume the leader’s entire week, there is little room left to think beyond what already exists.
Leaders need time to think. We need time to step back, read, study, dream, pray, wrestle with problems, develop people, and think about where the organization is going instead of simply keeping it going. We need margin to notice opportunities, imagine possibilities, and pursue new initiatives that could produce tremendous benefit to the work we’re leading.
For a lead pastor, that might mean having greater capacity to think about the future of the church, develop leaders, strengthen culture, improve preaching, work on vision, or pursue new kingdom initiatives. For a department head, it might mean finally having time to improve the department instead of spending all of your time operating it.
This kind of work rarely screams for our attention the way daily responsibilities do. But over time, it may prove far more consequential.
Franklin wanted freedom from the “little cares and fatigues of business” so he could pursue work that might benefit mankind. Rockefeller trained others to carry responsibilities so he could get above the endless administrative details of Standard Oil. Their examples remind me that one of the great benefits of developing capable people and giving away responsibility is that it creates room to think, dream, and work on the things that could make the greatest difference tomorrow.
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