Delegate or die: the self-employed trap
This is excellent advice, so often you see great capable people buckling from stress and worse because they don't know how to delegate.<p>The way I prefer to do it is to give everyone a piece of the project that they own. I don't want to know how or when they do their part, I just want to know that it gets done, works and that it plays well with what other people on the project are doing.<p>Recently I was in charge of a live webcast from a rocket launch in the middle of the Baltic Sea. A hard problem for several reasons. It involved high-speed Wi-fi over a 40 kilometer distance by having a parabolic antenna on land that tracks its counterpart at sea; using software written in C to control a videomixer in the middle of the ocean from the Internet, getting the right camera angles, mounting cameras, etc.; setting up a live studio on land where technicians could control videofeeds and move the cameras at sea, webcasting to thousands of users, making sure there was a competent speaker, creating filler videos, getting the logistics about everything right and much more. Also, since this is an opensource project there was no money, and I had to find the crew myself.<p>It isn't really that hard, if only you accept a few things.<p>1) You're not the smartest guy. There's someone smarter than you that can do whatever part of the project you have trouble with.<p>2) Let people take ownership of a part of their project and don't tell them what to do. Tell them what the goal is and let them do it however they want.<p>2) When they do awesome stuff make sure you tell them. People are capable of much more than they think it only they're motivated to so so.<p>3) Make sure it's fun.<p>4) Your job as a project manager is to make sure that the awesome stuff people do plays well with the awesome stuff other people do. You're in charge of the interfaces between people.<p>5) Your job as a project manager is to make sure people can do their job well. That means moving obstacles in the form of meetings, budgets, politics, etc.<p>5) Don't take credit for what you didn't do.