Are You Doing Too Much? 4 Tasks to Delegate

When you’re running a business, whether a large organization or a one-person operation, the line between “just get it done” and doing too much can get blurry very quickly. You try to wear every hat, answer every email, and chase every payment. And as hard as you work, you still find yourself wondering if you’ve made any progress. You’d check, but you’ve got a to-do list that seems to be doubling every time you look at it.

The truth is that you don’t have to do it all, and what’s more, you almost certainly shouldn’t try to. Delegating isn’t just for people with teams, and it’s not even really for people who just want to take a break. It’s for people who want to have the time to devote to what they’re really good at, and who want what they do to actually move the needle. Below, we look at four tasks you can delegate - even as a solopreneur - so you can focus on your areas of strength.

In This Article:

What to Delegate to Get Back More Time

Here are a few things you can hand over to someone else, allowing you to spend more time on the things you love most about running your business.

Creativity-Crushing Admin

You know the kind of thing: wrestling with your inbox, rescheduling meetings, updating spreadsheets. It’s all necessary, even important, but is it urgent? You’d be surprised, and it represents time you can have back.

Finding a virtual assistant doesn’t need to be a big leap. You can start by hiring someone for 5-10 hours a month, and assign tasks such as formatting blog posts or uploading images to your website. In addition, by deciding to batch admin work for handover, you are forced to think about what actually needs to be done and prioritize tasks realistically.

Time-Sapping Bookkeeping

Money is important in a business, obviously. You certainly need to retain oversight of it, but the nuts and bolts of it are guaranteed to deliver a laser beam of stress into the core of your mind on a regular basis. Once you’ve spent more than an evening combing through receipts trying to figure out what that one $17.45 transaction was for, it’s time to accept that you need to outsource.

There are some great freelance bookkeepers out there who charge reasonable rates and will allow you to take back control of your brain. There are also accounting apps that allow you to reach out to a human when things become confusing. Automation also helps with getting paid; instead of manually requesting payments, consider setting up recurring billing and card payments with support from a merchant services provider who can handle the setup. This is how you start to reclaim your time.

Brain-Zapping Design

We’ve all spent hours fiddling with templates, changing fonts, frowning at color wheels, and asking other people, “Does this look good?” (and hearing the response, “Yes, it looked good two hours ago when you first showed me”). And the truth is, you’re too close to it to make an objective decision, which leads to a vortex of tweaking.

Unless you’re a designer by trade, this is a clear case of something you can and should delegate. It’s what sites like Fiverr and Upwork were created for, and people will take your content and make it look polished in no time. Even a single $40 spend can make your brand look more professional and lift you out of formatting hell.

Tedious Tech Tasks

Tech is supposed to be intuitive. Most of us probably consider ourselves somewhat tech-savvy as well. But - and it isn’t just you - in recent times, tech has become a lot more time-consuming than it should be, needs to be, and used to be. It has a lot to do with proprietary systems and backwards compatibility, among other things, but you aren’t imagining things if you think that this stuff has gotten harder. You aren’t getting old; it's really more of a problem than it needs to be.

Whether you’re trying to install a plugin (or just make it do what you want it to), make an Excel sheet join up to an email service, or have Slack send you auto-updates, there are freelancers who have made it their work to wrangle tech and coding jobs. They’ll do it quickly and save you hours, allowing you to zone in on your areas of efficiency.

Bottom Line

The pages of business magazines are littered with articles about the polymaths who, at the age of 15, were running their own business using just their cell phone and a directory that was ten years out of date. These are inspiring stories, and almost all of them are lies - delegation is increasingly essential in business, and you’re not less of an entrepreneur for needing to do it. 

So if tasks are taking up your time, it’s time to take it back and hand over some of the work; it will make all the difference. And if you need help creating great content for your blog or website, let’s talk. Book a free discovery call to see how People First Content can remove your content writing hat.