Tasks You Should Delegate So You Can Grow Your Business

Imagine this: You woke up after a restful night’s sleep, you’ve had your morning coffee, and you feel motivated to tackle the day. When you want to be productive, what is the first thing you do?

If your first thought was to create a to-do list, you’re not alone. In fact, most people create these lists so that they can physically see what they want to accomplish that day, but also to feel the gratification of checking each task off of their list.

While there is nothing wrong with creating a daily to-do list (in fact, we encourage it), it is important to create a productive list and not just a bunch of mindless tasks to make us feel like we’ve gotten a lot done for the day. And that’s the problem; our mindset is so stuck on the number of things we accomplish in a day that we often forget that the tasks we need to be doing should benefit our business. Productivity has become a numbers game, not a task game.

Well, this is where we tell you that it is time to change that mindset. Productivity isn’t about how many tasks you can accomplish in a day and more about what tasks are propelling you forward. Is your to-do list full of tasks that will help your company or yourself grow? If not, you’re doing it wrong. That’s why in this blog post, we are going to talk about low-value tasks you should delegate to someone else so that you can focus on growing your business.

Should I Delegate This?

Once you’ve decided to start delegating, the next and probably hardest step is to determine what you should delegate. You might instantly know of a few tasks you no longer want to do, but to really feel the power of delegation, you have to hand over more than just a few things. So how do you determine what you should delegate? Ask yourself if your tasks fall into any of these four categories:

Tasks That Don’t Impact Business Growth

You should always keep the big picture in mind when you are deciding on what to delegate. As a business owner or executive, your goal is to grow the business, so your focus should be on tasks with that goal in mind. While everything still needs to get done, it doesn’t have to be done by you. So if you are handling a lot of tasks that take up most of your day and prevent you from working on growth, you should consider delegating them.

Tasks You Hate Doing

It doesn’t matter how much you love what you are doing; there will always be tasks you hate doing. And when you spend a large portion of your day and brainpower handling them, you feel less motivated to work on anything else. These types of tasks may not be as easy to delegate, so if they are confusing or complicated, consider creating easy-to-follow instructions before you ask someone else to take care of them.

Tasks Someone Else Can Do Better

We all have things we aren’t skilled at, so why do we spend a lot of time trying to figure them out? Maybe you aren’t proficient at creating workflows, but your assistant is. That shouldn’t feel like defeat; instead, it should feel like maximizing your assistant. It’s ok to admit there are people that can do things better than you can, and it’s time to start delegating to them.

Tasks You Don’t Have Time For

There are only so many hours in a day, and they can get filled very quickly. And while these types of tasks can fall into the business growth category, these are the tasks you are doing that you may not realize you don’t have to do. These are the tasks you are staying extra late for, such as replying to hundreds of emails or creating a travel itinerary. They are mostly the end of the day tasks that end up keeping you in the office later than you want to be.

Examples of Low-Value Tasks

Even though we have shared the different types of tasks you should be delegating, we know that sitting down and actually thinking about what you want to give up can feel overwhelming. To help you get started with delegating, we wanted to share some examples of the low-value tasks we mentioned above. So if you are new to delegating or could use more free time in your day, consider delegating these tasks and more:

• Office management
• Research and data gathering
• Schedule management
• Replying and organizing emails
• Travel arrangements and itinerary planning
• Data entry
• Project management
• Making appointments and scheduling meetings
• Handling follow-ups
• File management and organization
• Editing and proofreading
• Answering the phone and returning calls
• Backing up files
• Creating presentations and agendas

Who to Delegate To

Delegating tasks to another person isn’t a new concept, but it is one that many people struggle with. But why is that? A lot of times, it comes down to not knowing who they should delegate to. That’s where an assistant steps in. It’s true, hiring an executive assistant or a virtual assistant can have a big impact on your day-to-day. Not only are they trained to handle a lot of the low-value tasks, they also can help you delegate other tasks on your to-do list to qualified members of your team and manage the progress.

If you’re ready to start delegating but don’t have an assistant, it’s time to hire one. Unfortunately, not everyone will make a good assistant, so hiring can be tricky. LifeSquire Connect can take the trick out of hiring and turn it into a treat. Over the last ten years, we have studied and worked with psychologists to find out what type of people make the best assistants, and we want to find them for you. Click here to learn more about our support role recruiting services.