Greeting the day as an overwhelmed entrepreneur has become part of the norm for many first time business owners. The hats we wear are numerous and can present unexpected challenges in our day to day operations. It can be suffocating trying to figure out where to turn or what to do next.
Becoming more productive and being able to free up more time and leveraging your existing time, is one of the most skills that can literally multiply your success. Tor Refsland
You are an executive who worked hard, paid your dues and now you are sitting in the seat of responsibility. With responsibility comes an increased need to manage your time effectively. You cannot spin hours of your time formatting documents, writing business letters, building forms and editing or proof reading the marketing material. Your decision making, client relationships and management of the company’s fiscal responsibilities takes precedence. Hiring someone full time is just not in the books yet.
What can you do? Is there a simple solution to help you achieve more by doing less?
Delegating
The purpose of delegating is to enable you to focus on your core genius, the tasks and projects that ONLY you can do; the revenue generators.
If you are being busy with many of the back end, admin tasks, you not using your expertise to the best of your ability; thereby further impairing your business advancement and opportunities. You’re potentially hindering your own growth which is counterproductive to starting your business. Let go to grow.
Tracking Hours
How much valuable time is used for follow up emails, searching/scheduling social media posts, writing/editing content, travel planning, document reviews, calendar reminders, project management, or presentation prep, just to name a few?
Track your time for the rest of the week, including the project, time on task, distractions, task completion, new additions to your list, items that were dropped to a lower priority or simply forgotten and how you felt at the end. In your review, what tasks clearly represented your core genius? What tasks were a low value?
Infinite list of responsibilities
All of the above are just a few of the basic yet necessary components to your business operations. It can be exhausting and frustrating to manage all of these tasks on your own. Unless you’re a super hero, it’s nearly impossible to be all things, to all people, all of the time.
In his blog post “The Way To Measure Your Productivity As An Entrepreneur”, Dan Martell suggests you:
Create 4 buckets of activities: Admin, Work, Mgmt, Strategy
Measure each with a monetary value: $10, $100, $500, $5000
Focus on moving your way up the value chain (working ON vs. IN)
Measure each activity for what it is, then tally up your time for the day to get your daily value creation score.
The goal of these activities is to nudge you to work ON your business, rather than IN it. Typically, the IN does not generate revenue but keeps you busy. Busy isn’t necessarily productive. Busy can be frittering time. You don’t have time to waste.
When you love what you do, you want to do more of it!
Delegating gives you the flexibility you need to keep the company momentum going. Unburden yourself of these time consuming, the low payoff tasks/projects that keep you from the core of your business.
Stop doing stuff that isn’t valuable. So much of what people do in attempting to be productive involves just trying to fit more low value tasks into the same amount of time. Being productive means accomplishing more with the same or less effort. Mark Shead, Productivity 501
ACTION STEP
What’s on your To Do list right now that you’re ready to outsource? Do it and discover for yourself why so many other entrepreneurs embrace the power of delegating. What do they know that you don’t?