You Could Do It Yourself, But Should You? What to Delegate in Your Business

One of the things I hear quite often from business owners is that they’re not organised enough to start handing things over, so they may as well do it themselves.

It’s true, they could spend an afternoon learning how to set up email automations, or work out why something isn't behaving properly on their website. They probably could also create a presentation, or figure out how to get a webinar up and running.

There are tutorials for almost everything now, and if you're resourceful enough to have built a business, you're probably capable of figuring most of it out eventually.

But I'd challenge you to think about this one a little differently…

Just because you could do it yourself, does that mean it's the best use of your time?

When we think about delegation, we tend to think about time. If you give a task to someone else, it will save you X hours, but often that’s not factoring in all the time it takes to learn how to do something, find and store the passwords, and troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Not to mention the mental energy it takes to learn a new skill or check all the moving parts are coming together. That precious energy could have gone towards work for a client or finding a new client. It could have gone towards doing something you actually enjoy doing, or simply having a bit more left for yourself at the end of the day.

There's another cost that's harder to measure: mental load.

We’ve all got a job or two on our list that gets moved from one week's to-do list to the next, which we’ve been moving for about three months (or maybe more).

Often it’s the smaller, annoying jobs that wouldn't actually take that long, but you just don’t have the energy to look at them.

Every time you see it, you have to think about it again. Those seconds or minutes add up, and so does the energy we lose feeling guilty about still not having got round to it.

This is something I've become much more aware of in my own business. Two tasks can both take an hour and have completely different effects on me.

One might leave me energised and full of ideas, the other might leave me wondering why on earth it's only 11am. 😂

We all have things we're naturally drawn towards and things we find disproportionately draining.

If something takes you three hours because you don't really understand the technology, you don't enjoy doing it and you need to psych yourself up every time it comes around, the cost isn't just those three hours, it's your energy as well.

There's also an opportunity cost to doing everything yourself. If you're spending an afternoon trying to make an email automation work, what aren't you doing instead?

Maybe doing some client work or developing an idea that's been sitting in your head for months. Or maybe it's finishing work early and going for a walk, meeting a friend, dancing, travelling or doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with your business.

Recently I’ve been realising how much those last things matter. I’ve been feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of time I’m spending on my business when I could be doing something for my wellbeing.

The point of making your business more efficient doesn't always have to be so you can fit more work in… I want more space for myself.

Pay attention to the things that are creating friction or dissatisfaction, or the jobs that keep getting postponed. The frustrating things that you forget how to do and waste time having to relearn every time you come back to them.

The digital jobs where you know roughly what you want, but don't particularly want to spend your evening figuring out how to make it happen. Maybe its the things that make running your business feel harder than they needs to.

You also don't necessarily need to hand over an entire area of your business. Sometimes all you need is someone to set something up for you and give you a run-through of how to do it.

What would feel like a relief not to have to think about anymore?

And what do you want your business to feel like in the long term?

For me, it's about creating a business that feels manageable, and being able to have plenty of space when I’m done with my work, while still trusting that everything will keep working without me having to constantly think about it.

If reading this has brought a few tasks to mind that you’d quite like to stop thinking about, get in contact.