Every hour you dedicate to your inbox is an hour you’re pulling away from the work that truly develops your business. Yet, this is a calculation most small business owners won’t ever make until they’ve reached their last straw. Leaders in any industry dedicate 41% of their time to activities that don’t bring any value (Bain & Company), in case that’s true for those who have an entire team to back them up it’s even worse for business owners who wear all the hats and have no one else to rely on.

The solution isn’t a time management strategy or another shiny app, it’s identifying what those key things are that are eating up your time weekly preventing your business from moving forward and eliminating them. The worst offenders are usually:

Start With Your Inbox and Calendar

Email and calendar management are the low-hanging fruit, but it’s low-hanging for a reason. You check email dozens of times a day, people get you to schedule back-and-forths, and every time something pings you lose your focus. None of that most of the time requires your specific judgment.

A VA can go through your inbox and flag what they can handle and what needs your attention, draft out the responses to the basic requests you get, handle all of the logistics of scheduling – send the invites, follow up to ensure they did get confirmed, go ahead and block out some deep work time so people can’t just take whatever spot suits them. Owners who have consistently delegated this report getting 5-10 hours back per week. Not per month, per week. That’s not a rounding error. That’s most of an entire workday that you were spending on something that could have been handled for a $9 hourly cost of delegation.

First – before you delegate anything – run a time audit. Track your hours for three or four days and write down what you are doing. Most owners are shocked when they see what percentage of their week email was.

Hand Off Social Media With A Simple System

Social media makes you feel it should have your unique perspective, but in reality, it doesn’t. After you’ve established brand standards and a content schedule, another person can schedule out the posts, respond to the basic comments, and even compile a weekly analytics report to show you what’s effective.

Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite make the outsource almost painless. You take 30 minutes to review and approve a month’s worth of content, and then your VA loads it all up and runs the day to day operation. You’re still responsible for posting that needs to be in your voice specifically – and for that you’re on the hook. But you no longer need to be on the hook for daily posts (or the time-wasting checking for new comments).

This is usually the point we get asked about how to actually find someone trustworthy to handle this. Services like Virtustant saw the need and filled it by connecting business owners to qualified virtual assistants who are already skilled in running these programs.

Get Bookkeeping and Invoicing Off Your Desk

Hunting down invoices and organizing receipts is not a good way for an owner to be spending their time. Period. It’s also one of the simplest things to offload because the steps are the same each time, and the tools are already there to be able to do so.

A VA can code expenses, create and even send the invoices, and chase the ones who haven’t paid them, all within something like QuickBooks. And miraculously, your cash flow remains healthy because someone is actually monitoring it every day, not every month when you inevitably get around to catching up.

Let Someone Else Triage Customer Service

You can’t be the best person to answer every single query that comes in. Nobody can. And if you have employees, specifically hired to manage customer inquiries, they’ll soon get sick and tired of constantly interrupting you to ask necessary questions.

That’s an unpleasant, inefficient, and counterproductive way to have to operate. A ticketing system handled by a VA can be a game-changer.

Keep Your CRM and Data Clean

Making updates to contact records, logging in new leads, and tidying up your pipeline are all necessary but time-consuming tasks. They often get pushed aside because they don’t feel urgent, that is until you realize a lead has gone cold and it’s because nobody reached out to them.

Outsource the upkeep of your CRM and general data entry so that you can be sure that leads are always being logged and nothing is slipping through the cracks just because you couldn’t find the time to update a field.

Make Delegation Actually Work

Nothing here runs without some form of documentation. If you pass a task along with loose guidance, you’ll get loose results, and then likely determine delegation doesn’t work for you. Delegation didn’t fail you. The prework did.

Draft simple standard operating procedures for each item before transfer. They can be high level. A couple of bullets on the expectation of how you’d like something done will often suffice. Then, use a tool like Asana or Trello to assign the work, and points of check-in, with Slack for the couple of questions that pop up along the way.

It’s about protecting your core business – the actual revenue-generating and company-moving work. Measure that opportunity cost truthfully: what could you close in an hour of focus on strategy or sales versus an hour on bill adjustments. Whether that’s a full-time employee or a VA on a contract arrangement is the second question. The first is not up for debate. Don’t be the doer of these five tasks. Burnout isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a flag that you’re doing the wrong work.