Back in 2017, I jumped into the online business world, freelancing as a virtual assistant. 

After many conversations with clients and leads, where we discussed what they needed support with, I started to see some common issues that were holding them back from strategically delegating. 

The biggest one? 

Their lack of clarity over WHAT to delegate. 

And without that clarity, they didn’t know who to delegate to.

They looked for virtual assistants because they thought that was what they “should” be doing. They hired social media managers before they had marketing strategies in place. They looked for Online Business Managers because they just wanted someone to “hand off their entire business to.” 

Sound familiar at all? 

You’re in uncharted territory and you’ve never learned how to build and manage a virtual team (and it’s simply not what you set out to do when you started your business).

Seeing this, I came up with a framework to help guide my clients through figuring out exactly what they should delegate - strategically. And now I’m sharing it with you! 

I once used this framework to help a client clear 10 hours of work per WEEK, while outsourcing it to someone who does it in less time than that per MONTH. 

Read that again. 

She opened up 40 hours per month of her own time, and her outsourcing expense in place of that is under $300. 

What would you do with an extra 40 hours per month? How could you move your business forward? How could you improve the day-to-day of your life?

I’m here to show you how to get started (literally show you, step-by-step). 

Let’s start with an easy-to-remember acronym tied to something we all want more of: TIME. 

1) TRACK YOUR TIME 

Do you actually know where your time is being spent each week? 

Most of us don’t. 

While you might think you have a built-in time tracker in your brain that tells you your busy-ness means you’re doing what matters most, that’s just not the case. 

The first critical step in freeing up your time and figuring out what to delegate is to build an awareness of how you’re currently spending that time. You need to understand what you actually do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. 

We may underestimate the time we spend on certain tasks, preventing us from seeing the truth about how much it’s COSTING us to do a particular task. 

It might feel tedious to do this but it is a critical part of the process. 

It’ll open your eyes and serve as the foundation that allows you to easily delegate and get more of your time back!

Your Actionable: Use a time tracker for at least 1 full work week and track everything. Some great free trackers you can use include Clockify and Toggl. You can also use a pen and paper or pop open a spreadsheet!

At the end of the week, read through the task list and add any other tasks you can think of. What else do you commonly do that you didn’t do that particular week? 

2) IDENTIFY YOUR BUCKETS

Once you have your list of most common tasks, it’s time to categorize it into key buckets in your business! 

This step is a little like magic… Once you do it you’ll start to see where you’re spending more time than you want to be, you’ll uncover hidden job roles and job descriptions within these functions, and you’ll be able to easily find your biggest time sucker that’s not tied to generating revenue. 
 

Here are the buckets you likely have in your business. Use these as a jumping off point and adjust the list for your particular situation (hint: you still shouldn’t have more than 5 buckets!):  

• Marketing/Sales
• Service Delivery
• Finances
• Admin/Operations

Your Actionable: Go through all the tasks and write which bucket they fall into. 

Once you’re done, take it a step further and write in how long you spend on each task and the total time of each bucket. 

How is your time distributed? How much time are you spending on revenue-generating activities within marketing and sales? How much time is spent on admin work? 

How does that distribution feel? 

Write the key buckets and the IDEAL percentage of your time you want to be spending on each of them. 

Not what you think you SHOULD be spending, or what you think you HAVE to be spending on them. But the ideal amount of hours you’d like to spend in each area of your business in an ideal world. 

This will become your compass to strategically searching for, finding, training, and empowering the right team members to take over the areas of your business that you should simply NOT be in as the CEO of your business. 

3) MAKE A DECISION 

Now that you have your list of all the tasks, and you’ve broken them down into key buckets, it’s time to make some decisions on what action to take based on that information! 

Your Actionable:
Look at your list and circle the tasks that: 

• You hate doing or are not good at doing
• Take up a lot of time but are in the bucket you want to reduce your time in
• Are not directly related to increasing your revenue

Now consider: of those tasks, what’s the ONE task that if you took it off your plate would make the biggest difference to how you feel and what you’re able to accomplish over the course of one week? 

This is the first task that you should delegate to someone. 

Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. This is a process. In fact, it’s a process that never ends. You’ll be evolving your business and new tasks will come (and others will be eliminated). 

If it feels daunting, just keep refocusing on the fact that you’re taking it one step at a time and that you’re strategically removing tasks from your to-do list, which will allow you more time to grow the business, which will allow you to hire & delegate more.