Tight schedules, daunting To Do lists, endless commitments, overload of emails, phone calls, appointments and an ever expanding digital world makes it extremely difficult to effectively and efficiently manage our busy lives. We all know how important delegation is in relation to the success of our businesses. It is virtually impossible to execute all aspects of our daily grind, expecting gargantuan growth, innovation and revenue. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on the back end admin tasks in addition to business development, forward expansion, generation of revenue, or creating the sought after customer experience.

“So unless it’s possible for you to get 10x more productive or work 10x harder, it’s physically impossible to grow your business without more people. Your business requires the hours that only more human beings can give you!  Delegation is essential for hyper growth in a business.” Laura Roeder

Have you ever considered keeping track of every task or project that you work on during the week? How many of these represent your core genius or your passion? Do they generate income or are they simply some of the necessary tasks, marketing, social media or administrative duties that are part of your daily business operations?

Seriously, are these the best use of your time? Do you need to be uploading your blog posts, scheduling your e-newsletters, proofing/editing documents, responding to all emails, searching for article content, creating PowerPoints, calling vendors, confirming appointments, or managing all aspects of your social media posts? You know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of the activities that must be managed on a daily basis – all part of marketing, online reputation, visibility, customer engagement, loyalty building and so on. BUT, as vital as they all are, YOU don’t need to be doing them all. These activities are time consuming, sometimes tedious and certainly take you away from your core objectives.

Everybody needs a team to thrive and prosper. “The fact is this: Delegating tasks to others can save you a great deal of time and allow you to focus that time on the highest value-added tasks,” states Dave Lavinsky in Do Less, Achieve More: The Beauty Of Effective Delegation  This excellent article posted on Fast Company clearly reiterates the fact that as an entrepreneur, you should be focusing your time on the tasks that ONLY you can do and outsource the rest. All of the low payoff day to day things are not a valuable use of your time. With only one person wearing multiple hats, there is only so far you are able to evolve.

“If you are the one consulting, you need someone else to handle client expectations, emails and scheduling. It’s always sticky if you are the one who is answering questions, invoicing and dealing with the smaller details. It can not only be disruptive to your work, but it can give the impression that you’re wearing too many hats.” Angela Jia Kim in How a One-Person Show Can Look Bigger to Clients. “You can hire a virtual assistant for just an hour or two a day to check customer-service emails, follow your process of welcoming new clients and issue invoices. If you go this route, set yourself up as if you are already a bigger firm.”

“Delegation doesn’t come naturally to many small-business owners. However, if we want healthy, sustainable business and personal lives, delegation is a critical art to master.” Nellie Akalp, “6 Tips to Master the Art of Delegation.

As mentioned above, spend one week recording every task or project you worked on and the time required to complete it. Along with that, note if it was a direct income generator (IG) or simply a day to day activity (D2D). Tally up the hours for the 2 categories IG or D2D and think about what should have been the best use of your time. What could you have delegated? If you had spent 8 hours on low value projects, imagine what you could have accomplished in that time.

What is your strategy for growth? How will you institute change for 2013?