Every leader, business owner, and creator chooses to play a big game in life. You create a life filled with purpose, and you model what it takes to do and be it all. Your commitment to greatness, finding joy in the journey, and building homes and communities filled with love is a vision that takes a village.
Receiving support is something that the part of ourselves that’s like Encanto’s Luisa (if you haven’t seen it… what are you even doing??) must always work on. We all like to be useful and helpful, and we aren’t afraid to get our hands dirty and work hard to get the job done.
But, there comes a time when what you have built outgrows what you alone can manage. Your mission and vision to be and have it all means you must surrender to knowing you can’t do it all.
Sure, you can muster the strength to hold it together for a time – but when you become so focused on doing all that needs to be done, you lose sight of who you get to be… and what greater purpose you get to serve.
Enter: the art of delegating. I believe that delegating is a courageous act of leadership. It requires clarity of what’s needed, it takes trust and partnership with others, and it means you must learn to let go of control.
Multipassionate people tend to love wearing lots of hats, which is part of what magnetizes you to become an entrepreneur. Every day is designed by you, and the creative in you gets to make up what that looks like.
If you’ve read this far, likely you realize on some level that you need more hands on deck, but the mire and mess of things not going perfectly as intended stalls you from taking that next step.
I encourage you to not only take inspiration from the following 3 perspectives, but turn your ideas into actions that lead to a more aligned life and business.
1. The Home Edit – BUSINESS EDITION
I’ve always been super inspired by home organization shows, like Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up and Clea & Joanna’s The Home Edit on Netflix — and as many dopamine hits as I get from seeing stuff and spaces transform, it’s on a whole ‘nother level when seeing our time transform.
Getting back time and having more space – to create, to explore, to learn, to serve other parts of your souls – is a crucial need for creative leaders.
But… to make more space, we must first make our space messy.
By turning the methods of The Home Edit towards your business, you can have an honest reckoning with your task list and time. Edit, categorize, contain, and maintain your time, and you will undoubtedly see big shifts in the experience of your business and life.
E D I T
This is the phase that we dread and avoid because, just like cleaning out your closet, it means you’ve got to dump everything out, look at each individual piece, and choose if it stays or goes.
The whole reason we avoid this messy part is to maintain some semblance of spaciousness (after all, an enormous pile of clothes on the bed feels pretty intrusive), and ironically it is only by making this big ass mess that we can access more space.
In order to access more space in our time, we need to braindump the mess of tasks that we manage (with varying degrees of success) onto a piece of paper – or if you’re a tech-lover, an Asana or Trello board. Every task – each step required in running your life and business – can go into a master list.
Once you have what feels like a complete and honest list of everything you do in a day/week/month of your time, get out 3 highlighters. Just like the show, we’ll make three “piles” to:
KEEP,
DONATE,
Or THROW AWAY.
For each item on your master task list, highlight:
What tasks you must (or want to) do yourself,
What tasks you can’t (or don’t want to) do yourself, and
What tasks can be let go that aren’t worth the valuable real estate of your time or energy.
C A T E G O R I Z E
Now that you’ve dumped everything out, and edited what can be let go, now it’s time to sort what’s left.
You already have a sense of what tasks are yours and what can be delegated, but now it’s time to go through with a fine-tooth comb and categorize your tasks into buckets.
For some of you, it might be easiest to start with the 3 categories you’ve just sorted the tasks into. Assigning the specific tasks that you know you urgently need support managing will make a world of difference – even if it’s just an hour a week that you free up… that’s an hour that can be leveraged for an income-generating activity, a self-nurturing activity, or a purpose-driven activity.
You might be at a point, however, that you need to hand over whole buckets – not just specific tasks in them. You can breakdown all that’s within the remaining two categories of What tasks you must (or want to) do yourself, and what tasks you can’t (or don’t want to) do yourself, and sort these into smaller buckets – areas of focus in your life and business.
For example, here’s my list for reference:
{ l i f e b u c k e t s }
Home management
Relationship
Self-care
Animal care
(Child care… for my future self)
Family commitments
Friend commitments
Passion projects
{ b u s i n e s s c o m m i t m e n t s }
Lead generation
Relationship nurturing
Content creation
Client management
Service delivery
Money management
Personal / professional development
Creative visionwork
Systems and processes
Branding & design
Giving back
Outreach & visibility
These are just some examples, so write out whatever categories you find in your life and business!
C O N T A I N
Now, it’s time to place all of the tasks you do in a day/week/month in their designated buckets, and then either take hold of what buckets are yours, or decide who is better suited to carry that bucket.
Once you assign it to yourself or someone else in your mind, this is where implementation begins and action must be taken. Reach out to the people who could manage each bucket for you (spouse, friends, nanny, meal-prepper, landscaper, assistant, bookkeeper, etc.) and set up agreements, communicate your expectations, and work with them through until the hand-off is complete (more on this later).
M A I N T A I N
This phase might just feel the most uncomfortable yet – not doing so much!
Since you are accustomed to managing many more buckets than you currently have, likely there is some awkwardness in this newfound space, or in some cases there might be MORE front-loading of training and setting things up before you can fully let go of the bucket. One activity that usually took you 5 minutes a day might take you 15 or 20 minutes to explain, teach, or give feedback for improvement on – which will feel tempting to just take back over and do yourself.
But the key to this stage is maintain your buckets, and allow the buckets you have assigned to others to be maintained by them. Once a bucket is no longer your responsibility, then it is your work to let others take the lead and loosen your control on how things get done.
Done is better than perfect – and delegated is better than done by you!
2. MULTIPLY YOUR TIME
Ok, so I realize that for some, going and completing #1 above will be totally sufficient to step into some new space in your time – but for those who are STILL super resistant to taking those 4 steps, then here’s a lower-gradient place to start.
Watch this TED Talk by Rory Vaden, leadership speaker and co-founder at the Brand Builders Group. By the end of his presentation, you’ll see how the simple act of taking one 5-minute daily task off your plate can multiply your time and growth exponentially.
The essence of his point is this:
This is what a chart of your time looks like when you delegate one 5-minute task:
3. Be a Leader of Leaders
You didn’t think this blog post would be ALL strategy-oriented, did you? (If you did, it’s probably because you’re new here – so WELCOME!)
At the end of the day, the courage to delegate is powerful enough to change your life, no matter how you go about it.
BUT… if I were to offer you one last place to consider in practicing the art of delegating, it is to embrace your next level of leadership.
When you delegate in your life and business, it is important to trust the fleet of support you have assembled around you.
In my experience, when I have hired support that I find capable of following direction, it is a different world entirely from when I have hired support that I believe make capable leaders themselves.
Being a leader to someone who can follow your instructions is certainly necessary – but what took my time and spaciousness to another level was when I started relating to the people I hired as business owners and leaders of their own prerogative.
Whether it’s a VA, a dog sitter, or a maid service, each of those people have identified their zones of genius, created a transactional service, and built a business around delivering that service.
So, by relating to myself as a ‘leader of leaders’ in the context of my business or even life, I empower those around me to fully take responsibility for what they own of my buckets. That’s not to say I won’t partner with them through feedback, acknowledgement, checkins, and goal recalibrating – but I trust them to do their work.
If you are the type of leader who tends to fall into patterns of micromanaging or stepping in immediately when there is a breakdown, then YOU are getting in YOUR OWN way. Their mistakes are theirs to correct – and if they are unable to meet expectations, different support is needed.
Whether you decide to do a full business edit and master your time from top to bottom, just take back 5 minutes of each day, or shift your whole relationship to the people you already delegate to, I encourage you to take at least one actionable thing from this blog to implement into your life and business this week.
It will make a tremendous difference in your life and how you experience leading your business. Time is one of our most precious resources, and anything that gives us more space to create, be present, and to enjoy life is well worth it.
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