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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
Mastering Delegation: What Tasks Should You Delegate?
Unlock the secrets to becoming effortlessly productive with me, Annie Veblen-McCarty, as I reveal how delegation can transform your business and personal life. Imagine focusing only on tasks that excite you while offloading the ones that cause you stress—sounds like a dream, right? We'll guide you through identifying which tasks to keep and which to delegate by honing in on your natural strengths and recognizing what brings you joy. This episode is packed with strategies to continually reassess your responsibilities, ensuring they align with your current life season and personal superpowers.
Dive into effective delegation strategies that set clear expectations and create a foolproof system. From specifying how you want your laundry folded to outlining the exact products to use for cleaning, these tips will help you maintain authenticity and quality without micromanaging. Systematizing the delegation process not only optimizes your time and energy but also contributes significantly to scaling your business. We encourage you to share your experiences and successes with these techniques in the comments, making your journey not only productive but also enjoyable.
Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Welcome to today's episode of Effortlessly Productive. Today, we are going to be diving into one of the elements of the effortlessly productive framework, specifically delegation. So this is one of the aspects of the framework that I get asked about all the time. I get so many questions about it from people who are very experienced entrepreneurs and business owners in terms of managing employees or VAs, negotiating salary, things like all kinds of questions about that, dealing with interpersonal conflicts between employees or VAs. So we are going to start today, though kind of back at the very beginning of this topic, because I get asked all the time what should I be delegating in my business? How do I know what I should be giving to an employee or a VA or a subcontractor to do for me? So we're going to dive into that question, and this is where there is not a one size fits all question. There are some guidelines that I can give you for sure. So the first thing that I want you to do you have a little bit of homework here from me on this episode right off the bat go through your entire day and, yes, look at your business activities, but I also want you looking at your personal activities as well, and I want you to really tune in and pay attention to number one what things are super easy for you to do?
Speaker 1:What do you get excited about? What do you love doing? What do you feel like you could just spend if that was your only thing for the day? That you would be super happy and excited for your day If you could spend that entire day doing it. What do you get done faster than any other person on the face of the earth. These are going to start to give us indicators of the things that are our superpowers, the activities that we do in our day. They come very naturally and easily to us, that tap into our strengths, and this is also going to give us clues into what lights us up, what do we enjoy doing? Because, at the end of the day, we want to enjoy our work and our business.
Speaker 1:Not every single element of our entire day is going to be enjoyable. You are going to have to do things for your business that you do not love, so this is not like a free pass that you are never doing anything that you hate again. However, as we start to grow as a business owner and are able to hire more people to do things for us and I will little side note, I am doing another episode on whether you should be hiring subcontractors or hiring employees, because that's a really big difference. But and side note, and we're diving back into our discussion for today so paying attention to those things that light you up and that you do like nobody else does, that's a really big clue of the things that you maybe want to hold on to and there's no right and wrong answer. So design and building tech things is one of my strong suits. However, I have had seasons in my life where I have hired other people to build websites for me and build funnels for me and do graphics for me, because I was at a point where my time was constrained, that I needed to be focusing on other things and putting my time and energy into other things. So these questions are really important to go through as your business grows, as you grow, as you enter different seasons. If you have kids and you are home with your kids during the summer, the answers to these questions might be very different than when they're in school full time or when your kids have left home and are in college. So it's really important to consistently and continually do check-ins with yourself.
Speaker 1:Now that we have identified the things that you definitely want to hold on to. If you have things in the category that you do them better than anybody else, faster than anybody else and you love doing them, those are probably activities that for the most part as long as you are not in a season where you are really having to be very conscientious about your time and energy you probably want to hold on to those conscientious about your time and energy. You probably want to hold on to those. I want you now to start to pay attention to tasks that cause dread, that you wake up in the morning worrying about or on your mind and you don't want to do them. Things that you put off doing, even though they are super important to get done in your business, things that could be making income those are huge. What are the activities that earn the most income for your business? And if they are things that you dread doing or also we can have things that we do not do very well there are definitely things that are not my strong suit, that I do not do very well. Small talk conversation is not my thing and maybe that has no place in your business, but if that is something in your business to go out there and get to know a lot of people and sometimes the way we do that is through those small talk conversations maybe that's not your strong suit. Maybe that's an area where that's a red flag of how could I delegate this to somebody else? So we are going to be tuning into that as well, and I want you to, yes, focus on business activities.
Speaker 1:However, if you've been listening to my podcast for any length of time, you know that I am a huge proponent of also taking our personal lives into consideration. We are not just doing this for our business activities. We are also doing this for things in our personal life. I realized very early on cleaning my house was not something I enjoyed. On, cleaning my house was not something I enjoyed. Sure, I'm sure I do a decent job of it, but I'm also not the best cleaner. I don't nitpick every single thing. So for me, that was something huge that I could delegate out. Folding laundry and putting it away is another one where I absolutely dread that I will wash and dry all day long. Please do not ask me to fold and put away. So that would be another example of something that you could possibly delegate, that you could possibly hire somebody else to do.
Speaker 1:I also want you to think too so with our business. Yes, most of the time we are paying somebody, we are hiring somebody in one regard or another. However, with our daily personal activities, we can delegate those to family members, to people who are offering help If you have a friend who's constantly offering to help maybe run your kids to sports practice and that's not your favorite thing to do, or you're in a season where things are super crazy, take them up on it you don't have to pay them and think about the time and energy of taking your kid to sports practice. If you could have somebody else do that, how much time and energy would that save you that you could then put into something else. So I am talking through all of this with you because I want your brain to start asking what are all the things in my day not just in my business, but in my life that I could have somebody else do for me? What are the things that I want to hold on to? What are the things I want to get rid of? What are the things that I just do not do? Very well, it's not in my strength zone and, yes, there are some of those things we probably need to learn, but there are some of those things we also do not need to learn and we can just pay somebody else to do it. So start to go through your day probably for a good week or so, because we do different things on different days a lot of the time and start to make a list of the things you want to hold on to for sure and the things that you possibly could delegate or get off your plate in some way.
Speaker 1:Now, with those things that we're getting off our plate, we have two different things that we can do with those. We have two different things that we can do with those. Number one if it is something that a computer can do some kind of technology process that is something we can automate. However, if it is something that requires a human touch, a computer cannot do it, cannot be set up to do it automatically. We then need a person involved, and that is the definition of delegation here. So if somebody has to do it, somebody has to have human touch to do it. That is where delegation comes into play.
Speaker 1:I want you also to start to think about so we now have this list of things that we would like to delegate that does need that human touch, and I want you to think about do you have a good system for doing that? Is that something that you can easily teach to somebody else? I want you to start to pay attention as you do that task. What are all of the ways that you do it? What are all of the lines that you go down, what are the steps you take and start to actually write out a process for it. This might not be your favorite thing. It might not be your wheelhouse.
Speaker 1:However, one of the biggest worries I would say questions that people have, but also a worry associated with it or we could also call this a limiting belief of having somebody else do it, of delegating a task is is it going to be authentic to me? A perfect example is if we have a VA sending messages to clients or prospective clients for us, is that authentic? Because it's not coming from us? And my answer to that is if it is in your words, if you take the time to kind of write out how you would approach the conversation, the answers that you would give to questions, if you are giving that message, if you are writing that and crafting that to begin with, if you are writing your posts or starting with a post example, and handing it off to a VA to kind of mimic your language that is authentic to you. That is literally your words that you are sending out. Just because you are not the one actually pushing that enter button to send those messages does not make it not come from you. So that is my answer to keeping the authenticity. Will somebody else do it the same way that I will? That is another huge worry and fear, and this is why developing that process and coming up with that is so important.
Speaker 1:Rather than just being like go out and find people and send them a message that's not very specific, I want you to start to look at when you are doing that business activity. How are you doing it? Let's go to this example of sending those messages. Where are you finding the people to send messages to? How are you identifying those people? I'm going to say good and bad here. Obviously, no human is like, it's not like one is good and one is bad, like as a person and as a human. But our ideal client. How do you identify if somebody is your ideal client or if somebody is not a person that you would want to work with, because that's really important, right? We don't want to have somebody reaching out and sending messages to a whole bunch of people who are not the type of people that we would work with. So what's your process for figuring that out? And some of this is going to start to be a little bit more judgment, but I want you to really pay attention to the things that you are looking for, even if it is a little bit more subjective, because that's the kind of thing that we can teach somebody else, but we have to be aware of it first before we can start to teach it to them.
Speaker 1:What message do you send in those instances? Are you sending a different message based on certain identifying factors? Are you tweaking the message or changing it up every single time you send it? How are you customizing that message for the people that you are sending it to? And then, on the back end of that, is there a follow-up process? If you get a response, how would you respond to their answer? If you don't get a response, are you following back up with them? Are you just letting them go? Are you keeping track of the people that you're sending these messages to?
Speaker 1:Asking yourself and literally writing down every step of the process is how we start to develop the instruction manual per se for your business, so that we can start to train other people to do it the exact same way that we would. And when we can train somebody to do business the exact same way that we would. All of a sudden, it feels authentic to us because it is us, it is how we would do it. We just are not the ones whose time and energy is being spent to do those tasks. So this also obviously applies to your personal things as well.
Speaker 1:I know for me, specifically with folding laundry, I can get a little bit picky let's say that on like how my sheets are folded. I do not like them like balled up and just shoved in the closet. So there may be instructions with things like that too, where you like things being done a certain way. You like your house cleaned with certain products, whatever that is. Think about like things being done a certain way. You like your house cleaned with certain products, whatever that is. Think about it and be specific, because when we can be specific and we can be aware of it ourselves, it makes it a lot easier to set those expectations for the people that we are hiring to do that for us.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, these worries that it's not going to be done how I do it, it's not going to be authentic to me, it's not going to work the way that I want it to, it's not going to be successful, it's not going to get me the results that I want in my business.
Speaker 1:All of those start to go away because we have now created a system. We have actually systematized the delegation process in a way that, all of a sudden, everything is in alignment with us. So I just wanted to give you a kind of overview of how I teach my clients to start to delegate and the things that I look for, the questions that I ask and how of the time is our time and energy, and if we can compound that, if we can exponentially explode that by automating and delegating things. Think about how huge that's, how we are able to start to scale our business and start to grow in ways that maybe you're limited right now. So I hope this episode was helpful. I cannot wait to hear in the comments Let me know if this has helped in what different ways you are now thinking about delegating in your business, and I cannot wait to hear how your business is able to grow and explode because of these tips. Have a fantastic rest of your day and I will catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.
