Delegate: A Strategy to Learn How to Manage Your Time

Offloading low-value work can free up more of your time, boosting your productivity.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Time is your most important resource. It’s the one resource that’s non-renewable and it’s the one thing you’re constantly running out.

Because you can’t make more time you have to learn how to work more efficiently in the time you have.

Learning how to manage your work rather than letting it manage you puts you in more control over how your time is spent.

This essay is Part Two of a three-part series on how to streamline your workflow to become more productive.

With more and more advanced technologies coming online, it’s important that you learn how to manage your work. By doing so you can better allocate your time to things that really matter.

This second essay is about delegation. It’s all about how to get low-value work off your plate so you can optimize how you spend your time.

Not all work is created equal. Some work is worth doing, but most work isn’t.

There’s a problem with how we understand work. We think staying busy between the hours of 9am to 5pm is the same as working.

It’s not.

Today’s knowledge workers often have loosely defined job descriptions and ill-defined tasks. As a result, staying busy has become the easiest way to signal to your boss and colleagues that you’re working.

Cal Newport refers to this as “pseudo productivity.” In his latest book, Slow Productivity, Newport defines pseudo productivity as busywork that results in the absence of defined processes and work objectives.

Because of the proliferation of pseudo productive work, it can be hard to distinguish real, value-added work from busywork.

Take email as an example. When I worked with the Department of Defense, I had two computer screens. One always had Outlook open. Even if I was doing something else, part of my brain was constantly scanning my inbox looking for urgent tasks that might have come in.

I thought email was important. I made physical space for email to make up a core part of my physical workday. In reality email provided little value. Managing my inbox wasn’t a transferable skill I could take to the private sector and it made me incredibly unproductive.

Unless you’re in a sales role where you use email to follow up on leads, for most knowledge workers, email is a nuisance. It eats away at your time and attention, providing little if any ROI that benefits you or your company.

Some of the things you do throughout the day are going to be more valuable than others. My ability to carve out focused time to write articles like this is infinitely more valuable than babysitting my inbox, hoping for a new work opportunity to come in.

Cultivating the ability to discern between high-value and low-value work is an incredibly important skill that few people have managed. The ones who have – think Elon Musk and Steve Jobs – have gone on to do incredible things.

As more and more knowledge workers find themselves inundated with work, it’s important to start developing this skill, sooner rather than later.

Distinguish low-value work from high-value work, then delegate it.

No two people are going to have the same definition of high- vs. low-value work because the idea of both is highly subjective. The goal of differentiating the two isn’t to be more productive for the sake of being more productive, it’s to maximize the value of your time.

For some people, value maximization looks like growing a business or working towards a promotion. For others, it might look like spending more quality time with your kids.

For me, high-value work is reading, writing, and cooking. Responding to emails and creating social media content that gets lost in the algorithm may be a necessary part of what I do, but it isn’t high-value work.

This is where delegation comes in. Once you know the type of tasks that are essential or necessary for your line of work but are also low-value, you can begin to strategically eliminate them from your workload.

Before you can do this, though, you need to clearly define what high- and low-value work looks like for you.

For most people, high-value work is the kind of work you get lost in. It’s work where hours can easily pass by or where what you’re doing doesn’t even feel like work at all.

I can open a new Google Doc and type a well-thought out essay in a couple of hours. It’s easy and it’s something I enjoy doing. Deploying the same skill to write emails to pitch article ideas to editors, on the other hand, is not so enjoyable.

Both of those activities – writing my own content and pitching publications – are high-value activities. But one is more draining and thus time consuming than the other.

Delegation can boost your productivity by protecting more of your time and attention to focus on high-value work that you enjoy doing while leveraging your unique set of talents and skills.

Delegate work to an assistant.

There are a lot of reasons why you want to start delegating your work if you haven’t already.

For one, the exercise of categorizing your work between high- and low-value activities helps make you aware of how you’re spending your time. If you’re not consciously aware of what you’re doing when you clock into work in the mornings, how on earth can you ever change anything?

It also puts you in a position to stop doing your work and start managing it.

Have you ever noticed this is what the most successful people do? They’re not Swiss Army knives who can do everything. They know their strengths and they outsource their weaknesses to people who are more competent than they are.

Elon Musk isn’t personally building rockets to send to Mars. He’s simply orchestrating teams of technical experts to accomplish that goal with him.

You need to start looking at your daily workflows the same way. When you know what work you should be doing, you can go all in on that by delegating the rest.

The easiest way to delegate is to hire an assistant.

Tim Ferriss talked about this almost two decades ago in The 4-Hour Workweek. There are people located here in the U.S. as well as in countries like India in the Philippines that work as virtual assistants. Some make calendar appointments and book travel, others manage bookkeeping and social media accounts.

But a virtual assistant isn’t just someone who will do your work for you. By working with them, you’ll have to train them how to do your work and then actively manage them. You’ll develop management skills that you might not have had a chance to develop yet. And as you work with your assistant you’ll have a chance to document your processes and look for areas to be more productive.

Here’s one example. I worked with a virtual assistant to help me manage my inbox. Every week I’d have her go through my email, look for events that I had been invited to, and add them to my calendar.

She noticed some patterns that I hadn’t picked up on. Some events occurred at a regular cadence while others were more one-off events. The ones that were a regular cadence, she added a recurring placeholder to my calendar. I might not know the topic of the next event, but I knew when to expect the next event to take place.

This seems like an obvious solution to an unnecessary problem. Why wouldn’t I use a recurring placeholder to block off my time on my calendar?

But this is something you might not see. We get so caught up in doing things the way that they’ve always been done that it’s difficult to step away from the work we’re doing to look for new ways to work.

Delegate work to an assistant and be part of the training process. Let them ask you questions so you can refine what you’re doing and become more efficient over time.

Then get ready to delegate work to an AI agent.

While those might be some compelling reasons for working with an assistant, that’s not actually the most important reason for doing so.

The AI revolution is here whether you’re ready or not. ChatGPT is still a relatively new tool yet companies like OpenAI plans to launch AI agents some time in 2025. This is going to change everything.

An AI agent isn’t a general intelligence platform like ChatGPT; it’s a dedicated digital assistant. You can train agents to work on very specific tasks. That means you can build yourself a specialized team of experts with a few clicks of your mouse.

As a writer, this allows me to focus on the one thing I’m really good at – writing. I can train an AI agent to play other roles in my writing process: editor, publicist, and fact checker. By doing this, I can spend less time on things I’m mediocre at – like editing – and more time writing thought-provoking articles you want to read.

Unless you already have your processes written out and experience delegating tasks, you’re going to find working with an AI agent to be incredibly difficult. How do you know what tasks to give them and how to train them to complete each task exactly as you want?

This is why learning to delegate now and working with an assistant is so important. An assistant is a human feedback mechanism. They will complete tasks wrong, signaling to you that you need to improve how you delegated things. Over time, you’ll refine this process, becoming a better manager of tasks and team members – digital or human – at the same time.

Right now AI tools will give you an answer even if they have to make it up. You won’t get feedback with ChatGPT. A human, on the other hand, will ask for clarification. They’ll let you know you did a poor job communicating something and ask for additional information.

In the next few years, the ability to work with AI is going to be a key differentiator in the labor market. It’s not just about getting more work done, it’s about adopting new tools quickly to exponentially increase your productivity.

If you can master delegation, you won’t just be more efficient in your own work, you will become highly valuable to the people who haven’t caught up. You can use this efficiency to spend less time working or capitalize on it to increase the value of your time.

You want to put yourself in a position to not only be more productive but to have options. The more options you have the more freedom you’ll grant yourself in the years to come.

How to get started.

Delegation is important. The only way you’re going to know what to delegate and how to do it is to just dive in and start doing it.

To begin, read Cal Newport. He’s written several books about work and productivity including:

• Deep Work

• Digital Minimalism

• A World Without Email

• Slow Productivity

Combined, these books create a framework for understanding the inefficiencies in modern knowledge work. He articulates why less is sometimes more and how drawing boundaries is an essential part of productivity.

Once you become aware of what’s working and what’s not in your own personal workflows, start categorizing your work. Look for work you’re doing that provides value and work that is administrative overhead. Take note of which tasks are easy to do and which tasks feel like a drain on your soul.

Define what your goals are and what’s important to you. If your goal is to earn $X by the end of the year, then prioritize revenue-generating work. If your goal is to spend less time working, prioritize developing systems or finding higher paying gigs that allows you to work less.

After you’ve developed something of a roadmap for yourself, begin delegating. Hire an assistant. You can start with a single task like generating leads, doing design work, or editing a document.

This is a skill that you need to practice repeatedly. You likely won’t get it right on your first go and that’s ok. Use it as a learning opportunity to study yourself and your work processes. Check out the workshop on how to hire an assistant to learn more about some of the best practices you should follow.

Once you’ve started actively managing your workload, document your processes. Just like you might follow a recipe to cook dinner every night, create work “recipes" that you and your assistant can follow with instructions on what to do and how to do them.

With your processes in hand and an assistant to work with, you can begin looking for ways to incorporate AI-powered tools into your workflow. That’s something I’ll cover more deeply in the final essay in this series, automate.

The goal of all of this isn’t to work more for the sake of working more. It’s to redirect your time towards higher value work. This can be professional work activities or it can be personal.

The definition of work is rapidly changing. Finding ways to leverage your time will help you navigate the future of work as it evolves.

Delegation is a strategy that can free up more of your time and mental bandwidth to do just that.