Last updated on June 21st, 2023 at 05:00 pm
You just started your startup business. It is like your baby; you want to do everything as you believe nobody would do those things better than you. Right?
Wrong!
At some point, you will hit a point when you cannot handle everything yourself. And if you do, you will become burnout.
Yes, my friend, startup burnout is as real as it gets.
That’s why it is essential to do the tasks that really matter. In a study published in Harvard Business Review, Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen interviewed executives at 39 companies in the United States and Europe. They found that executives spent an average of 41% of their time on discretionary activities that others could handle competently.
A reality check here – aren’t you spending 41% of your time on low-value tasks?
In today’s post, I will share with you seven tasks you must stop doing immediately to boost your productivity.
Without further ado, let’s start unfolding these tasks!
Tasks You Should Start Delegating:
1. Social Media Management
You will be surprised to know that small businesses spend about 6 hours weekly on social media. This is a significant amount of time.
What about you? Are you spending this amount of time on social media?
Social media is a necessary evil. Your business can’t compete with competitors if you are not active on social platforms. But it takes too much of your time.
The best way is,
You should delegate social media management tasks to others. You can hire a social media virtual assistant if you are running short of employees.
A social media virtual assistant can do multiple tasks for you, which include, but are not limited to:
- Creating Facebook page and LinkedIn page for your business
- Growing and engaging your audience on different social media channels
- Keeping an eye on your competitors
- Creating and sharing helpful content on other social media channels
If you want your social media virtual assistant to handle any particular task, you should provide them with instructions.
Related: Five Easy (But Surefire) Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing
2. Email Labelling
As a startup owner, you must have your inbox flooded with emails. Few emails can wait, but few ones need quick replies.
However, you will miss some of them as your inbox is disorganized. Email labelling can help you manage your inbox efficiently.
But it requires time to do email labelling.
Should you spend time daily on email labelling?
The answer is No.
You should always delegate email labelling to others and save time.
Related: How Your Content Marketing Can Benefit from Email Marketing
3. Influencer Marketing
You might be skeptical about delegating influencer marketing to someone working at remote locations. But your skepticism doesn’t hold ground.
These days, you can easily hire a virtual assistant for influencer marketing who can successfully handle:
- Identifying goals for influencer marketing campaigns
- Defining the ideal influencer profile
- Finding potential influencers
- Reaching out to influencers
- Measuring results
- Delegating assigning these tasks to a virtual assistant can save you time.
Related: Don’t Make These Common Influencer Marketing Mistakes to Maximize Success
4. Internet Research
Maybe, it is searching for a new market, gaining competitive knowledge, or any other task; startup owners spend a great deal of time on the internet research.
Do you think you should do it?
Well, I’d say you shouldn’t. You can easily hire a virtual assistant to complete this task.
If you search Upwork, you can get a skilled virtual assistant for $5-10 per hour. A virtual assistant will search the web as per your requirement and send the compiled data in the desired format. This way, you can save around 2-3 hours daily, meaning you will have more time for core business activities.
5. Website Blog Management
So you know you should have a blog on your website as it offers many advantages – blogging helps with SEO efforts, makes you an authority in your business domain, and promotes your business.
But website blog management takes time.
Ritu, my friend, runs a recipe website. Usually, she publishes two blog posts per week. Initially, everything was fine. But after some time, her blog became popular and attracted massive traffic. This took a toll on her productivity. She became entangled with replying comments. One day, I suggested she could delegate website blog management tasks to someone else. She hired a freelancer from Upwork. Her freelancer takes care of everything from blog postings to comments. Now, the only task she does is to write a recipe post and share it on Google drive.
Being a startup owner, you have many other core tasks to manage. So you should never spend time on website blog management.
Related: Proven Blogging Tips That Every Blogger Must Know
6. Keeping Prospects and Customers Updated
It can be launching a new product or any new update pertinent to the existing products, your prospects and customers should be updated.
If you send those eNewsletters, you should immediately resign from this post. Let other people in your organization take care of this task; you should spend your time and energy on the core business activities that are directly related to the growth of your business.
7. Preparing SlideShare/PPT Presentations
Oh, meetings, those big-time killers! Most startup owners spend boatloads of time preparing SlideShare/PPT presentations each month. Sales data, market reports, or SlideShare/PPT presentations are a part of every entrepreneur’s life.
If you spend a lot of time on this, you should stop doing it immediately.
Hiring a virtual assistant is the best way to handle SlideShare/PPT presentations. Doing so will save you both time and energy.
Remember, you owe it yourself to make the most out of your time. Don’t entangle yourself with tasks that you can easily delegate to others. This is a success mantra of many entrepreneurs.
Conclusion
Being a startup owner is not easy. You must make the best use of your time and delegate low-value tasks.
Email labelling & calendar management, social media management, influencer marketing, internet research, website blog management, sending newsletters to prospects and customers, and preparing SlideShare presentations are some tasks you can easily take off your plate.
What about you? What task do you think you can delegate? Do share your thought in the comment section. I’d love to hear about it.
Additional Resources:
I think as a startup owner one should give utmost focus on service/product management and delegate all the operational tasks. One can start with delegating accounting jobs of the business.
Thanks Kamalika De for reading and sharing your thought. And I completely agree with you that startup owners should never do bookkeeping themselves.
Completely agree with you that social media management should be delegated as it takes too much of time. Thank you Sandeep for writing such a useful article.
I’m glad that you liked it Summer!
Yes, certainly some tasks should be delegated to other people to boost the startup business’ productivity. But the people, to whom the startup business owner is giving job responsibilities, should have enough expertise and experience to handle everything. As a startup owner one must choose these people wisely.
Yes, you make a valid point. Thanks for reading and sharing your thought.