Most founders who bring in an assistant start by delegating whatever is annoying them that week. It works for a fortnight, then stalls, because there was never a real picture of where the time was going.
There is a better method, and it takes two weeks of light effort.
Week one: log everything
For five working days, keep a running list of every task you do, with rough duration. Not a detailed time sheet — just a note in a document each time you switch activity. It will be tedious and it will be revealing.
At the end of the week, sort every entry into four buckets: work only you can do, work someone else could do with training, work someone else could do immediately, and work that should not be happening at all.
Week two: attack the last two buckets
The fourth bucket is free money. Reports nobody reads, meetings without decisions, approval steps that never change an outcome. Delete them first; there is no point delegating waste.
The third bucket is what you hand over immediately. In our experience it is almost always some combination of the following.
- Inbox triage — sorting, flagging, drafting standard replies, escalating what needs you.
- Calendar management, scheduling and rescheduling across time zones.
- Quote and invoice preparation, plus chasing overdue payments.
- Data entry, CRM hygiene and keeping records where they belong.
- Research: suppliers, prospects, competitors, pricing.
- Uploading content, scheduling posts, updating website pages.
- First-line responses to enquiries using an agreed script.
- Report assembly — pulling numbers into the same template every month.
Write it down as you hand it over
The single highest-return habit is recording the process while you explain it the first time. A short screen recording plus a checklist is enough. Do this and the knowledge becomes an asset your business owns rather than something living in one person's memory.
It also makes the second and third delegations dramatically faster, because you are handing over a documented process rather than starting from scratch.
Delegate the process, not just the task. Otherwise you have bought yourself a helper instead of capacity.
Expand deliberately
After a month, revisit the second bucket — work someone could do with training. This is where the real leverage is, and it is where most engagements stop short. Move one item across at a time, document it, confirm it is running reliably, then move the next.
Done properly, the compounding is significant. Founders who work through this method typically recover somewhere between eight and fifteen hours a week within a quarter, and those hours go back into work that actually grows the business.
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We do this work every day for businesses in Australia and worldwide.