Delegation — A Major Key to Success

Transcript

Transcript of the recorded lesson. Recorded 2023, reviewed 2026.

In this video I want to talk about freeing up your time by delegating. One thing that has helped free up my time and focus on important business priorities is delegation. My eyes were open up to the possibilities when we started using Upwork in 2018. I've always delegated to other team members but Upwork took it to another level. There were many day to day tasks that I was doing just because that is what I always did. I started looking myself in the mirror and asking if these were tasks that I specifically needed to do. If the answer was no, then I worked on delegating it. The fastest and easiest way to delegate tasks on Upwork and to other team members for that

matter is with screen recordings. I explained and demonstrated the task and then I sent it over. If for some reason they didn't do it correctly or they needed some feedback, I would do additional screen recordings until they had that task mastered. Even if we delegate a task to multiple people like photo editing, I found that training one individual and having that person train additional people up has helped. Also in having the screen recordings, those new hires can refer back to the ones that we've already created instead of starting over from scratch. At this point I spend most of my time focused on important but not urgent tasks like business

growth and team member development. I don't spend much time on the day to day operation other than giving leaders feedback and following up with initiatives that we're working on. I try to spend as much time as possible in the important but not urgent quadrant of the business. This is something that I learned years ago from the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Different activities will fall under different quadrants. These four quadrants are important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, and not important and not urgent. There are times where I have to deal with important and urgent tasks, but I try to keep

those to a minimum. As I spend more time on the important but not urgent tasks, I do seem to deal with less urgent tasks. At the end of the day you need to look at what your time is worth and look at the activities that you're spending your time on and ask yourself is this a task that somebody else should be doing? A lot of times that answer is going to be yes. It may take more time initially to train somebody up versus doing the task yourself, but as you spend time delegating it will save you a lot of time in the long run and allow you to focus

on other business priorities. I attribute delegation as one of the primary keys to our business success here at Lister Pros. If I didn't delegate it would be hard to run the organization that we have today. These are my thoughts on how you can free up your time with delegation. If you have any additional questions feel free to reach out. We'll see you guys on the next one.