“It’s quicker if I do it myself” — until it isn’t

“It’s quicker if I do it myself.”

I get it.

Sometimes it genuinely is quicker.

By the time you've explained the task, shown someone where everything lives, given them access and answered a couple of questions, you probably could have done it yourself.

So you do.

Then you do it again next week.

And the week after that.

And suddenly the ten-minute job you didn't have time to delegate has taken hours of your time over the last few months.

That’s where “it’s quicker if I do it myself” starts becoming a bit of a trap.

The first time probably will take longer

There’s no point pretending otherwise.

Delegating takes some work at the beginning.

Someone has to understand your business, your systems, how you like things done and what “can you just sort this?” actually means in your world.

There might be questions.

You might have to record a Loom, write something down or spend half an hour talking through a process you've always just done automatically.

That doesn't mean delegating isn't working.

It means you're transferring something that previously only existed in your head.

And once it's out of your head, you don't have to keep carrying it.

Ten minutes isn’t always ten minutes

This is where I think small tasks are deceptive.

Sending a follow-up might take five minutes.

Updating a CRM record might take another five.

Booking a meeting? A few more.

Checking an inbox? Ten minutes.

Individually, none of those sounds worth handing over.

But you're not doing each one once.

You're doing them every day, every week, alongside everything else involved in running the business.

And there’s also the interruption itself.

Stopping what you're doing.

Opening the system.

Finding the information.

Doing the task.

Trying to remember what you were doing before it.

The job might take five minutes. The space it takes up can be much bigger.

I don’t think you should delegate everything

This is important.

There are things in your business that should stay with you.

There are also things you might simply enjoy doing.

The point of outsourcing isn't to hand your entire business to somebody else.

It's to get a little more intentional about where your time goes.

I tend to look for the things that are:

repetitive,

easy to put off,

important but not necessarily dependent on you,

or regularly interrupting more valuable work.

Those are usually good places to start.

And this is why understanding the business matters

Before starting my own business, I spent years working directly with hundreds of small businesses through a government-funded business support programme.

One thing that experience taught me very quickly was that no two businesses work the same way.

Something that makes perfect sense to outsource in one business might make absolutely no sense in another.

That's why I'm much more interested in understanding what's taking your time and why than arriving with a list of things I think you should hand over.

Sometimes the answer is your inbox.

Sometimes it's your CRM.

Sometimes it's follow-ups, research, client onboarding or keeping a project moving.

And sometimes the answer genuinely is:

keep doing that one yourself.

The question I’d ask instead

Rather than:

“Would it be quicker if I just did this myself?”

I'd ask:

“Do I still want to be the person doing this six months from now?”

Because those are two very different questions.

If the answer is no, spending a little longer handing it over today might save you a lot more time later.

Tell me what you’d happily never do again →

This Note started life as a post I shared on LinkedIn.