If you find yourself thinking, “It would take me just as long to hand it off to someone as it would to do it myself,” then you need to get better at delegating.
Most people think of delegating as a way of getting things off your plate so that you can have more time to focus on the stuff you care about, but this is a gross misunderstanding of what it means to delegate. As any manager or military officer will tell you, when you lead a team of two or more people, delegation is a full time job. More precisely, it is the incredibly important job of ensuring that the person executing the tasks knows exactly what they’re doing and why. Without that knowledge we all run the risk of falling into analysis paralysis, or worse, our project dies for lack of energy.
This misunderstanding is especially prevalent in freelancers who are trying to grow their business. Because delegate only to reduce their own workload, they would rather continue rushing their work instead of taking the necessary time to train someone else, for fear that this would take more time, and that the next person will do it slower. And a year later they’re stuck doing the same stuff, having too much work, and NOT growing their business.
But if you change your role from actuator to delegator, from worker to leader, if you take the time to train people, not only will you save time in the long run, you’ll be able to make bigger projects than ever before.