You could do it yourself.
You could research the options. Compare the prices. Make the calls. Organise the paperwork. Chase the supplier. Sort the spreadsheet. Find the present. Book the restaurant. Plan the trip.
Given enough time, most of us could probably do an enormous number of the things sitting on our lists.
And that’s often exactly why we keep doing them.
“It’s fine. I can do it myself.”
Sometimes that’s absolutely true. Sometimes it might even be quicker than explaining the job to somebody else.
But there’s another question that we don’t ask nearly as often:
Just because I could do it myself… should I?
Because being capable of doing something and being the best person to spend your time doing it are not necessarily the same thing.
And that applies just as much to the jobs waiting at home as it does to the ones sitting in your inbox.
The five-minute job that isn’t really five minutes
A lot of the things we keep doing ourselves don’t look particularly demanding.
Reply to that email. Make a quick phone call. Look up three options. Book an appointment. Check a price. Chase something that hasn’t arrived. Add something to the spreadsheet. Send an invoice. Chase a payment.
“It’ll only take five minutes.”
And sometimes the task itself genuinely does.
The problem is that those five minutes rarely exist in isolation.
You stop what you were doing. Find the information you need. Switch your attention to something completely different. Deal with it. Then try to remember where you were before the “quick job” interrupted you.
There’s research behind this. Studies into task switching have repeatedly found that moving between tasks comes with a measurable cost: we tend to take longer and make more errors when we repeatedly switch our attention, particularly when the tasks are more complex or unfamiliar. The American Psychological Association describes these small losses as “switch costs”.
One five-minute interruption might not matter very much.
But five minutes here, ten minutes there, another quick job before lunch and something else you suddenly remember at 4pm?
That’s not just a collection of small tasks. It’s a day that keeps getting broken into pieces.
And perhaps that’s the more useful way to think about delegation.
It isn’t always about finding something you can’t do.
Sometimes it’s about protecting the time and attention you need for the things that really do need you.
Does this actually need me?
One of the easiest traps to fall into is assuming that because something is your responsibility, you have to personally carry out every part of it.
But those aren’t quite the same thing.
You might need to decide which supplier to use, but do you need to be the person who researches six of them first?
You might want to choose the final hotel, but do you need to spend an evening comparing locations, reviews, cancellation policies and room types?
You might need to approve an invoice, but do you need to be the person who noticed it was overdue, found the original email and chased it?
And at home, you might absolutely want to choose the birthday present, but perhaps you don’t need to research it, find where it’s in stock, order it, arrange delivery and remember to sort the card as well.
Delegation doesn’t necessarily mean handing over the decision.
Often, it means handing over everything around the decision so that your time and attention are saved for the bit that genuinely needs you.
There’s an interesting parallel here with something researchers call cognitive offloading, using something outside our own minds to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. We already do this constantly: we put appointments into calendars, set reminders, make lists and use satnav rather than trying to hold everything in our heads. Researchers at UCL and the University of Waterloo have studied how people use these kinds of external tools to reduce demands on memory and attention.
Delegating to another person isn’t the same thing as setting a reminder, of course. But the underlying idea is useful:
Not everything that needs to be remembered, organised or completed needs to be held entirely by you.
And that leads to a much better question than “Could I do this myself?”
“Which part of this actually needs me?”
That question can change the list considerably.
A simple test for the things on your list
Next time you look at something on your list, instead of automatically thinking “I’ll do that later”, try putting it into one of four categories.
KEEP IT
Does this genuinely need your judgement, expertise, authority or personal involvement?
Some things really do need you. The important client conversation. The final business decision. Choosing something deeply personal. Spending time with somebody you care about.
Keep those.
DELEGATE IT
Does it need doing properly, but not necessarily by you?
Research. Comparisons. Chasing. Booking. Organising. Formatting. Finding information. Making arrangements. Updating records. Sorting paperwork.
You can still make the final decision without doing all the work required to get there.
AUTOMATE IT
Is this something technology could reliably take care of?
Reminders, recurring payments, appointment confirmations, routine emails, calendar notifications and repetitive processes can often be set up once rather than remembered over and over again.
Automation won’t work for everything, and sometimes a human being is considerably more useful than another app, but there are plenty of jobs we simply don’t need to keep doing manually.
DITCH IT
And then there are the things that perhaps don’t need doing at all.
The task that’s been copied from one list to another for six months. The report nobody actually reads. The routine you’ve continued because you’ve always done it that way.
Sometimes the most efficient way to deal with a job is simply to decide that it doesn’t need doing anymore.
Keep it. Delegate it. Automate it. Ditch it.
The aim isn’t to hand over your entire life or business.
It’s to make sure the things taking up your time have actually earned their place there.
But it’s quicker if I just do it myself
Sometimes, it is!
By the time you’ve explained what needs doing, answered a couple of questions and shown somebody where to find everything, you might genuinely have been able to finish the job yourself.
The first time.
But if it’s a task that comes up again next week, next month or every time a new client arrives, doing it yourself because it feels quicker can become a rather expensive shortcut.
The same applies at home.
Perhaps it takes ten minutes to explain exactly what you’re looking for in a holiday, what sort of restaurant you like or which birthday presents would be completely wrong. But once somebody understands your preferences, they can do the hours of searching, comparing, checking and organising around them.
Good delegation isn’t simply throwing a task at somebody and hoping for the best.
It’s giving them enough information to understand the outcome you want, agreeing where you still want to make the decisions, and allowing them to take responsibility for the work in between.
And yes, that can mean giving up a little control.
Research into delegation in businesses has identified exactly that trade-off: handing over decisions or tasks can free senior people’s time and attention for more important work, but it also requires them to relinquish some direct control. More recent research into entrepreneurs has similarly linked delegation with spending more time on strategic business activity.
That doesn’t mean everything should be delegated.
It means “I can do it faster myself” isn’t always the same as “doing it myself is the best long-term choice.”
Because if you are permanently the only person who knows how to do everything, remembers everything and sorts everything…
You haven’t really saved yourself time. You’ve made yourself the system.
What would you rather be doing?
There’s another way to decide whether something deserves your time.
Ask yourself what you’re not doing while you’re doing it.
If you run a business, an hour spent formatting documents, researching suppliers or sorting your inbox is an hour you’re not spending with clients, developing an idea, building relationships or working on where the business goes next.
At home, the calculation might be completely different.
An evening spent comparing insurance renewals, researching a family holiday or trying to find a birthday present is also an evening you could have spent having dinner with your family, seeing a friend, watching something ridiculous on Netflix or simply doing absolutely nothing.
And doing nothing is allowed to count.
Not every hour you save needs to become another productive hour.
Sometimes the value of handing something over is that you can use that time to earn more or grow something.
Sometimes it’s that you can give your attention to something more important.
And sometimes it’s simply that you get your evening back.
That’s why the question isn’t only:
“How long will this take me?”
It’s also:
“What could I be doing instead?”
Because once you start looking at your list that way, “I could do it myself” becomes a much less convincing reason for doing everything yourself.
Delegation doesn’t have to be a big commitment
Perhaps one of the reasons we hesitate to hand things over is because delegation sounds rather grand.
It can conjure up visions of hiring employees, building teams, signing long contracts or having enough work to keep somebody busy every week.
But it doesn’t have to look like that.
Sometimes delegation is simply:
“Can you sort this for me?”
It might be one piece of research you don’t have time to do. A spreadsheet that needs sorting out. A restaurant that needs finding and booking. A pile of paperwork you’ve been avoiding. A present that needs sourcing. A supplier that needs chasing. A trip that needs organising.
It could be a couple of hours of support during a particularly busy week, or regular help with the things that keep landing back on your list.
You don’t have to hand over everything.
You don’t even have to hand over the whole task.
You can simply hand over the bit that doesn’t need you.
And perhaps that’s the easiest place to start.
So, should you do it yourself?
Maybe.
There will always be things that make sense to do yourself. Things you enjoy, things that need your expertise, things that are personal to you and things where being directly involved genuinely matters.
But “I could do it myself” isn’t necessarily a reason to do it yourself.
The better question is whether that particular job deserves your time, your attention and your headspace.
If it does, keep it.
If it doesn’t, perhaps it can be delegated, automated or simply taken off the list altogether.
Because being capable of doing everything yourself doesn’t mean you have to prove it by actually doing everything yourself.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do with a task is hand it to somebody else and say:
“Can you sort this for me?”
And then get on with whatever you’d rather be doing instead.
WHAT DOESN’T NEED YOU?
Take another look at your list. If there’s something you’d happily hand over, tell me what needs sorting.