Tag: Time Management

It’s 9pm. The client work is finished, the emails have been answered, and technically your working day should be over.

Except there’s still an invoice to chase. A spreadsheet that needs updating. Tomorrow’s appointments to confirm. Some research you promised yourself you’d do. And that bit of paperwork that has been sitting on your list since Monday.

None of it is particularly difficult. You can do it yourself.

But should you?

Because there’s a cost to doing your own admin that doesn’t necessarily appear anywhere in your accounts – your time.

Running a business means wearing a lot of hats

If running your own business sometimes feels as though you’ve accidentally taken on six different jobs, you’re certainly not alone.

Research commissioned by AXA in 2024, surveying 1,000 UK small-business owners, found that 84% felt they had to be a “Jack of all trades”. Almost three quarters (73%) said they were taking on more roles than they had anticipated, while 61% said that simply not having enough time to get everything done was one of the main reasons they felt that way.

And there’s a good reason so many business owners end up doing everything themselves. At the start of 2025, the UK had an estimated 5.7 million private-sector businesses. Around 4.27 million had no employees other than their owner or owners.

In other words, for a huge number of UK businesses, there isn’t an accounts department, an admin team or somebody sitting nearby who can pick up the jobs that still need doing. The business owner is the business — and all too often, they become the admin department too.

Where does all that time actually go? Admin doesn’t take five minutes

Admin has a habit of disguising itself as a collection of “quick jobs”.

Send an invoice. Update a spreadsheet. Reply to an enquiry. Chase a payment. Find that document. Compare those suppliers. Book that meeting. Update the CRM.

Individually, many of them really might only take a few minutes. The problem is what happens when you add them together and when every small task interrupts the work that actually generates revenue.

Sage says the average small business loses 24 working days a year to financial administration alone. That’s nearly five working weeks spent on just one part of the admin involved in running a business.

And getting paid can create another drain on time. Research commissioned by the Department for Business and Trade found that 22% of businesses surveyed used staff time to chase late payments. Among businesses affected by late payment, an average of 86 hours a year was spent chasing money they were owed.

Put it another way, that 86 hours is the equivalent of more than ten eight-hour working days spent chasing payments for work that has already been done rather than on the next client, the next project or actually growing the business.

Your time still has a cost – even when nobody invoices you for it!

This is where doing everything yourself can become deceptively expensive.

If you spend three hours sorting paperwork, chasing invoices or researching something for the business, you haven’t physically paid somebody for those three hours. So on paper, doing it yourself can look like the cheaper option.

But those three hours still came from somewhere.

They might have come from time you could have spent on client work. From following up a new enquiry. From developing a new service. From marketing the business. Or, just as importantly, from an evening or weekend that was supposed to belong to you.

That’s the bit that’s easy to miss when we talk about the “cost” of admin. Saving the fee doesn’t necessarily mean the task was free.

Imagine your time is worth £50 an hour when you’re doing the work only you can do. If you spend four hours on admin instead, that’s £200 worth of your time absorbed by tasks that may not actually require you.

That doesn’t automatically mean every admin task should be outsourced. Sometimes doing it yourself genuinely is the most sensible option.

The useful question is simply: is this the best use of my time?

Try the maths on your own business

The numbers will look different for every business.

Your hourly value might be £30, £50, £100 or considerably more. You might lose two hours a week to admin, or realise that once you include emails, invoicing, research, diary management, paperwork and all those little “I’ll just quickly…” jobs, it’s far more.

So rather than telling you what your time is worth, it makes more sense to work it out for yourself.

How many hours are you spending on tasks that don’t actually need to be done by you?

And what could those hours be worth if you put them back into your business, or simply took them back for yourself?

The cost isn’t only the hours – it’s also the interruptions

There’s another problem with all those “quick” admin jobs: they rarely wait politely until you’ve finished everything else.

An email comes in while you’re working on a proposal. You stop to reply. A payment needs chasing while you’re preparing for a client call. You deal with it quickly. Then you remember the appointment you meant to book, the document you need to find and the supplier you wanted to research.

None of those tasks necessarily takes very long.

But every time your attention moves from one type of work to another, there can be a cost to getting your concentration back.

Researchers often describe this as task switching or switching costs. Rather than our brains seamlessly doing several things at once, moving between tasks can make us slower and more prone to mistakes, particularly when the work requires concentration.

So the real question isn’t always simply “How long did that admin task take?”

It can also be: “What did it interrupt?”

Experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found measurable “switching-time costs” when people moved between tasks. The researchers found that those time costs increased as the tasks became more complex.

In other words, the interruption itself might be quick, but getting back into what you were doing isn’t necessarily instant.

So, when does delegating actually make sense?

Delegating isn’t about handing over everything you don’t fancy doing.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you’re incapable of doing those things yourself.

Often, the best tasks to delegate are the ones you could do perfectly well, but which don’t particularly need your expertise, your judgement or your time.

A useful place to start is to ask yourself four questions:

Does this task actually need me?
Could somebody else complete it to the same standard with the right information?

Is it taking me away from something more valuable?
That might mean paid client work, business development, strategic thinking or simply time outside work.

Do I keep putting it off?
Tasks that repeatedly migrate from one day’s list to the next are often good candidates for handing over.

Would somebody who does this regularly be quicker than me?
Spending two hours figuring out a system, researching options or formatting something isn’t necessarily economical if somebody experienced could sort it in considerably less time.

If the answer to one or more of those is yes, doing it yourself may no longer be the cheapest option even if it looks free.

What could you actually hand over?

Probably more than you think.

The easiest place to start isn’t necessarily with the biggest job on your list. It’s often the collection of smaller tasks that keep stealing little pieces of your day.

Things like:

Inbox and diary management: organising appointments, scheduling meetings, managing invitations and keeping on top of follow-ups.

Invoices and payment chasing: preparing invoices, keeping records up to date and following up when payments are overdue.

Research: finding suppliers, comparing options, gathering information or doing the legwork before you make a decision.

Documents and spreadsheets: creating, formatting, updating and organising the things your business relies on.

Customer and client administration: responding to routine enquiries, organising information, preparing paperwork and keeping things moving behind the scenes.

The jobs that don’t fit neatly into a box: the one-off problem that needs sorting, the system that needs setting up, or the task that has been sitting on your list because you simply haven’t had time to deal with it.

You don’t necessarily need to employ somebody, build an entire admin department or hand over control of your business.

Sometimes you just need someone you trust to say: “Leave that with me.”

So, how much is doing your own admin actually costing you?

There isn’t one figure that will apply to every business.

For one person, the cost might be a few hours of potentially billable work each week. For somebody else, it might be the enquiries they never quite get around to following up, the business development that keeps being pushed aside, or the evenings spent catching up on jobs that couldn’t fit into the working day.

And sometimes the cost isn’t financial at all.

It’s the headspace taken up by remembering everything. The constant switching between roles. The unfinished jobs sitting in the back of your mind. Or the feeling that although you started a business to do something you’re good at, you somehow spend an enormous amount of time doing everything else.

The answer isn’t necessarily to outsource everything.

It’s to become a little more deliberate about what actually needs you, and what simply needs to get done.

Because being capable of doing something yourself and it being the best use of your time are two very different things.

Virtual Suze provides flexible professional support for businesses that need an extra pair of hands without employing another member of staff. From one-off tasks and ad hoc support to regular monthly help, you can hand over the jobs that are taking up your time, and get back to the work that needs you.