How Delegating Can Help You Work On Your Passion

There are only so many hours in a day. Between working, keeping up with your health, chores, and other tasks, it’s hard to find time to sit down and be able to write songs. For business owners, this is exemplified even more; every part of the business is on you if you’re the only employee! You’ll have to do the marketing, preparation, and the work all by yourself. If you’re feeling a little stressed and can afford it, it’s time to delegate some work!

Photo by XPS on Unsplash

What Can I Delegate?

You can delegate things as simple as house cleaning, yard work, meal preparation, etc to free up your time, they don't have to be exclusively work-related. Mind you, you’ll need to be able to afford the help; usually this means you’ll have to be working your job while the helper does what you need. If you aren’t making money from writing songs/doing what you want, this might not be possible yet unless you have another stream of income. The whole goal is to free up time from doing necessities to put toward what you’d like to do.

If you do make money from your side gig, great! You can work a little while longer to afford the help; you’re trading time working not making money, for time working making money.

Delegating part of your work is a little more tough. Many people think they can get the job done better themselves, which may be true, but it just isn’t possible to do “all of the things”. If you’re working on client work/gigging the whole time, you won’t have time to work on marketing and getting more gigs. If you’re doing all the marketing, you aren’t making money because you aren’t actually doing the thing bringing in the income!

If you decide to gig to bring in income though, you have the option to reinvest that money into hiring someone to help you with marketing. You’re trading money for time. This way, the marketing can help you get gigs/income indirectly, and actually doing the work can bring in the income.

When Can I Delegate?

The hard part is being able to afford the help, so you need to make sure you’re making enough overhead in order to afford it. It doesn’t have to be super expensive/a lot of work though! It can be as simple as hiring someone to take photos at a gig to help you get content for social media, or simply brainstorming what to post on social media. Either of those aren’t a full time or much of a part time thing, but they can help free up your time when you need it.

Delegating shouldn’t be your first option to free up time though; you should try eliminating what doesn’t matter, batching, and automating what you can first before heading down this route, which will be discussed in later articles. After you’ve done everything you can to free up time by yourself, then you can start looking at delegating some work.

Personally I think until you’re working 12 hour days 5-6 times a week, you should do as much as you can. Once you’re actually limited by the amount of time in a day/week, it’s smart to start handing off some help. I think the difference here is wanting to do the work, and actually being limited in what you can get done!

Who Should I Delegate To?

It really depends on the task; but you’ll usually need someone competent enough to get things done, on time, and be self-driven to do what needs to be done without it necessarily being said. If you can find friends with some free time and want to earn a little cash, great! It’s definitely better to work with a friend as opposed to a stranger you know little about.

Some people hire VA’s (virtual assistants) as personal assistants to get things done over the internet, like scheduling appointments, scheduling meetings, invoicing, researching a topic and giving a summary on all the highlights, etc. A lot of them can do nearly anything you want that can be done remotely.

I think it’s probably better to get to know someone and act as though you are hiring them to be on your team. Eventually, you may need their help full time if things start growing! This way you can be much more personal when getting involved in what/how they do things.

---

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear what you delegate and how it helps you!

-Michael