You could do it but should you?

Here are a couple of questions to get you started. Questions we should all be asking (probably) much more frequently than we do:

• Is this part of the core, high-value work that you're great at doing, your clients love you for and that only you can do?

• Do you enjoy doing it?

There will always be more to do than you can do. Far more. You have to be selective about what makes the cut. You need to discriminate. Don't fall into the trap of doing something just because it's come your way and you know that you can.

Everything is in someone's sweet spot.

For all the stuff that needs to get done but isn't part of your high-value tasks, there's someone or something else to do the job.

Everything that isn't part of your high-value sweet spot is right in the middle of someone else's. They'd love to take care of this thing that's been staring you in the face for the last three weeks and you've been putting off because you know you're not going to enjoy it, you know you're not particularly good at it, and you'll find it tedious and boring.

"Doing work you don't like doing is way more exhausting than working long hours."

David Perell

Don't fall into the traps.

There are a few traps to avoid.

The first is thinking that to assume that finding someone else to do this is going to be expensive.

"I know I don't want to do it, but it's going to be cheaper than doing anything else. The budget's tight and we need to save every penny we can, so anything we can do in-house we should do in-house."

This way of thinking falls into the opportunity cost trap too. Forgetting that the time it's going to take you to do this would be much better invested in working on the client project, developing new product ideas, or anything else that only you can do.

(By the way, "making the most of every penny we can_" is a much healthier way of thinking about things when cashflow is tight.)

A few months ago, I was working on a project and wanted to get a transcription of a podcast. Yes, this was certainly something that I could do. Would I enjoy transcribing a one and a half-hour podcast? No, probably not. Would I find it tedious and frustrating? Definitely.

Five minutes with a search engine and I'd found Temi, a transcription service where I could upload an mp3 file, have it transcribed and sent to me in whatever format I wanted. All for the princely sum of $9 or $0.10 per minute of audio.

Yes, it was an automatic service and there were a few small mistakes. But the file I received was editable and only took a couple of minutes at most to fix. For most of the audio files that I need transcribing, that's fine. (Yes, 80/20 applies here too.)

Easy. Simple. Straightforward. With no fuss. And the whole job was done in less than ten minutes. How long would it have taken me? Much, much longer than that. And the stress, frustration, tedium, and sheer boredom would have cost me something too. I might not have even bothered to do the job at all.

Now, thanks to Hazel, Dropbox, and Zapier, I don't even need to log on to Temi when I need any audio transcribed. I drop the audio file into one folder on my computer, and a few minutes later the transcription appears as if by magic in the folder next door.

This is one example. There are lots of others. Everyone has opportunities like this to make life easier for yourself.

When I start working my clients I usually find that most of them are doing things they shouldn't be doing. One of the best ways to find more space to be doing the work that you know you should be doing but never get to is to stop doing the things that can be done differently. You need to ruthlessly eliminate these sort of tasks from your day.

You can stay stuck with lots of tedious, dull, boring, stressful, frustrating, time-consuming, mind-numbing, soul-destroying jobs if you want to. Or you can invest a little time in finding better ways to do it. Then you can get back to doing the work that you want to be doing, that you're great at, and your clients love you for.