As an executive, you have a lot of important responsibilities on your plate—from managing your team, to meeting with investors, to taking time to plan company strategy and vision. But chances are you’re bogged down with work and routine to-dos that don’t need your expertise. You know you need to delegate more, but aren’t sure which tasks you can trust to hand off to someone else.
At Double, we’ve matched hundreds of CEOs and executives with experienced, part-time assistants. Our data show these are the top 10 tasks executives choose to delegate to get their day back.
1. Daily Time Management
Whether you’re back in your office or still working remotely, time management is key to accomplishing your goals for the day. If you want focused work time, meetings with your direct reports, family time, and home workouts to all fit in your day, you need to plan. Your assistant can help you stay on track and make sure your priorities are blocked off on your calendar.
2. Email organization and triaging
With emails from investors, industry newsletters, and messages from sales reps flooding your inbox, the most important messages can get buried. Your assistant can triage your emails daily to make sure you don’t miss critical messages. They can handle all the emails that don’t need your attention—including unsubscribing from those lists you’ve been meaning to get off.
3. Scheduling requests
Meeting requests, strategy calls with your team, and networking follow-ups are all important. They also take up a lot of bandwidth. Let your assistant know which meetings are most important to you and they can handle scheduling.
4. Expense management
You might have a backlog of invoices to submit or be looking to scale back unnecessary contracts, like water delivery and cleaning. Or maybe it's time to cancel your gym membership and that coffee subscription box. Work and personal expenese are easy tasks to delegate.
5. CRM management
Whether you use Pipedrive, Close, HubSpot, or another CRM, your assistant can do a lot to help you keep your customers happy. They can enter new contacts, update existing ones, and add important conversation notes and follow-ups.
6. Social media management
Across your social accounts, your assistant can respond to straight-forward comments, flag messages that need your response, and even create and schedule posts. Many Double assistants have creative backgrounds as well as experience managing social accounts. They’re able to do more than you might think.
7. Supply ordering
The Amazon box you MacGyvered to double as a temporary standing desk might not be the ideal long-term solution. Since many of our CEOs and executives are planning to work from home even after stay-at-home orders lift, they’re wanting to revamp their home office. Do you need a more comfortable chair, a new monitor, or an ergonomic keyboard? Or maybe new toys for the kids, a pair of kettlebells for your home gym, or more Nespresso pods? Your assistant can find these and order them.
8. General research
Want to get a deep-dive on a new competitor? Learn the latest on travel regulations? Decide which is the best type of espresso machine to buy? Finding answers to these questions can turn into hours of internet searching. Research projects are a perfect example of tasks to delegate.
9. Travel management
With some travel restrictions beginning to ease, many are all too excited to finally go somewhere that’s not their kitchen. Looking to book a trip to meet with a new investor or cancel a vacation due to new travel guidelines? From hotel reservations to car rentals, airline reimbursements to show refunds, your assistant can do the research and make the arrangements.
10. Gift purchasing
Finding a gift for mom’s birthday, new swag for team members’ work anniversaries, or a bottle of wine to send to a new client, takes time and thought. Instead, jot down any gift preferences and let your assistant get to work. They can spend the hours scouring the internet and local shops to come up with a few options for you.
All ten of these tasks are both time-consuming and teachable, which Harvard research says are two of the keys to knowing what tasks to delegate. From getting your priorities on the calendar to triaging your inbox, your assistant can handle a lot of tasks that don’t need your expertise. This frees up hours in your day you can spend focusing on what you do best.
Want to learn more about working with a double or our assistant matching process? Sign up for a free 15-minute consultation with a member of our team.