What Tasks Should I Stop Doing Today? The List That Gave Me My Time Back

You know that feeling. Nothing in your business moves unless you move it. A client is waiting on a reply, a report needs updating, a promise from Tuesday’s call is sitting somewhere in your head, and every single one of them is waiting for you.

So you search for it: “What should I stop working on first?”

I’m Eszter, your #LifeFirst Business Mentor, and I lived in that place for ten years. I had a team, but they were executors, not partners. (I wrote about that in how much you should really delegate.) Three years ago, that changed. Not because I worked harder, but because I stopped doing a handful of very specific tasks.

Here they are, what each one gave me back, and how to find yours.

The task I held on to longest: talking to clients after they bought

I’m not talking about sales conversations or strategy. I mean the day-to-day logistics after someone has already said yes:

• “Can you change that email?”
• “Have you posted this for me?”
• “Can you help me move forward on this?”
• “Where do I book my next session?”

Every one of those went through me. Even the smallest comment from my team to a client had to pass my desk first.

And here’s the part I’m a little embarrassed about: my clients didn’t even know I had a team. I never mentioned one. It was always just me, me, me, because I was afraid that if other names showed up, clients would lose trust.

How I handed it over

First, I told my clients I had a team. I started with the clients who trusted me most, and their trust carried straight over to the team. It went far more smoothly than the story I’d been telling myself. Today, with new clients, I say it in the very first conversation: “It’s me and my team. For any task, we can bring in someone who knows it even better than I do.” Clients see that as a plus, not a risk.

Then I gave my team what they needed to speak for me:

• The full story of each client. What we’re doing for them, and why.
• A brand voice and language guide, so every reply sounds like us.
• What each client is entitled to, and what they’re not.
• Sample replies and actions for recurring questions. “You can answer these. Send those to me.”
• Clear moments to ask me. Anything they’ve never seen before comes to me.
• One platform where every client conversation happens, where I can see everything at any moment. Never in a private inbox where I can’t see what was said.
• A separate space for the team and me, so our back-and-forth never happens in front of the client.

These conversations are written, not live. My team doesn’t jump on calls with clients without me, apart from a very experienced team member on an account where I fully trust them. That’s coming, step by step.

The surprise: my team held better boundaries than I did

My biggest fear was that someone on my team would promise a client something we don’t do.

It turned out to be the other way around. I was the one over-promising. A client would ask, “Could you do this for me?” Something not in the contract, something we didn’t even know how to do yet. And I’d say yes. I’d figure it out, and I wouldn’t charge for it, because I wanted to keep the client happy.

My team? They check the scope. “That’s not included.” Kindly, clearly, every time. They protect my business better than I did.

And when something does go wrong, because it does, I take full responsibility in front of the client. It’s my company. If a team member made a mistake, I probably wasn’t clear enough. It’s never a blame game between us, and that’s exactly why the trust holds.

What it gave me back

At least an hour a day, weekends included. That’s 7 hours a week.

Those 7 hours cost me less than $100 to hand over. And in those same 7 hours, working on the things that actually grow the business, I earn close to $1,000.

That’s the real cost of holding on.

More tasks you can stop doing today

1. Copy-pasting numbers into spreadsheets

We rarely think of analysis as a task we can drop. It feels too important. But most of it isn’t analysis at all. It’s copy-paste.

Here’s a real example. When we run a launch event, like a masterclass or a 3- or 5-day challenge, we promote it for about three weeks before it starts. Traffic comes from social media, emails, YouTube, LinkedIn, talks I give, and paid ads. Every day, some people visit the landing page and some of them register.

Those numbers matter. A 2% conversion rate and a 60% conversion rate are two very different launches. And you want to know the difference between people who come from ads and people who come from your own audience.

It used to look like this: every day, log into the right system, copy the page visits into a spreadsheet, copy the registrations, do it again for organic and again for paid, let the spreadsheet calculate the conversion rate, rerun the ad report to see which countries the leads came from, then actually think about it. Between my team and me, about an hour a day. Over three weeks, that’s roughly 21 hours per launch.

Now, by the time I get up in the morning, the numbers are already waiting for me:

• “You had a 9% conversion rate from ads.”
• “You had a 25% conversion rate from organic traffic: emails and social media.”
• “This country stands out.”

It comes with suggestions and questions on how to improve the conversion rate. And it catches things I’d have missed, like leads coming in from a country I don’t want to target because those leads rarely buy.

The hour a day became 15 minutes: “Do we change anything, or keep it running?” That’s around 16 hours back on every launch, and a far more complete picture than any spreadsheet ever gave me.

2. Comparing your emails and social posts by hand

I can look at one email and see how it did. What I can’t do by hand is look at a whole year of emails and spot which ones stood out, and why. Same for social media.

Open rates, click rates, which posts actually brought people in: all of that can be handed to analysis tools and AI. You keep the decision. You drop the digging.

3. Number-crunching for your clients

If your clients need reports from you, the same applies. The numbers part can be automated, so your time goes into what the numbers mean for them, which is the part they actually value.

4. Searching your own memory

I’ve shared before how every client meeting I have is now transcribed automatically, with each promise turned into a task, a deadline and an owner. (That whole story is in why your business fails without you.)

But there was another hidden task. If I needed an answer from a past meeting, I had to remember when that meeting happened, roughly where in the conversation we said it, then go back, listen, and search the transcript.

Now I just ask: “What did I promise this client, and by when?” And I get the exact answer. No digging, no guessing, no relying on my memory.

How to find which of your tasks to stop first

My list won’t be exactly your list. So here’s how to find yours.

Track your week. For at least seven days, write down every task that comes up, with three things next to it:

• The task
• How long it takes
• How many times a week you do it

(If you’ve done my “only me” list, this is its natural next step.)

The first tasks to go are the ones that tick these boxes:

• You do it every single day, and it’s repetitive.
• It drains you.
• It piles up. You start it, then skip it, then catch up on three days at once, then a whole week. That catch-up costs far more than the task itself, and sometimes it costs you the week.

If a task checks all three, that’s your first one.

Automate it, delegate it, or keep it?

Once you know what to stop, here’s the simple filter I use for every task on my plate (I shared it in this reel too):

Does it follow the same steps every single time? Automate it. Invoices, reminders, scheduling, follow-ups, reports. If it’s repeatable, it’s not yours to do anymore. A tool can do it while you sleep.

Does it need a human judgment call or a personal touch? Delegate it, to someone who is genuinely better at it than you. Client care, content, the things with a heartbeat.

Whatever is left, the one or two things only you can do, is your actual job.

I always try automation first. Automation has taken a huge leap this year, and most things can be automated now. If a task doesn’t need a human decision and can be described with a set of rules, it goes to automation. Only what needs the human element goes to a person.

What I’ll never hand over

Here’s what stays with me:

• My core teachings. I do bring in experts for some sessions, but the heart of what I teach is mine.
• My podcast episodes. Fully written by me.
• My social media. Curated by me. Anything written always gets my last word.
• My copy, sales and nurture alike.

For that last one, my rule is simple: the first idea is always mine, and the last word is always mine. Everything in between can be a person or an automation.

Even this blog post works that way. It started with me answering a set of interview questions. The ideas and the final edit are mine.

The tasks I was sure only I could do

Some of the things I thought were “only me” really weren’t:

• Video editing. I was convinced only I knew the rhythm I wanted my videos to flow in. It was the worst idea ever, because I’m the worst video editor ever.
• Parts of my accounting. Not my strength. Not my job.
• Anything that needed a password. I thought if it needed my login, it had to be me. But there are great platforms that let you give your team access without ever sharing your password.

If you’re holding on to something because “only I can do it”, ask yourself whether that’s actually true, or just familiar.

The biggest mistake: doing it “just one more time”

Here’s the mistake I made, and the one I see most often.

It’s all in your head. You hand a task over, and you’re sure you shared every detail. Then something comes back that has nothing to do with what you imagined. And your first reaction is: “Oh my God, this isn’t going to work. I’ll just have to do it myself.”

Don’t. That’s the trap. The moment you do it yourself “just this once”, you’re right back where you started. I call “it’s quicker if I just do it myself” the most expensive sentence in your business.

Put that energy into refining instead. Better documentation. Clearer descriptions. Another pass on the process.

Yes, there’s a learning curve. The first, second, even third time you hand over something new, you might get back something completely off. But delegation is a skill, and you get better at it every single time. By the tenth time, you’ll hand over a brand new process and get back something spot on.

And there’s a bonus. Early on, when something comes back wrong, it’s usually your instructions, not the person. Later, once you know your instructions are clear, you’ll be able to tell from the very first interaction whether someone is the right person for the job. (Louise Sandoval shared brilliant ways to get there in our episode on delegating like a pro.)

Your first step today: 10 minutes

You don’t need to track a whole week before you start. Start with ten minutes.

My free 10-minute reset for getting out of the doer’s seat walks you through it in four short steps, so you know where you’re going before you decide what to drop.

Stop carrying what was never yours

So, what tasks should you stop doing today? The ones that repeat, drain you and pile up. The copy-paste. The logistics. The digging through your own memory. Automate the repeatable, delegate the human, and protect the handful of things that truly need you.

A business stops needing you in every corner not when you work harder, but when you decide what was never yours to carry in the first place.

And when you’re ready to build this with support around you, that’s exactly what we do inside Life First Lab, my community for building a business that feeds your life.