Five tasks that busy startups should stop doing immediately

So you have transformed your business idea into the reality. You have left the 9-5 grind to pursue your dreams.

But the question is,

Are you satisfied?

A large number of startups share the same story - Crunched for time, strapped for cash, overburdened with work. What is your story?

Are you making the best use of your time? Are you able to cut overhead costs? Do you have time for your family?

In today’s post, I’m going to share with you the 5 tasks that you should stop doing immediately.

And after reading this post, you will know how taking these tasks off your plate can help you save time, money and increase productivity.

Without further ado, let’s discuss these tasks:

1. Social media management

Love it or hate it, social media is a necessary evil. Why?

Businessmen spend 6 hours or more hours per week on social media.

Needless to say, this is a significant amount of time. Tell me one thing, my friend, whether you would like to address a query on the Facebook page or you would like to search for new markets for your business. Obviously, you would choose later one.

That’s why you should stop doing social media management yourself if you are doing so. In case you’re running short of employees, you can hire a freelance social media consultant.

Stop managing social media yourself and save time that you can spend on the core business activities.

2. Onsite Blog Management

It improves your search ranking, it can help you become a thought leader, it can help you promote your products or services, onsite blogs help startup owners in many ways.

However, managing an onsite blog is a time-consuming task, even if you have somebody to write for you.

You will have to search for relevant images, post the content into the CMS, share the published post on social media, and reply to comments. This all takes time.

The best way is you should delegate this task to someone in your organization and save time.

3. SlideShare/PowerPoint presentation

It happened to me many times that I felt I was wasting my time in meetings.

Have you ever felt the same?

Believe it or not, meetings are a big time-killer, my friend.

Ray Williams wrote in his column ‘Wired for Success’ on Psychology Today,

“Cancel 50 percent of your meetings and you will get more work done.”

If you get into the details, you will find that ‘preparation for meetings’ is an actual time- killer. Those SlideShare/Powerpoint presentations eat hours of our time. You need to find data and make presentations.

Should you really be spending hours on making SlideShare/PowerPoint presentations?

The answer is a big resounding No.

By delegating this task to somebody in your organization, you can save a boatload of time.

4. Internet research

Regardless of your business domain, you must be doing lots of Internet research in your daily routine. Why?

Sometimes, you want to track what your competitors are doing, and sometimes, you require data to make marketing strategies. Whatever is the reason for your Internet research, it takes time to get informative data and compile it into a presentable form.

These days, you can easily hire a freelance Internet research assistant who will search the web and provide you with the data as per your need.

So stop doing the Internet research and save time that you can spend on the core business activities.

5. Making travel arrangement

As a startup owner, you must be traveling from one city to another for business purposes. If you make travel arrangement yourself, you should delegate this task as it is time-consuming to book hotels and flights.

These are five non-core tasks, you shouldn’t be handling yourself. If you are not comfortable working with a freelance consultant, you should hire a virtual assistant from a reputed agency. This way, you can avail a more professional setup.

Now comes how you can save money by delegating these tasks.

It is simple: after the delegation, you will have more free time that you can spend on high-value tasks that are directly related to business growth and ROI, meaning more sales and more money.

Conclusion:

Being a startup owner is never easy. Some people say that it is a 24/7 job. But as a business leader, you should cherry pick tasks. Else, you will be burnout soon.

Delegate social media management, onsite blog management, Internet research, SlideShare/PPT presentation, and making travel arrangement tasks to others. This will not only save you time but also increase your productivity.

What about you? Do you want to add any task to this list? Share it in the comment section. I’d love to hear about it.