Running a business is hard. It eats your time, drains your energy, and—if you’re not careful—traps you inside the very machine you built.
For years, I thought the grind was normal. I figured if I paid people well and did interesting work, my company culture and the systemization of my business would take care of themselves.
Spoiler alert: they don’t.
After years of working with business owners inside our Lean Marketing Accelerator, I’ve seen the same pattern play out again and again:
Smart entrepreneurs waste their best hours doing low-value tasks. Not because they want to, but because they haven’t built a business that can run without them.
In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how to change that. Read it, and you’ll walk away knowing how to step back from the day-to-day grind, reclaim your time, and focus on the work that actually grows your business.
Let’s dive in.
Whether you like it or not, I guarantee that you’re probably doing too much. From experience, I can tell you that most business owners are. Don’t believe?
Take a moment to think about the tasks on your daily plate. What hats are you wearing? If you hold the role of marketing, admin, accounts, fulfillment, and product development, stop wondering why you have no time to focus on strategy. That’s why.
You’re too busy. And while you might congratulate yourself on being able to juggle all these balls, the knock-on effect is that you don’t have time to sink into your genius zone.
So what’s the solution?
It isn’t working harder or automating everything overnight. It’s not even hiring a team of unicorns. The solution is to build systems, document everything, and delegate the low-value work.
Because you cannot automate chaos, and you cannot delegate guesswork.
If your goal is to scale your business in 2026, but everything still lives inside your head, you have a problem. It needs to be put on paper first, then turned into a system you can delegate.
Here’s exactly how to do just that.
The first step to freeing up your time is understanding which activities you’re spending it on. To start, jot down all the tasks you fulfil on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You’d be surprised by how much you’re actually doing.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a solo operator. I still want you to write them all down.
Your list could look something like this:
This becomes the blueprint for freeing yourself.
The reality is that not all tasks are created equal. While some grow your business, most don’t. Your goal is to remove any low-value tasks from your business plate.
Low-value tasks could include:
They seem inconsequential, but you’d be surprised by how much time these tasks actually can take. Don’t believe me? Time yourself.
I did this exercise with my team members. To better understand their capacity, I needed to know where they were spending their time and how long each task took.
The results were eye-opening. Where possible, I’ve tried to automate tasks, or better yet, delegate them to assistants. It’s made a world of difference.
Remember, low-value tasks must eventually be delegated, because they steal your most precious asset: your time.
So now that you’ve identified the tasks that aren’t worth your time, naturally, you want to delegate them. Only, you can’t. Why? Because you can’t delegate a task without documenting how to do it.
Whether your goal is to hand something off to a team member or to AI, they need to know the exact steps. Otherwise, it will take them 10x longer than it takes you. Or, they create their own way of doing things. This could be beneficial to you, but it could also be a disaster.
Here’s how I like to document my systems. Start simple:
This is a great exercise to deploy as a solopreneur. Every time you complete a task, document it and save it in a folder you can hand off—quickly and cleanly.
This is how real businesses scale.
I break down exactly how to build a business process in 8-steps here.
Everyone wants to automate everything with AI. The only problem is that AI is useless without good instructions.
What you want to do is treat AI like a team member:
✔ It needs to know exactly what you want
✔ It needs your preferences
✔ It needs a documented process
Once you have that, automation becomes powerful. For example, we used to manually edit podcasts, switching between camera feeds and active speakers. This took hours of work. Now, tools like Descript automatically detect the active speaker.
It cut our workload by 80%. Not because of AI alone, but because the process was documented well enough to automate intelligently.
Now you might be thinking, “But Allan, I can’t afford to hire someone.” Here’s why you’re thinking about it wrong. And this I learned from my good friend Dan Martell, the author of Buy Back Your Time:
Calculate your effective hourly rate.
Basically, you divide your business's profit by the hours you work. If that number is $50/hour, anything that costs less than $50/hour for someone else to do should be delegated.
Laundry? Cleaning? Packing boxes? Admin? Responding to emails? Booking flights? You get the idea.
Someone can do it for $25–30/hour. Heck, someone could do it for $15 p/h. Now, instead of you saving a measly $25, you spend that time generating $50–100/hour doing high-value work.
Suddenly, you’re making money. Delegation is not a cost. It’s an ROI calculation. So ask yourself, what could you be spending your time doing if you weren’t using it on low-value tasks?
Every process in your business can be defined by three things:
I’ll give you an example. Take a café that closes at 3 pm. Their process might be to bring in the outside furniture, clean the coffee machine, sweep the floor, stack the dishwasher, add loo paper to the bathrooms, put the hand towels in the washing machine, and lock up.
Having this process mapped out means their staff gets the job done right, every time. Which ultimately means they deliver a consistent experience, something their customers expect.
If you want to see the same results, you need to write down how you do the task, assign responsibility, and set the timing.
That process is critical to scaling and achieving the freedom you so badly want.
To recap, the fastest way to grow your business is shockingly simple:
This is how you reclaim your time. It’s how you grow without burning out, and it’s how you finally work on your business—not in it.
If you have the goal of scaling and freeing up your time so you can take a holiday without your laptop, start building systems.
You don’t need to overhaul your entire business. Trying to do everything at once will only overwhelm you. The result is you’ll get nothing done.
Instead, start with one task. Then move on to another and another. Before you know it, you’ve built a business that doesn’t rely on you for every decision. Most importantly, you get to step into the role you were meant for: the leader of your business, not its bottleneck.
And that’s a powerful place to be.
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