A 10-min exercise to figure out what to delegate

Use a simple 10-minute monthly exercise to discover exactly what to delegate. Lia Garvin shows how to audit your calendar and task list to identify repetitive, low-impact, or handoff-ready work — without handing off your whole job or dumping busywork on your team. Learn a step-by-step method to spot delegation candidates, prioritize what to offload, and create clear handoffs managers trust. Ideal for founders, people managers, and business owners wanting faster delegation outcomes.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why delegating is not all or nothing, and the myth that keeps you stuck
• The calendar pass that surfaces meetings you can hand off, and the ones you shouldn't
• How to choose 3 to 5 monthly tasks a team member can take on
• How to hand off a piece of a task instead of the whole thin
• Why doing it yourself costs you more time than it saves

Resources mentioned:

• The New Manager Playbook by Lia Garvin

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© 2026 Lia Garvin / Managing Made Simple

Transcript

Lia (00:00)
You have a pile of work sitting on your desk and you know you've got to let some of it go. Maybe some of it's in post-its, others of it is in your notes app. I love to use the starred feature in my email. It's just collecting, I don't know, five, six hundred starred emails. That's sort of a to-do list. You've got all these things piling up and you have a team and you're thinking, I know I have to delegate. I know I've got to let some of this go. But when you think about how to get started, you freeze.

Maybe your team members are already spread pretty thin and you don't want to offload some of that work to them. But maybe worse, and I know this happens to me, you feel like I can't even stop for 10 seconds to figure out what I'm even supposed to delegate, let alone explain it right. And then you get stuck and you hold on to the work and you don't let it go, and your team members are underutilized, or there's real opportunity to free you up to operate at a more strategic level, and you just keep missing that window.

So today on the show, I'm going to talk about how to figure out what to delegate.

Before we set expectations, before we hand things off, before we get to all the stopping, micromanaging, all the things, we have to figure out what we want to delegate in the first place. And that's what we're talking about today.

you have this list of work. You have your meetings, you have your projects, you have your conversations, your decks to make whatever. I don't know, whatever your work is that you do all day. Your content to create, your appointments to be had, your business follow-ups, whatever it is. You have a set of work that you are doing. And right now, current you, soon to be old, you feels like I have to do all of this.

Maybe current you feels like, well, I don't have to do all of it, or I shouldn't have to do all of it, but I don't have anybody else that can do it. So current you is feeling like this is my set of work, this is the the the curse I've put on myself as being a leader, this is the job I signed up for, whatever it is. And I don't really know how to get out of that. Now, future you, future you, which is by the end of this conversation, has a very clear sense of.

What I can hand off. Now, again, the conversation to have after that, that's what we talked about last week, and we'll talk again about it next week, right? Step two of delegating. But future you will come away from today saying, okay, I'm super, super clear on what I can eventually hand off. Now, why is this first step so important? Because we jump, we typically jump to, I know I need to delegate, and then we think about.

everything kind of as a total and we're like, well, I'm not going to hand off my whole job, so we don't do it anymore. We think about it like it is our entire profession that we're handing off. And that is where I see so many folks get stuck. I was running a manager training at Google a few years ago with engineering managers. And it was about time management, which is essentially about delegating, which is essentially about trusting your team, right? We covered we we left no stone unturned in this training. And a manager raised his hand and he said, well

I want to delegate, but I don't my pe my team will think, why am I just throwing my job over the fence and having them do it for me? I don't want to just put that on my team. And another person raised their hand and said, Well, if I delegate, like people are gonna look at me and think, well, what do you do all day? These two comments showed me there is a fundamental misunderstanding around what delegating is, believing it is an all or nothing that you are reassigning your whole job to someone else.

If you are a corporate manager, that that means you do nothing. You've thrown your whole job over the fence and you're sitting there with your arms folded, thinking, like, well, when are you gonna be done with that? And that you're being looked at by your higher-ups like you don't do anything. That's the myth. If you are a business owner, you're thinking, gosh, well, I'm gonna hand over the keys to the kingdom to this person. I don't know about that. Absolutely not talking about either of those things. I'm talking about handing off some things on your list. Now I'm also not talking about

handing off just busy work no one wants to do. That's another thing that came up in that manager training at Google. Also comes up with business owners, also comes up when I was doing a manager session at FIFA, all over the world, any kind of industry. This comes up thinking, well, I don't want to hand off these, you know, little ad mini tasks that someone is gonna feel like I only just threw them scraps. We're also not necessarily talking about that. And I talk about this in my book, The New Manager Playbook, around finding

meaningful work to delegate so that someone has an opportunity to learn a new skill, get some visibility, be able to actually take things off your plate that are going to move the needle. Now, this day and age with a lot of work, you kind of administrative sort of tactical work being able to be automated, that is going to be a new thing that we weigh in when we think about delegating.

Delegating to a chatbot, chatbot, what is this 2001 to an agent? We're talking about delegating to a person, to an automation, to an agency, right? There could be a whole lot of things that we are delegating to. It's not just to your employee. It's not just to one person. And it's not your whole job. So now we've kind of covered the myth busting. How do we figure out what we want to delegate or what's even

in scope to delegate. There's two places to look at things. And I and I want you to actually literally do this. If you're sitting at your computer, do this real time. If you're driving in the car, you know, come back to this when you get into the office or get to your computer and like walk through it real time. You're going to start with looking at your calendar and you're going to go through a typical week. And if you need to look through two weeks or three weeks, whatever, to kind of get like a typical what is your rhythm of operating? And you're going to look at meetings

that you and other team members are in. This is where I see folks spend 80% of their time running meetings or sitting in on meetings that their team members are also in. There's going to be meetings that you have to be in. Business owners, maybe you're the one that closes the deals. Maybe you're the one that does the onboarding. Maybe you're the one that ha handles the, you know, the the sensitive personnel issues. Corporate managers, same thing. You're running the performance reviews, having your one-on-ones. I am not talking about those meetings that you do still need to be in.

Please do not delegate those. What are the meetings that you and other people on your team are also in at the same time? Start by just looking at those. Now, if you're in a calendar feature, maybe put the color code them in yellow. We're gonna start narrowing down. Okay. Or write, jot them down on a list. If you have them on a list, circle them, whatever it is. Identify what are meetings that you and people in your team go to. That's step one.

Then step two is look at of those meetings. Let's say you identified five meetings in a week. What is the one or two that you have someone in that meeting who is capable enough, if not already capable, that could be running that meeting or stepping in in your place and then relaying back to you whatever the decisions were, or that someone that you could kind of coach in how they want to take on your role there?

Where is there some potential? That is that one or two, those are going to be on our list of possible things to delegate. Now that action right there probably saved you at least one to two hours every single week. If you are able to delegate those things, I'm not saying it's gonna be handing over overnight. It doesn't mean you're gonna just like remove yourself from the meeting and think someone's gonna take it on, but you have now identified two things.

That go on your potential to delegate list just by stopping and looking at this. Now, what's awesome is as you start to build up your team members in how they're running these meetings, as you start to see some wins and they're really taking ownership, you can now go from two meetings to three to four and go from there. But that's how we start when it comes to looking at our calendar. Second piece, our to-do list, our tasks. We're thinking, my gosh, I can't hand over.

Just like business development. I can't hand over annual planning. I can't hand over OKR setting. I can't hand over being an engineering manager. I can't hand off being a sales manager. I can't hand off this. You're thinking of like really broad categories. Go through what is a typical week or month of work? What are the big things that you do? Again, I'm saying not to have someone take over just your meeting though. It's stuff that nobody wants to do.

What are some, let's say for a month, list out 10 things. Okay, I'm gonna five to 10, right? Okay, what's whatever is doable. This is piece two. Five to ten things that you do every single month. Maybe it's reporting, maybe it's some sort of stakeholder meeting, maybe it's some sort of client check-in. What are things that you do every single month over and over that are not related to the internal management of your team? Again, I do not want you to offload.

having conversations with your team or being a leader. Okay, I'm not trying to do that. Of those five to ten that you've written down, underline three to five that again, with the right coaching, the right setup, there is someone in your team that could potentially take this on. Okay. So now we're under underlying three to five. Now just doing this alone, you have

We got two meetings and we've got three to five things. You've got about five pieces of work that you can delegate on a weekly or monthly basis to your team. And that is something that we were able to come together and do in under 10 minutes. Now I say that and I literally workshop this real time on the show because I wanted you to see how easy it is to start the process. We didn't finish delegating everything yet.

We didn't tee up the expectations. We didn't define success. That's step two and three. But we figured out what the heck to do in the first place. And that, if that's where you're getting stuck, then you're welcome after today. You don't have to feel stuck there. Because a lot of us get in this analysis paralysis, and I don't know what to do. But and we think, I'm just gonna do it myself. It is faster to do it yourself initially, but you know what?

Now you have a 10-minute process you can run through on a monthly basis to go, okay, how do I skim off those meetings and what tasks can I hand off? And then you get the ball rolling. Now I glossed a little bit over figuring out that task list. So I want to come back to that. How do we really get clear on what those five things are that we're gonna hand off on a monthly basis? Because I said it wasn't the full projects. When you think about that list there of the things that you maybe could delegate.

Now you're gonna think about, well, what are the pieces that I'm doing that I maybe don't have to do that still have a lot of value for a team member? So let's say, for example, when you have a new client, you do the pitching or kind of like the initial strategy conversation. Could a team member not take on some of the research that comes together to like figure out what the strategy is? Could a team member not actually run a piece of that meeting that sort of shows another kind of other voices from your team?

Could that team member not contribute to a part of the strategic development of the piece they're actually responsible for? That's all just for one meeting. If you're talking about, you know, some sort of, you're the one that trains or onboards people on the team, okay, could you, could you hand off sort of figure out what the onboarding process is? Interviewing team members around the company to understand where the onboarding was good and where it could use some love.

Maybe where people typically get stuck in the first 90 days and putting together a little analysis there. Let's say when you something that you're responsible for is following up with, you know, clients when you want to make sure that they're like gonna your retention calls and making sure everyone's kind of happy, the customer service, a little bit more hands-on play, and they're wanting to speak to the business owner for that. Maybe you hand off

Someone you brief a team member on how you go about even having these conversations and meetings so that someday somebody could take that over or take over the prep that you do for that. So you're thinking about even if you're gonna keep a piece of the task, what are some really meaningful aspects that someone could contribute to? Let's say you run the OKR setting process. Well, there's a ton of pieces that go into that. Figuring out what everyone's

objectives and key results are going back and forth with folks to make sure everything's measurable, breaking down who's gonna go what, do what. Are there cross-functional dependencies, right? There's a lot of work that happens on the back end, even if you are running sort of a bigger chunk of the process. So we don't need to look at it like it's all or nothing. And the same thing with the meetings I mentioned in that example. You might hand off a piece of the meeting. You might have, let's say you're talking about running your your weekly team meeting.

One suggestion I offer a lot of my clients is having instead of you being the one talking at everyone, break that agenda into different focuses and have each of the respective owner of that, whether it's department or sort of like line of work or role, whatever it is, whatever they're responsible for, maybe it's KPI driven, they're reporting on that piece and everyone gets to hear from everyone. Now you've taken a meeting that was an hour that was just you talking and broken it into a way more engaging, interactive conversation.

This is the how of delegating. And when you figure out what you're actually gonna hand off, now it makes it so much easier to actually start the process of getting folks lined up to take on that work. So there it is. This is in in literally, we're at 14 minutes. Once I add the opening credits and it'll be more. But in a literally 15-minute conversation, we figure out how to make that list that you can have for yourself every single month.

For how to delegate. The meetings I would do, this is something you want to do on a weekly basis. But this is a process going through this exact thing once a month, taking 15 minutes and figuring out what he can delegate is going to save you. We started with the meetings, that was just two hours. This is gonna save you, I'm gonna say 10, 20 hours a month. Yeah, at least, right? Because if we've already saved eight hours in meetings a month, we can actually carve out the rest with tasks.

So this is how you free up your time, and this is how you show your team members that you value them, that you see them, that you want them to be stepping in more, taking more ownership. That's why I didn't say, ooh, let's see what I like, don't like to do. You don't, I didn't ask you to make a list of all the BS stuff you don't like to do. Okay, like that's not what we're talking about. Okay. And so that's how you come up with the what am I even gonna delegate in the first place?

And I want to hear from you. Send me your list. I'd love to hear, especially if you're getting stuck, you don't know quite how to do it. And then I will do a deep dive episode literally sharing some of the examples folks came up with so that we're really talking through what we're trying to delegate and how to structure those conversations to make sure that's set up effectively. So if you want to share your list that you came up with for a little bit of accountability and for me to talk about on the show, I won't say your name, so don't worry about that.

Send it to hello at LeahGarvin dot com. All right. See you next time.