Midlife MavericksFor 9 years, I did everything myself.
Scheduling. Email management. Content distribution. Bookkeeping. Contract reviews. Database organisation. Formatting newsletters. Booking meetings. Follow-ups. Meeting prep.
I’m not exaggerating when I say Thursdays are my meeting day and by the end of it, I don’t know my own name. Six calls. Back to back. Different clients, different topics, different problems.
And everything around those calls still landed on me.
A few months ago, I did a time audit. I tracked everything for a week. Every task, every hour.
More than half my time was non-billable.
I read a piece by Justin Welsh that made me sit with that number. And I thought, maybe I should try this. Maybe I should stop doing everything myself.
So a little over a month ago, I hired a virtual assistant. She works 20 hours a week.
And I cannot believe I didn’t do this sooner.
Quote of the Week
“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself.”
Andrew Carnegie
The contract that broke me
A few weeks ago, I had a B2B contract to review. Serious money on the line. I sat down and thought, I can do this. I used to review contracts all the time in banking.
Two days. Two full days I spent on that contract.
On day two, I stopped and thought, hold on. There’s actual liability here. If I miss something, there’s real money at risk. I need a lawyer’s eyes on this.
So I paid someone to do it properly.
That’s when it clicked.
I’d just burned two days of my life doing something a professional could have done in two hours. And the professional would have done it better.
The four stories I told myself
I resisted hiring help for years. Four stories on repeat.
“I’ll lose control of the work.” What I really meant was, I won’t have oversight. I won’t know if something goes out wrong. A typo, a mistake, a missed detail. If my name’s on it, I need to see it.
“I don’t have time to train someone.” This one was real. I cleared my calendar to make space for onboarding. I braced myself for it. And once the calendar was clean, it was fine. I did invest the time, properly. But the dread of it was worse than the actual doing.
“No one does it the way I do.” Correct. No one will ever do things exactly the way you do. But 80% is good enough. And odds are, it’ll be more than 80%.
“It’s faster to do it myself.” This is the most dangerous one. Because in the moment, it feels true. But if you audit your time, you’ll see that the hours you spend on tasks someone else could handle add up fast. That time should go to work only you can do.
Why women don’t delegate
I think women are particularly bad at this. I include myself.
At work, we accept the extra load. Someone dumps a project on us and we don’t push back. We just execute. In corporate, I ran around doing the work of three people. Someone had to pull me aside on the trading floor and tell me to start saying no. Nobody had told me that before. The script in my head was: accept it, solve it, don’t complain.
At home, same script, different setting. “I can do it quicker, so let me just do it.” “I can do it better, so let me just do it.” Sound familiar? We pick up the task because we know we’ll do it faster. Then we resent the fact that nobody else helps. But we never actually asked. We just absorbed it.
That script followed me into self-employment.
I kept trying to prove I could handle everything. Except now, there was no one to impress. I was just exhausting myself for an audience of zero.
What changed
It’s been a month. Here’s what’s different, in numbers.
I got back about fifteen hours a week. Fifteen. That’s almost two full working days.
Those hours didn’t vanish into nothing. I blocked longer focus sessions. Real deep work blocks, not the thirty-minute scraps between meetings. My output is measurably better. I’m writing more. I’m thinking more clearly. The quality of the work that only I can do has gone up because I finally have the space for it.
I’ve doubled the number of meetings I’m taking. In my line of work, that’s directly tied to revenue. More investor conversations, more client calls, more pipeline. That wasn’t possible when I was the one booking them, confirming them, rescheduling them, and doing the back and forth. Not everyone uses a Calendly link. Someone has to manage the logistics, and that someone doesn’t need to be me.
The first morning I opened my laptop and my inbox was already triaged, I just sat there for a second. Relief. That’s the only word for it.
Some of my largest clients already say, “Oh, can you ask Donna?” One month in, and she’s already part of the operation in their eyes.
Own it
More than half my working week was going to things that didn’t need me. I knew it. I could feel it. And I still waited 9 years.
If you’re reading this and recognising yourself in those four stories, you already know what’s eating your time. You don’t need permission to stop doing it all. You need a plan to hand some of it over.
Not all of it. Not tomorrow. But something. One thing.
This week, do a time audit. Track every task for five days. Then count the non-billable hours. The ones that keep the lights on but don’t move the business forward. The scheduling, the formatting, the follow-ups, the filing.
Look at that number. Sit with it. Then ask yourself: what would I do with those hours back?
Hit reply and tell me: what’s one task you’re still doing yourself that you know you shouldn’t be?
I’ll be here with my third espresso, reading every one.
See you next Wednesday,
C
