MBA1477 Outsourcing Your Most Time Consuming Tasks + Free Ride Friday
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
Omar Zenhom walks through reclaiming time by tracking your hours with Time Doctor, cutting nonessential work, and outsourcing repetitive tasks to VAs on sites like Upwork or onlinejobs.ph. Rolling standups help manage delegated work smoothly.
Questions this episode answers
March 6, 2020
Time Doctor
$500 per month via onlinejobs.ph
Upwork
$500
Chapters
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Welcome to the $100NB. Because time means more than money. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar's at home. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to outsource your most time consuming tasks. Time is your greatest asset in life. In business you have a limited quantity of time. Not only in the day, not only in the month or year, but in your life. So as you start growing your business, the number one thing you want to get back is your time. So in today's episode, I'm going to show you how to identify the most time consuming tasks that you can outsource. Off the bat. This may not be apparent to you, but there are a lot of small tasks that you do here and there that totally suck your time. Those little 10, 15 minute tasks that you do on a regular basis, they add up to to hours. So I'm going to show you a surefire technique to find out what's taking your time and how to make sure somebody else does it. And the best part is it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The problem with being busy is that you're doing so many things, you're not really sure what takes how long. So you really need to take an inventory of everything you do on a regular basis, even things you don't do on a regular basis. Maybe things you do once a month. But to get started, we're going to focus on a typical day. And one of the best ways to find out how you're spending your time on any given day is to track it. Now, most people find it very hard for you to take notes throughout the day about what am I doing now? Actually looking at their calendar and seeing what their tasks are, because we do little things in between of our tasks on the calendar or appointments on the calendar. One of the best ways to do this is to use a time tracker. There's a free one that you can use or one that has a free plan. It's called Time Doctor. And by downloading the software on your computer, it could track exactly where, where you're spending all your time when you're working on your computer. And it'll actually give you a graph, like a little bar chart that will show you where all your time is being spent. Whether it's an email, whether it's on video, calls, whether it's on Facebook, you will know by the end of the day. Once you have this data, now it's time to make some decisions. The first thing I want you to do is look at what you're spending your time at and figure out what things can you totally cut. Like, you don't have to do them anymore. They're unnecessary. Now you might say, I don't do things that are unnecessary. Everything I do helps. Everything I do is important. No, that's not true. Most things that you do are probably not going to move the needle dramatically. There's definitely some things that you do on a regular basis that don't have a dramatic effect on your business. Remember the 8020 rule. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. That means there's a whole bunch of stuff. 80% of your time being spent on things that really probably don't move the needle. And by freeing yourself up from those things, you're allowed to focus on what works. So first thing we're doing, we're going to cull. We're going to get rid of anything we feel that, hey, I can do without. I could stop doing that, and my business won't collapse, right? My business will be fine. And if you're not sure if it's going to be fine or not, give it a try. Stop doing it for a week and see what happens. Does it, you know, bring the business a little bit down or does it not do anything? Maybe it isn't bringing it up. I've done things where I let go of certain tasks where it actually helped the business by me not doing it. Crazy. I know. So first we call. Next we take a look at what are we using our time on, Right? How are we spending our time? I love the term spending time because it's like a currency, right? It's like, it has value. So we got to make sure how are we actually cashing in our time every day? For example, for me, it could be Facebook. And now you might be thinking, omar, you're on Facebook all day. Well, we have a lot of Facebook groups, and we serve a lot of our customers through those groups. And maybe I'm spending too much time there. And what I need to do is consolidate. So the next thing we're going to do, we're going to consolidate. So if I see, like, I'm spending five minutes here, five minutes there, 10 minutes there, no, I'm going to consolidate. Instead of spending a total of 60 minutes a day on Facebook, I'm going to spend 20 minutes. But one shot once a day, no one's going to die. If you don't comment on Facebook or answer a question immediately, right. They can wait, you know, 12, 24 hours. It's okay. And if you're consistent every day and people feel like, okay, within a day, I always get an answer. That's the expectation. You're setting expectations when you reply to comments within seconds. So allotting a time, consolidating the time, saying, okay, 20 minutes a day in my calendar, I'm gonna go in, answer all the comments in my Facebook Groups and, and I'm out. I don't come back until tomorrow. So we're consolidating scattered time. That adds up to a lot of different minutes. Right? That adds up to a lot of time that I'm being used. Now I'm gonna look at the big chunk times where it's like solid. I spend an hour on email or spend an hour on doing some admin. I spend an hour on, let's say tweaking a website or creating a landing page. And an hour's just an example. It could be two hours, it could be three. But the point here is that these are big chunks of time. And if I'm doing this every day, then, you know, this adds up to like 5, 10, 15 hours a week. What would you do with 15 extra hours a week? I don't know, maybe catch up on sleep or maybe, you know, enjoy life a little bit or go to the gym or work on a project that excites you. So what do we do with these tasks that spend so much time? Well, we look at them and we say, is there any way possible I can outsource this if I can get somebody to do this? And I'm going to give you some examples and I want to show you the brutal honesty you have to go through to outsource this to make this decision. Let's say email. You spend about an hour a day on email answering people's emails. In my experience, 70 to 80% of all email can be replied by somebody else with no intervention from you. It's information that's very easy. I would like your logo. I'd like to book a time with Omar on his calendar. I'd like to do something that is very cookie cutter easy. This is just a reminder. Omar's got an interview tomorrow. You could definitely outsource that and hire an EA. A VA. You can get VAs starting at $500 over at in the Philippines. You can check out onlinejobs ph$500 a month for a full time EA or VA. That's amazing. You're gonna save hours upon hours of time and this is just one of the tasks they can do. And all you gotta do is really give them access to your inbox. This is your work inbox. You should be able to give them access if they're an employee and they can take care of your email for you. Now there might be an email or two during the week that they don't know how to handle. They don't know how to ask. But what you can do is create a cadence with your va, with your ea, where they send you a message on Slack or Basecamp or whatever tool you use to communicate with your team saying, I need some help with a couple of emails. Or they could just say, I'm all good today. No questions. So what we do is called a rolling standup. A standup that's virtual. And basically every staff member will answer three questions every day. What did you work on yesterday? That's question number one. Question number two is, what will you work on today? And question three is, do you have any blockers? Is there something that's stopping you from completing your work? And this is when your VA or EA can put down the questions they have for the emails they can't answer. And they can keep it brief. And you can train them to say, hey, just keep it brief. You don't have to copy and paste the whole email. I don't want to read the whole email. That's the whole reason why I'm outsourcing it to you. Just tell me what they want. Tell me what the question is. Tell me what you need to answer them. So usually this is one or two lines. This person's asking this question, do we offer this? Something like that, right? Very simple. And answering two or three questions a week via Slack or via Basecamp or whatever is going to take you seconds. It's going to take you less than a minute versus hours of email. Let's say, for example, you are putting together landing pages or pages on your website. Extremely time consuming. You're gonna spend hours fiddling within, adding photos, and it's still just not gonna be perfect. It's gonna be slow, and you're gonna do something wrong and all that kind of stuff to try to fix it. Getting a tech person, a web person, a website manager to take care of your website a few hours a week is definitely worth it. Or on an hourly basis via Upwork, where they're on a retainer, definitely worth it. You could just give them the task. Hey, I need a landing page that has 1, 2, 3, 4. Can you please get it done? Your instructions to them is probably going to take you five minutes, and they're going to get it done on their time and you can outsource. Saving you hours of fiddling with a website. Now, in order for this to work, you have to be absolutely honest with yourself. Can I outsource this? And the best way to kind of imagine this. I know this sounds strange, but. But this is a good way for you to answer this honestly. If you had to, had to get somebody else to do this, like you're physically unable, you're hospitalized. Right. You can't do this task. How would you outsource it? You maybe create some documentation, some training and give it to them. Right. Getting somebody to do it at 80% is better than you wasting your own valuable time and trying to get it at a hundred percent. I know what you're thinking. No one's going to do it as good as me. And you're absolutely right. But somebody could do it 80, 90, 95% as good as you. And it's better that they're doing it and not you. So you can free yourself up to enjoy your life a little bit. Enjoy the benefits of having your own business. Enjoy the work you do. Choose work that you actually enjoy.
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To wrap up today's lesson, you gotta first look at the information, the data. Where is my time being spent? Use time, doctor for that. First you got to consolidate. How can I consolidate these scattered tasks in chunks of time, in blocks of time? Then I got to look into what can I outsource. Be brutally honest. Who can do this? How can I train somebody? Who can I hire? How much is it going to cost me? It's going to be far, far less than me spending my own time. The last step is action. You have to take action. You actually have to follow through and hire the person you need to hire, get them up to speed and get them doing these tasks. You got to start outsourcing them. You can't just plan it out and say, okay, this person will do this, this person will do this and never actually get them to do it. You have to be fast in implementing because the more you delay, the more time you're wasting. And guess what? You don't have to figure it all out at once. Once you start learning you're wasting time or you're using your time on several different things that you can outsource. Get them started on that, get your EA started on that, get your outsourced help started on that. Then you can put more work on their plate as you learn more and more about your working habits and you refine this until you're absolutely only doing the things you have to do in your business. And that's making decisions. As a leader, your job is to make decisions. And making decisions is not time consuming. It actually is one of those things that may take a few minutes for you to think about and it's done right. But be vigilant about how you use your time. Outsource these tasks because really, that's what a business is. You leveraging your team, your team's time to get a lot done so you don't do it yourself. Otherwise you're just self employed. You're not running a business, you're self employed. You're still working in a job that you created for yourself. Once you learn the power of outsourcing and building a team around these tasks that you shouldn't be doing and is taking your time, you're going to get addicted to it. You're going to start hiring people to take care of all your needs, even your personal needs. You know, you'll start saying, hey, I don't want to do laundry anymore. I'm going to get somebody to come over and do my laundry anymore. You know, I don't like cleaning up in the house. I don't like cooking. You might enjoy cooking and you won't outsource that. But the point here is that you'll start realizing, wow, what a good use of money. Spending it on, gaining back my time. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter RMBA show that wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode is not over because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is N.J. wilson, 32. N.J. wilson, 32 says quick helpful info. Five stars. Great podcast. Really helpful short podcast with loads of helpful information. Thank you. N.J. wilson, 32. Your mission is to email me over@omar00nba.net so we can hook you up with the lifetime membership to easy course, our $500 course over at easycourse co. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. If you're listening and you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating interview to enter our weekly random draw. And while you're there, hit that subscribe button so you automatically get our next episodes as well as access to over 1400 business lessons, our archives. It's the only way to get access and it's absolutely free. So hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this time will always go by. If you look back at the year of 2019, that year went by, it's over now and you can't go back. That time is spent. And we have a limited time on this earth, right? They haven't invented, you know, living forever yet, right? So the point here is, is that, you know, time passes, you know, every day goes by. So if you're not utilizing every minute of your day in a way that you want to utilize it, this is your asset, not somebody else's, then you're really losing the game of life. And this is something it takes a very long time to understand or to really sink in. At least it did for me. But once it does, it like changes the way you see the world and see life. You start to realize real happiness is being able to do what you want when you want. That's freedom. And really that's why we build businesses, right? So we can have that kind of freedom. Yes, we want to make money and we want to fulfill our purpose and supply a great product or service to people to improve their lives. But the benefit for us is to have total control over our time. So start outsourcing so you can start that process. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
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