How Delegating Tasks Can Free Up Your Time, Increase Earnings and Accelerate Your Channel

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

YouTube creators are busy people, made even busier by taking on tasks that they could delegate to others. By not delegating, they end up unintentionally holding themselves back from making more content, saving more time, and staying ahead of the curve. And this doesn’t help them.

In this post, we provide a structure (which the most successful creators use) to approach delegation and to make informed business decisions.

Ready? Here we go.

Firstly, work out your hourly worth.

Many YouTube creators know that their time is probably worth hundreds of dollars per hour, but they often don’t know the exact figure. This leads to them undertaking tasks which they could easily delegate to someone else at the cost of, say, $15-$40 per hour.

Instead of guessing how much your time is worth, if you want to go to the next level, you need to calculate how much your time is worth in order to make clear, confident decisions. The formula is:

And here’s an example:

Note: if you’re one of the many creators with an income that is not as consistent as the one in the example, it would be more accurate to calculate your average revenue, costs, and hours worked across the last 3-12 months. Depending upon your channel’s nature, you might need a longer timeframe. For example, if last month you didn’t receive a brand deal, then it would be unrealistic to use that month alone as your benchmark.

Once you have this figure (hourly worth), that’s where the mindset shift should occur:

You could benefit from acting as if you were spending your hourly fee every moment of your working day. Based on the above example of your time costing $200/hr, this is what that would look like:

• If you spend 30 minutes creating a YouTube thumbnail, you’ve just spent $100 (there are plenty of services to delegate this to)

• If you spend 1 hour emailing about potential business opportunities, you’ve just spent $200 (it may be worth finding an assistant).

• If you spend 5 hours editing your own video, since you don’t yet have an editor, you’ve just spent $1000 (it may be worth finding an editor).

All in all – you have just spent $1300 in six and a half hours.

And before you say, “Well, no, I didn’t, I still have that money”, consider this:

If you could clone yourself and go on vacation for a month while your clone continued creating content and building your career, what hourly rate would you be willing to pay that clone? Would you spend half of your (calculated) hourly rate ($100/hr) to have your clone handle all tasks? You probably would!

So what does this mean?

Clearly, you’d be willing to spend a lot of money per hour to delegate tasks – if your clone did them just as well as you would. In reality, it is possible to find people who can do some of your daily tasks – including creating thumbnails, editing videos, responding to emails and other activities. It may take some effort to find the right individuals or companies to help, but they do exist. Many top creators use this kind of support to help them produce more content in less time, and you can, too.

With this new perspective, does “act as if you are spending your hourly fee every moment of your working day” feel more real? It does, right? But we must remember that, while delegating, it is important to choose the right people.

Since we’re a post-production company, let’s look at a more in-depth example related to video editing:

Your time is worth $200/hr and you have 2 service options:

• Stand-alone editor: They charge $15/hr, and each time this editor sends a video to you, 2 revisions are needed. The reviewing process plus communication will likely use 1 hour (or more) of your time for each video.
• Post-production company: They charge $35/hr and each time the company sends a video to you, 1 revision is needed. The reviewing process plus communication will likely use up to 15 minutes of your time for each video.

Say it took each of them 4 hours to complete the same video: which is the better option? Let’s compare the costs:

With a company, not only are you saving valuable time (both for business and leisure) but, from this new mindset, you’re actually profiting more by going with a higher quality service that saves as much of your time as possible. You also create more headspace for yourself to concentrate on generating more ideas and discovering new opportunities.

And the above calculation doesn’t even take into consideration the improved reliability, consistency, quality, turnaround time, and many other benefits you often get by working with the right company.

To round up, then, this is the fundamental mindset shift that we’re suggesting:

From: “My time is worth around $200 per hour.”

To: “For each hour of my workday that I spend doing something, I spend $200. I could pay other people less money to do those things. So these are the activities that I am going to delegate: …”

We know it can be uncomfortable to delegate sometimes, but with the above concepts and examples in mind, we’ve hopefully helped you understand the overall benefits that delegation has to offer.

If you’re having difficulty believing someone else can edit your videos in your style, or want an example of a creator applying the above concept, it may be worth watching MrBeast talk about this topic here. It is a 3 minute segment, from 4:37 – 7:50, and he talks about delegation and why you should work with video editors. Also, here (49:15 – 51:11) is Preston talking about delegating and working with editors.

Thanks for coming by!

NC team

Tags: Video Editor, Time Management, Growth, Now Creatives, Creator, Editing, Delegating