A Data-Based Approach to Delegating

Over the 20 years I have spent coaching executives, there is one topic that comes up at almost every level of leadership: delegation. Most leaders know that they should be delegating, and many of them know how to do so. The stumbling block that holds most leaders back is knowing what to delegate.

When I ask executives, “What, according to you, should you delegate?” I can see them scanning their memories for tasks they would be comfortable handing over to someone else. Rarely have I seen them come up with anything significant. As a result, they talk about giving up a few low-risk activities but miss the opportunity to hand over anything substantive and meaningful. The truth is: Many senior leaders carry out tasks that might appear seemingly small but are surprisingly time consuming, and the value they generate isn’t proportional to the time spent on them. In essence, these tasks rob senior leaders of valuable time that can be spent on more strategic, higher ROI activities.

To help my clients give visibility into (and measure) these tasks, I ask them to use a classic time management tool for identifying inefficiency and redundancy: a time log. Instead of relying on a leader’s memory, a time log presents data of where their time is actually being spent.

Consider the example of a CFO (let’s call him Mike) I was recently coaching. Mike had been promoted from a corporate controller position internally. He knew at a conceptual level that he should be reallocating how he spent his time but was struggling to identify what he could delegate to his team. Once he had two weeks of time log data, he quickly recognized all of the tasks he carried forward from his old job into his new one. There were some reports that he was still running for the CEO, as well as some reconciliation tasks that he had not gotten around to teaching his new controller how to perform. He also spotted several meetings he was attending that would be better attended by a member of his team. In all, Mike found about 20 hours a month of activities (tasks and meetings) that he could delegate. He learned so much from keeping his own time log that he asked each of his direct reports to do the same.

While a time log might feel tedious, it can be a very effective way to start freeing up your day for more strategic work. If you’re ready to put this into action, I recommend approaching this exercise in four steps: capture, analyze, delegate, reflect.

Capture

Start by creating a spreadsheet and dividing the workday into 15-minute increments. Some people fine tune this with 10-minute blocks, others broaden it to 30 minutes. Those are okay, too, but I do not suggest going all the way up to 60 minutes, as a lot of the smaller tasks will start to get lost.

While there are excellent apps out there for time tracking, many of them have a decent-sized learning curve that results in leaders giving up before they get going. If you have an app that you like and will reliably use, you should do that. Otherwise, the humble spreadsheet is an easy tool most of us know how to use.

Once you have created your log, take some time, two to three times a day, to reconstruct how you spent your time over the prior two to four hours (yes, this can feel a lot, but it reaps benefits in the long term). Anything that took longer than five minutes goes into the log, including people dropping by with a question, lengthy text exchanges, reading reports, and meetings you attended. For the first week, just capture everything; don’t start analyzing your data yet. You want to get a realistic accounting of what you are doing without judgment. Also, try to add to your log multiple times each day instead of waiting until the end of the day (or the next day). Most of us can’t remember what we had for lunch yesterday, let alone how long we spent answering questions when someone dropped by.

Analyze

Once you have at least two weeks of data, start reviewing how you spent your time. Categorize the tasks into the following four categories:

Should delegate. These are tasks that could be handed over to someone else without too much difficulty. Don’t be surprised by the number of tasks you see here. For example, you might be preparing monthly or quarterly reports (like Mike was) or attending meetings that should actually be your direct report’s responsibility. These may even be carry over tasks you brought with you from a prior role or tasks you inherited from your predecessor that you never questioned.

Could delegate. These are tasks that could be given to someone else, but giving them up could take some time and effort. You may realize that some of these tasks are on your plate because you feel like there isn’t anyone on your team who has enough skills or experience to do the task, which leads to you keeping it. For example, a different CFO I coach (Tina) would prepare the annual budget presentations for the company president herself because she worried that her employees did not have enough expertise or experience with such reports and wouldn’t complete them to her standards. I had to point out that they weren’t going to learn how to prepare the presentations if she kept doing it for them. And the good news is that taking time to teach someone to do something generally pays off within a few weeks or months (depending on the activity), both in terms of reallocating your time and growing your people.

Should not delegate. These tasks are core to your job and rely on your skill set and position to be effectively executed. If you are able to delegate tasks in the other two categories, you will have more time to spend on these activities. For example, a CEO I coached lamented that he didn’t have any “strategic thinking” time because of all of the demands on him. He felt like he was constantly working in the business and never had time to work on the business like his predecessor and mentor had. When he started delegating some of the tasks that were consuming his time, he was able to schedule 90 minutes with himself every week to review financial projections, read industry publications, and refine his vision for his business.

Automate or eliminate. This final category is for those tasks that shouldn’t be done by you or your employees. They are either vestigial tasks or meetings that should be eliminated from your day or tasks that could be automated, perhaps by an app or with the help of artificial intelligence. Tasks that fall under these could include meetings where your attendance isn’t really necessary, status updates that no one reads, or manual analysis that could be programmed. For instance, if you can get other work done during a meeting without negatively impacting the quality of the meeting, you probably don’t need to be there.

Delegate

Armed with this data, it is time to create a list of responsibilities that you need to delegate. My clients usually start with what is in the “should delegate” category and make a plan to bring someone else in to take them over.

Begin by selecting someone whose strengths, interests, and/or developmental goals align with the task. Then, make some notes on the task and gather examples or materials that would help the person get up to speed. Finally, schedule a little time to gauge interest, review the task, communicate expectations, and invite questions.

The time such a transition will take depends on both the task and the employee’s readiness to take it on. More complex tasks, especially those on the “could delegate” list, probably need a longer plan with additional times to touch base. You may actually perform the task together the first few times before you start to back out of doing it.

In addition, you may want to delegate meetings that you have historically been a part of, but don’t really need to be at anymore. Meetings also merit some preparation and explanation. So, you may want to prepare notes on what the overall purpose of the meeting is, what is expected of the employees who attend it, why you have continued to attend the meeting, or what you’d like to be made aware of after the meeting once you stop attending it. Like the “could delegate” tasks, you may attend a few meetings with the person you’re delegating the meeting(s) to and answer any questions they may have before you back out of the meeting entirely.

Throughout the whole process, you’ll want to be aware of the temptation to take tasks back, especially at the first sign of a mistake or hesitation. When Tina, the CFO I worked with, delegated the annual budget presentations, she actually took the day off when her team was working on it and went to a movie so she wouldn’t be tempted to check up on them. I’m not saying everyone should go to the movies when they delegate a task, but you should remember one thing in times like these: you probably weren’t as good when you first started performing the task as you are today.

Reflect

The last step in the process is to analyze how you have reallocated your time. After, say, two months, you may consider restarting your time log for a few weeks to calculate the return on your delegation investment. At the very least, you can look at your original time log and add up how much time the meetings and tasks took before and what replaced them. That is how the CFO, Mike, identified the 20 hours a month he had been spending on the tasks he delegated.

If you want to get granular on the return on investment from keeping the time log, multiply the hours the delegated tasks used to take you by an estimate of what your hourly pay is (the value of your total compensation divided by the number of hours you work in a year). Assuming you are paid more than the person to whom you delegated, you will be able to see how much value you created by moving that work over so you can focus on more strategic work.

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Data mined from time logs can be supremely useful for deciding what you should and could delegate. One benefit of using this tool is how it changes your view of the tasks that you have in front of you. The other? You actually end up making space for more strategic things that should consume your day and have an impact on how business functions.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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