The £10 Tasks That Are Costing You £100 an Hour

Quick question. What's your time actually worth?

Not in a deep, philosophical sense. In a practical, "this is what I charge clients" sense. If you bill at £500 a day, that's about £62 an hour. At £750, it's £94. If you're a consultant charging £1,000 a day, every hour of your time is worth £125.

Now think about how you spent this morning.

The most expensive free work you'll ever do

Admin doesn't feel expensive. Answering emails costs nothing. Formatting a document takes ten minutes. Updating a spreadsheet is quick. No single task feels like a problem.

But they stack up. An hour here, two hours there, and by Friday you've burned five or six hours on work that doesn't require your brain, your judgement, or your client relationships. Work that someone else could do perfectly well at a fraction of your rate.

Let's do the maths on that. Six hours a week at £62 an hour is £372 in lost revenue. Every week. That's roughly £1,500 a month. Over a year, it's north of £19,000.

Nineteen thousand pounds. On formatting proposals and chasing diary confirmations.

That's not a rounding error. That's someone's salary. That's your entire marketing budget for the year. That's a lot of money to spend on work that a good VA could handle for £300 a month.

The tasks that genuinely don't need you

I know you know this. But reading the list still stings a bit. How many of these are you still doing?

Email. You open your inbox at 8am with good intentions. By 10am you've been sucked into twelve threads, replied to seven, and haven't started the thing you actually sat down to do. Most of what's in there is routine. Acknowledgements, scheduling, follow-ups, simple enquiries. Maybe 20% of your inbox genuinely needs you. The other 80% needs someone competent with access to your calendar and a decent understanding of your tone.

Scheduling. Finding a time that works. Sending the invite. Rescheduling when it inevitably moves. Rescheduling again when the other person forgets. This is not difficult work. It's just relentless. And it interrupts whatever you're actually trying to concentrate on.

Document formatting. You write the proposal. You know the content inside out. Then you spend 45 minutes making it look presentable because the fonts are wrong and the headings don't match and the logo is slightly pixelated. The thinking was the valuable bit. The formatting was not.

Invoicing. Creating them, sending them, chasing them, tracking who's paid and who's gone suspiciously quiet. Essential for cash flow. Not essential that the founder does it personally.

Social media. You know you should be posting regularly. You know consistency matters. And yet every week the same thing happens: you mean to post something, get busy, and don't. The strategy needs your brain. The writing, scheduling, and posting really doesn't.

Research. Comparing software tools, checking competitor pricing, finding suppliers. The kind of work where you open three tabs, then seventeen, then lose an entire morning. You need the information. You don't need to be the one gathering it.

Travel. Flights, hotels, transfers, restaurants. You could brief someone in five minutes and get costed options back within the hour. Instead you spend half a day cross-referencing TripAdvisor reviews while your actual work sits untouched.

CRM updates. Your pipeline should be a useful picture of where things stand. In reality it's a graveyard of stale contacts you update once every few weeks out of guilt. Someone maintaining it properly means it actually works as a tool. What a concept.

Filing. Your Google Drive is a mess. You know it's a mess. Finding anything takes longer than it should, and every so often you lose something entirely. A logical folder structure takes a few hours to set up and an hour a month to maintain. It is profoundly not a founder-level task.

"But nobody does it as well as me"

I hear this a lot. And look, it might even be true. For the first week.

But the benchmark isn't "as perfectly as I would do it if I had unlimited time." The benchmark is "done properly, done consistently, done on time."

Because let's be honest about what "doing it yourself" actually looks like in practice. The proposal goes out three days late. Social media goes quiet for a fortnight. The CRM hasn't been touched since February. You're not delivering your high standards. You're delivering late, inconsistent, or not at all, because you're one person trying to do fifteen jobs.

A good VA learns your style fast. Within a couple of weeks they know your voice, your preferences, how you like things structured. And they do it every single time, without it competing with the rest of your workload. Consistent and reliable beats brilliant-but-sporadic. Every time.

A challenge, if you're up for it

For the next two weeks, keep a simple log of how you spend your time. End of each day, jot down what you did and roughly how long it took. Nothing fancy. A Notes app is fine.

After the fortnight, sort everything into three buckets:

1. Only I can do this (client work, strategy, relationships)

2. Someone else could handle this (admin, formatting, research, scheduling)

3. Why am I still doing this? (tasks that exist out of habit, not necessity)

Most founders find that bucket two is 60 to 70% of their list. Not because they're bad at time management. Because they're the only person there.

Once you see that number in black and white, it's quite hard to unsee it. The tasks are worth £10 an hour. You're worth a lot more. Something's got to give.

Curious what could come off your plate? A discovery call is a decent place to start. 30 minutes, free, and focused entirely on your situation. Book a free discovery call