Deanna Maio works 7 hours per day, 4 days per week during three quarters of the year, and only 3 hours per day, 4 days per week during the summer. She runs a profitable 6-figure business, with a side career as a musician. How does she do that? Her secret is the “delegated to done” formula, which she shared during this month’s SkillBites Show.

The delegated to done formula consists of a 5 step process:

1. Create a high performance plan, beginning with identifying your vision or dream for both your personal life and your professional career, as well as identifying what you are currently doing that don’t really want to continue doing. With respect to these tasks, determine what you would like to do with those tasks – delegate them to someone else; eliminate them; or automate them.
2. Streamline your processes so you can create more order to go further, faster. Find ways to automate what you are doing, particularly in the following areas:
   1. Communications
   2. Scheduling
   3. Information management
   4. Managing tasks, projects and staff
   For example, take email. This is one of the biggest time suckers for most people. Streamlining your time reviewing email can save you at least 30 minutes every day. Consider the following 3 tips for streamlining your email review: (a) limit your review of email to 3 times per day for up to 30 minutes each time, using a timer to notify you when your 30 minutes is up; (b) spend at least 1 hour in a revenue generating activity prior to your first email review period; and (c) have someone else go through your email to weed out the emails that you don’t need to focus on.
3. Systematize your work and processes. Document everything that needs to happen on a recurring basis. You’ll get more consistency, efficiency and quality, and it will make it much easier to scale your business. To get started, you can write out the steps, or you can use a tool such as Jing to video someone doing the process or you can record yourself talking through the steps. For example, if you want to increase the likelihood that a prospect will keep an appointment, you will want to have a process in place to remind the prospect of the appointment and get the prospect “warmed up” and interested.
4. Build a dream team. You need to have the right people in place to be able to delegate work so you can “stay in your brilliance” and grow your business. This consists of two components: selecting the right people in the first place and then managing them properly. You need to be clear on what help you need, how much budget you have and where to find the best people. Because it takes a lot of time to hire someone, you want to make sure you hire the right person so you don’t have to go through the hiring process again soon. If you have multiple good candidates, ask them to perform a task for you, such as writing a blog post, proofreading a document or doing research, even if that won’t be part of their job. You can learn a lot from evaluating their work on that task.
5. Lead the culture of your company. As the leader, you need to set the direction and the strategy for achieving your vision. You need to keep your staff inspired, motivated and aligned with your vision. And you need to leverage the strengths of each person on your staff.

Deanna offers a self-study program that delves into considerably more detail on these 5 steps, and has a live program twice a year on this. She also offers private intensive coaching and private consulting. For anyone desiring to have a conversation with Deanna, go to chatwithdeanna.com to schedule an appointment. Deanna also offered a report of the top 10 apps for managing tasks, normally a $27 value, for free. Just go to top10appsto7figures.com to obtain that report.