The First 10 Tasks You Should Delegate to a Virtual Assistant
Most business owners know they should be delegating more. They say it in quarterly planning meetings, write it into their goals, and then spend Sunday evening manually updating a spreadsheet because "it's faster to just do it myself."
The problem isn't motivation. It's that delegation feels abstract until you see a specific list of specific tasks with specific time estimates attached to each one. So that's exactly what this is: a concrete delegation audit you can run on your own calendar this week, anchored by the ten tasks that deliver the fastest time recovery when you hand them to a virtual assistant.
The total recoverable time across all ten categories: 36–52 hours per week. That's a full-time job's worth of hours currently sitting inside your workweek, waiting to be freed up.
The Delegation Audit Framework
Before you hand anything off, you need to know what you're actually spending time on. This week, keep a running log — five minutes at the end of each day — of every task you completed. Mark each one as either "only I can do this" or "someone trained for this could do this." Most business owners are shocked to find that 60–70% of their weekly hours fall into the second category.
That second category is your delegation list. The ten tasks below are your starting point. Tally your own estimated hours as you read — by the end of this post, you'll know your number.
Task 1: Email Triage and Inbox Management
Time saved: 5–7 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Email is the single largest time drain for most executives and founders. Research consistently puts professional email time at 2–3 hours per day — that's 10–15 hours per week before you've done a single dollar of billable work. A trained VA reduces this to the few minutes it takes to review flagged items and approve pre-drafted replies.
Your VA handles this by building a triage system tailored to your communication: flagging emails that require your direct response, archiving the rest, drafting replies in your voice for one-click approval, unsubscribing from low-value lists, setting up filters that surface priority messages automatically, and following up on outstanding threads so nothing gets buried.
The goal isn't a zero-inbox. The goal is an inbox where everything you see genuinely requires your attention. A VA makes that distinction every single day so you don't have to.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 2: Calendar and Scheduling Management
Time saved: 3–4 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Scheduling is deceptively expensive. Every "does Tuesday at 2pm work for you?" exchange burns 5–10 minutes across multiple messages. Multiply that by 10–15 scheduling conversations per week and you've spent an hour just booking meetings — before attending a single one.
A VA manages your calendar end-to-end: handling all inbound scheduling requests without pulling you into the back-and-forth, protecting the deep work blocks you've designated, sending confirmations and agendas to attendees, rescheduling conflicts without requiring your involvement, and coordinating across time zones without you doing the conversion math. You tell your VA your calendar rules once. They enforce them every day.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 3: Data Entry and CRM Updates
Time saved: 4–6 hours per week
THC service category: Sales Growth Services
CRMs are only as useful as the data inside them. Most founders know this and still leave contact records incomplete, follow-up dates blank, and deal stages stagnant — because updating the CRM feels like administrative punishment after every sales call. The result is a pipeline that looks active but doesn't reflect reality, and a sales review built on guesswork.
A VA solves this by logging call notes and updating deal stages after every meeting, adding new contacts from business cards and LinkedIn connections, flagging dormant leads for re-engagement based on your defined criteria, running weekly CRM hygiene reports to surface gaps, and ensuring pipeline data is current before every sales review. Clean CRM data produces better forecasting, better follow-up rates, and better close rates. It also opens the door to more sophisticated sales growth services once your VA understands your pipeline rhythm.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 4: Social Media Posting and Engagement
Time saved: 5–8 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Consistent social media presence is a competitive necessity for most businesses in 2025, but the actual execution — writing captions, formatting graphics, scheduling posts, responding to comments, pulling analytics — is almost never the highest-value use of a founder's time. If you're personally managing your social channels, you're functioning as a part-time content coordinator on top of everything else.
A VA handles this by repurposing content you've already created (podcast clips, articles, client case studies, recorded talks) into platform-appropriate posts, scheduling across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X using tools like Buffer or Later, responding to comments and DMs using approved templates, monitoring brand mentions and flagging anything requiring your attention, and pulling weekly engagement metrics. You set the strategy and the voice. Your VA executes consistently, every week, without you thinking about it daily.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 5: Invoicing and Expense Tracking
Time saved: 3–4 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Late invoices and disorganized expenses are quiet margin killers. A VA who manages your billing workflow ensures that money you've already earned actually gets collected, and that your books aren't a monthly scramble before your accountant asks for them.
Tasks include generating and sending invoices on your defined schedule, following up on overdue accounts with escalation flagging for persistent non-payers, categorizing and logging expenses in your accounting software (QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks), reconciling receipts against credit card statements, and preparing monthly expense summaries for your bookkeeper. This is one of the most immediately satisfying delegations because the financial impact — faster collection cycles, fewer missed invoices — becomes measurable within the first billing cycle. For businesses that need full financial operations beyond invoicing, our dedicated bookkeeping VA services cover QuickBooks management, reconciliation, payroll support, and monthly reporting.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 6: Lead Research and List Building
Time saved: 5–7 hours per week
THC service category: Sales Growth Services
Prospecting is essential. The research that feeds prospecting is almost entirely delegatable. A VA builds targeted lead lists, researches prospect companies before outreach, and prepares pre-call briefs so your sales conversations are informed and start from context rather than cold.
Tasks include building prospect lists from LinkedIn, industry directories, and public databases; researching target companies for size, funding status, recent news, and decision-maker contact information; preparing one-page pre-call briefs for your sales team; maintaining and deduplicating your lead database on a rolling basis; and identifying trigger events — funding announcements, leadership changes, job postings — that signal buying intent. The ROI calculator on our website lets you model the exact time and revenue impact of delegating lead research. For businesses with an active sales motion, this is consistently one of the highest-leverage delegations on this list.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 7: Customer Support Email Responses
Time saved: 4–6 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
If you're personally responding to every customer support email, you're functioning as a customer service representative — not as the owner of a business. Most customer support questions are variations of five to ten recurring issues. A VA learns your approved responses and handles the vast majority independently, without escalation.
Your VA handles support by triaging emails by urgency and issue type, responding to common questions using approved templates written in your voice, escalating edge cases or genuinely dissatisfied customers directly to you, logging common issues so you can identify systemic problems worth fixing, and following up on unresolved tickets to ensure closure. The key is building a response playbook in the first two weeks. After that, your VA manages the queue independently and you only see what genuinely requires your judgment.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 8: Travel Booking and Coordination
Time saved: 2–3 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Business travel planning is a textbook example of high-effort, low-judgment work. Every part of it — flight searches, hotel comparisons, ground transportation, restaurant reservations, itinerary consolidation — can be executed by someone who knows your preferences and handles the logistics without requiring your involvement at each step.
A VA books flights within your budget and loyalty program preferences, secures hotels at your preferred chains with loyalty numbers attached, coordinates ground transportation and airport transfers, builds a consolidated travel itinerary with all confirmation numbers in one document, and manages changes and rebooking when plans shift. For executives in a city like Austin, where conference travel and regional business trips are near-weekly realities, this single delegation can recover 3+ hours per week across the year.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 9: Document Formatting and File Organization
Time saved: 2–3 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Polished documents and organized file systems don't happen by accident — they happen because someone spent time making them that way. That someone does not need to be you.
A VA formats proposals, reports, and presentations to your brand standards, converts documents between formats (PDF, Word, Google Docs, PowerPoint), organizes shared drives with consistent folder structures and naming conventions, archives completed project files so active folders stay navigable, and updates templates and slide decks when branding elements change. Business owners rarely track how much time they spend "just cleaning up this doc" — but across a week, those minutes add up to hours, and across a year they add up to thousands of dollars of your own time spent on tasks that don't require you.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Task 10: Meeting Prep and Follow-Up Notes
Time saved: 3–4 hours per week
THC service category: Back-Office VA Services
Meetings without preparation are expensive. Meetings without documented follow-up lose most of their value within 48 hours. A VA wraps both ends of every meeting so you walk in prepared and walk out with action items already captured, formatted, and distributed.
Your VA pulls background research on attendees and their organizations before external meetings, prepares agendas based on the meeting objective and your input, attends virtual meetings to take notes (with appropriate attendee disclosure), formats meeting summaries and distributes them within 24 hours, and tracks action item completion with follow-up reminders to owners. For executives running 8–12 meetings per week, the compounding effect of better-prepared, better-documented meetings is significant. Decisions get made faster. Follow-through improves. Context doesn't have to be repeated from meeting to meeting.
Your audit number: _____ hours/week
Your Total: The Delegation Audit Summary
| Task | Weekly Hours Saved |
|---|---|
| Email triage and inbox management | 5–7 hrs |
| Calendar and scheduling management | 3–4 hrs |
| Data entry and CRM updates | 4–6 hrs |
| Social media posting and engagement | 5–8 hrs |
| Invoicing and expense tracking | 3–4 hrs |
| Lead research and list building | 5–7 hrs |
| Customer support email responses | 4–6 hrs |
| Travel booking and coordination | 2–3 hrs |
| Document formatting and file organization | 2–3 hrs |
| Meeting prep and follow-up notes | 3–4 hrs |
| Total | 36–52 hrs/week |
Add up the hours you wrote next to each task. That's your personal delegation audit number. If it's above 10 hours per week, a part-time VA at $700/month is almost certainly worth it on pure time-cost math alone. If it's above 20 hours per week, a full-time VA at $1,300/month is a straightforward decision.
At THC's full-time rate, you're recovering 36–52 hours per week. If your time is worth $100/hour — a conservative figure for most founders — that's $3,600–$5,200 per week in recovered capacity. The math on $1,300/month is hard to argue with.
How to Sequence Your Delegations
Don't hand off all ten categories at once. Here's the sequence that works consistently:
Weeks 1–2: Start with email triage and calendar management. These two tasks have the most immediate daily impact and give your VA a chance to learn your communication style and scheduling preferences with low operational risk.
Weeks 3–4: Add CRM updates and customer support email responses. By now your VA understands your voice and can handle customer-facing communication with minimal oversight.
Month 2: Introduce social media, document formatting, and lead research. These tasks benefit from the institutional knowledge your VA has built in the first month.
Month 3 and beyond: Full handoff across all ten categories, with your VA running independently and your Client Manager handling quality oversight. You check in weekly, not daily, and only see what genuinely requires your decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which tasks to delegate first?
Start with the tasks you do most frequently and resent the most. High-frequency, low-judgment tasks are the easiest to hand off and deliver the fastest time recovery. Email and calendar management are almost universally the right starting point because they touch every other area of your day. If you're unsure where to begin, track your hours for one week — the pattern becomes obvious quickly, and the tasks that belong on your VA's plate will be apparent.
Can a VA handle tasks across multiple categories?
Yes. At THC, your dedicated VA is trained across administrative, sales support, and operational categories. The categories above are organizational — your VA doesn't work in silos. A single VA can manage your inbox in the morning, update your CRM after your noon calls, and schedule social posts in the afternoon. That breadth is a core part of the value of a dedicated managed VA versus a freelancer who specializes in a single area.
How long does it take for a VA to get fully up to speed?
For straightforward tasks like email triage and scheduling: one to two weeks. For more nuanced work like customer support responses and CRM management: two to four weeks. By the end of month one, a well-onboarded VA should be running independently on most routine tasks with minimal check-ins. THC's Client Manager manages this ramp-up actively, so you're not left figuring out the onboarding process on your own.
Still doing all ten? That's a full-time job that isn't yours. Book a free 15-minute strategy call and get matched with a dedicated VA within 48 hours — we'll build your delegation plan together in the first session.