Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the importance of stepping into “CEO energy”  by eliminating low-value tasks (otherwise known as “$20 tasks”) that drain your energy and hinder your productivity. You’ll get a reality check on what those tasks look like and why you need to focus on high-leverage actions, strategic decision-making, and relationship building. 

Tune in to learn the significance of reassessing responsibilities, automating tasks, and establishing routines to maintain true “CEO energy.” You’ll walk away with a better understanding of where your priorities should be, as well as a list of actionable steps towards delegating and automating tasks to enhance your leadership effectiveness!

Key Highlights:

• Every time you say “yes” to a $20 task, you're saying “no” to a $2,000 idea.
• Master the art of strategic time allocation and learn to protect your energy for high-impact activities that drive business evolution.
• Transform your calendar into a CEO-level powerhouse by prioritizing deep work, strategy sessions, and relationship building.
• Discover the triple-threat approach to task management: Eliminate, automate, and delegate to unlock your leadership potential.
• Create sustainable CEO systems through intentional routines and empowered team dynamics that scale your impact.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

Thanks for listening!

If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!

Subscribe to the podcast

If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

Leave us an Apple Podcast review

Ratings and reviews from our listeners are really valuable and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about CEO energy and why you shouldn't be doing $20 tasks anymore. That is no longer your job. I'm firing you from doing these things. So before we dive in, I wanted to just have you think about something before we go through

What are these $20 tasks? Why are they really costing you a whole lot more than that? And then how do we step into CEO energy and release some of these lower level things? So every time you say yes to a $20 task, you're saying no to a $2,000 idea. Think about that. Every time you do these little tasks, there are bigger and better things

that you could be spending your time and your energy on creating, that would truly move the needle in your business and make a huge difference in your capacity for growth. Because the truth is, is that low value tasks are draining your energy and capacity. So I even think about this in my own life because inevitably I'm not perfect. I get pulled into reactive mode from time to time or

I have smaller tasks that end up on my plate, even though I have a full team and an executive assistant. What I find is when I have these days where I'm in reactive mode, or if I have these days where I am just doing all the tasks and trying to check things off of my list, I find that I'm really tired at the end of the day. Then often, I go back at the end of the day and I'm like, what did I do today? Because it just added up to a whole bunch of

not a lot. When I say not a lot, I mean not a big project that got completed or not a new offer that we want to create and roll out. I didn't have a good conversation with a referral partner. None of these things that are super important to me as the CEO of my company actually happened. It's just like somebody just rained all over my day and the time just evaporated.

and I'm just feeling really, really tired. So today, we're going to help you identify your energy leaks and reclaim your role as the visionary leader of your company. So first things first, what exactly is CEO energy? So if you've been following this podcast for a long time, you could probably answer this, but I want to recap this just to kind of clarify where we want to be spending our time, the things that we want to be thinking about.

So this is clear thinking. This is high leverage action. This is confident decision-making. This is vision casting. This is having a very clear vision for where the business is headed. This is having that clarity of direction and being able to ultimately lead your company and organization. And as the CEO of your company, your energy is the most valuable and limited resource that you have.

And so when we think about the cost of $20 tasks, and these can add up really, really quickly and significantly over time. So some examples of $20 tasks, email. I can spend an entire day in email. If I am procrastinating, where maybe my perfectionism is coming in, or I have decision fatigue, I can just sit in email and I can just ping pong. They come in, I respond, they come in, I respond.

I can spend all day in that easily or have most of my day eaten up by miscellaneous emails coming in. And the truth is, it really doesn't make a huge difference to my bottom line. Scheduling meetings is another example. Formatting your email newsletters or making a quick tweak on your website or, you know, there's just so many miscellaneous tasks that happen throughout the course of a given day or week or month.

that you could probably think of so many more examples of this, but it's the necessary things that need to get done, but it's also not necessarily your job, doesn't have to be your job in order to do those things. Because we also, in addition to the cost of how this adds up over time, we also think about lost momentum. Another day went by that I did not work on my signature talk to launch my speaking career.

or another day went by and I did not reach out to my potential customers for this new offer that we have coming up. Time goes by. Time is going to pass no matter what, but it's really up to us in terms of what we're doing with it. And if we're just filling that with the busy work and not on the bigger picture things as the CEO of our companies, we're losing momentum.

The other thing is that gets lost in this is just that clarity and that decision making is just greatly reduced because you can get decision fatigue really, really easily dealing with all the different reactive mode things like email or when questions are coming up from the team. That's another one. And I love my team. Don't get me wrong. And we've done a lot to help empower them so that they have the answers and they can just make decisions. But, you know, certainly there are days where we have something that just goes sideways and we're all

jumping in and trying to figure out like, what do we do with this? How is this best going to be solved for our client? How do we want to support our team member in this? It's very easy when you have just so much coming at you throughout the course of a day, you're like, I cannot make any more decisions today. I'm just so tired. And then the other thing to think about too, especially if you're leading a team, when you operate like a task runner, you are dulling your leadership edge. You are a worker bee, just like everyone else.

I do have respect for the CEOs who are very hands-on. They are very approachable. They know their team very, very well, and they are involved in the work that their team is doing. But there is a difference between the ones who just get in and start doing all the doing and maybe even taking some work off their team's plate. There's a mismatch in terms of roles and expectations when that happens to

a greater extent. So what should you be prioritizing? So as the CEO of your company or organization, you should be doing things like strategy and innovation. You should be building relationships, not only with your own team, which we'll talk more about in a second, but also potential referral partners or collaborators. want to build up our networks. want to, but we don't want, so we want to, we want to,

build up our networks, but we also wanna nurture our networks. We don't wanna just meet 500 people at an event one evening and not actually know any of them. We want to be connecting with others in our community, getting to know them, getting to know other leaders, or again, potential collaborators where it's like, hey, we serve a similar clientele, you serve them this way, I serve them this way. What are some opportunities where we can really make an impact together?

having those relationship building priorities are important for a CEO. And high level decision making. We don't wanna worry about what color t-shirt we should all be wearing on Thursdays. We wanna be worried about how do we get our clients better results in a shorter amount of time and be able to serve them at a higher level. We wanna be thinking about bigger picture things or

Is there an opportunity to maybe update some of our technology so that we're able to do our work in less time and also serve our clients to a greater capacity? These are high level decisions, not what are we gonna have as the company snack on Thursday, little things like that. Developing your team is a big one, certainly.

Having regular one-on-ones with key members of your team is going to be really, really important. Again, growing those relationships, but also building that trust and also identifying what their goals are and what are they best at so that you can continue to funnel work their way that really energizes them. Certainly vision setting as well is taking a look at big picture. Here's ultimately what we're creating. Here's ultimately what we're trying to do at our company or organization.

So when we think about the things we should be prioritizing, we're gonna take this a step further now. And some of you are gonna feel seen. I know I might feel seen as well. Some weeks for me are better than others. What does your calendar say about your priorities? If you pulled out your calendar and just did a brief audit from say the last couple of weeks or the last couple of months, would your calendar reflect the priorities you should have as a CEO?

What about your to-do list? Are you doing just kind of miscellaneous busy work? Are you going to do that LinkedIn post or are you going to send a follow-up email to so-and-so? Do you just have a lot on your to-do list that doesn't necessarily reflect CEO priorities? So take a look at this, dig into this. And I have, certainly if you want to dig into this further, especially on the calendar audit front,

we need to reconsider what's on your plate. So we want to run this through the filter of, know, here are my priorities and then here's everything else. So the everything else that doesn't necessarily fit into CEO priorities and feeds CEO energy, we want to look at, is there anything that can just be eliminated completely? Like, you know what, this project is not a priority right now, or I really do not need to necessarily get involved.

with that particular group at this time. Just giving you some high level examples. Are there things that we could just kind of cross off the list completely where it just now is not the right time or just it does not need to get done? And then we can take a look at, are there some things that can be automated where I'm not specifically doing this work, but I also don't have my team doing unnecessarily manual work either. So we can take a look at opportunities to automate.

Again, I have lots of episodes on automations and things as well that you can look back on for more details there. What can we delegate? What can I hand off to other people as their existing team members who can take this on? Do we need to maybe add a position or a role on the team in order to get this type of work done? And here's the most important thing. You might be thinking, my gosh, I'm going to make so many challenges or so many changes.

So quickly, I'm going to be saying no to this. I'm going to be automating that. I'm going to be hiring a new role for this. Just take a step back because you can start small, but you need to be able to grow your automation in your delegation consistently and continuously. I think I've shared here on the podcast before that one of the first things that I personally outsourced was social media, because what would happen is

that I would spend a significant amount of time writing one post, right? It's not something that comes naturally to me. This was before AI tools. This was several years ago at this point. And so I would find that I would either take a significant amount of time and I would have, in my opinion, a beautiful social media post perfectly written, and then I post it, and then a month goes by and...

I was busy doing other things in the business and, shoot, I haven't posted on social media in a month. And then we have kind of this feast and famine cycle. So one of the first things that I did was hire somebody to do my social media posts. And I think at that point it was even small enough where they were just bulk writing a set of posts that I could even schedule, right? And then eventually I had somebody completely handling my social media where they were

you know, having me review and then they would schedule for me. And then now I have, you know, a whole marketing team that helps me to manage this podcast and create social media content, write blogs, write email newsletters and all the different things. have a full team helping me now. The point is, that you can start small, but don't stay there as soon as, you know, something is going well. Add on one more, add on one more, or I'm also going to...

delegate this now, or I'm gonna hire that out now. So we wanna make sure that we are continuing to evolve. And then lastly, we wanna operate from CEO energy every day. So we've gotten clear on what that energy looks like, what those priorities should be. We have talked about how do we get out from under all the other things that kind of wind up on our plates over time. So what we wanna do now,

In order to stay in that CEO energy as much as possible, we want to establish morning and evening routines. Evening routines might be kind of a new thing for you. I know I've talked about morning routines plenty. There are so many podcasts and so many resources on creating your ultimate morning routine where maybe you're doing some mindfulness, meditation, maybe you're doing some exercise and you're fueling your body, you're getting ready for the day.

But the other thing that I've been focusing more on lately has been evening routines as well. Because if I can get a wind down routine that I am reducing my screen time at night and I am letting my brain and my body relax before bed, I'm getting better sleep. And then what does that help with during the day? Better CEO energy because I'm not tired. I'm not out of react mode. I'm thinking more clearly. So morning, evening routines, take a look at those.

Making sure that you have deep work time blocked in your calendar. So you want that CEO time. You want to prioritize that where nobody is meeting with you. Nobody's interrupting you at least for even starting with one hour per week of heads down CEO time and certainly increase from there. Continue increasing from there. That is one way you can start small and just kind of keep building on that. And then

Also thinking about empowering your team to own outcomes and to take full ownership of the things that you are assigning to them, right? Because we don't want to hand off work and then be micromanaging it because that keeps us kind of in that lower level, reviewing, monitoring, tweaking, that micromanaging. We don't want that. We want to say, you know what, I want you to head up my marketing and you and I are going to meet, you

once a week or once a month to review metrics. We're going to put together ideas, figure out what's working, what could be working better, but I want you to oversee my marketing. Eventually what we want to do is we want to get to a point where we have point people on the team who are overseeing some of these major aspects of the business, and then you can just review and maybe offer some direction on an ongoing basis in a recurring

schedule that you guys decide would make sense. Is it a Monday stand-up? Maybe with your executive assistant you're having a regular check-in meeting every week to go through what's coming up, what am I going to need help with? Or maybe your marketing team is once a month. Or maybe with your accountant, it's quarterly. You get the idea. But what we want to do is we want to have a team in place and fully empower them to

execute on and oversee the work in these areas, and then you can just step in and refine and make some changes in direction as needed. Okay, so we talked a lot about CEO energy today. I am curious, what is one thing that you are going to eliminate? What is one thing you're going to automate? And one thing you're going to delegate this week? Don't wait, just take a high-level look at

Here's all the things that I'm responsible for this week. What are some of the things that I can just let go of? What are some of the things that maybe I could make easier? What are some things that I could just ask for some help on? Take a few minutes to do that reflection. And then most importantly, take one action step towards making those things happen. Thank you so much for tuning in today's episode. I really appreciate your support and I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day.