4 small tasks to delegate to an assistant

If you have a personal assistant, but always find yourself  too busy, it's time to start reclaiming some of your precious time. Here four tasks you should almost always delegate.

• Sure, you probably want to read and respond to your own mail. However, you don't have to handle whatever comes next with it. Instead, you handle the correspondence part, then have your personal assistant keep your mailbox clean.
• Come up with a filing system together or teach your assistant the system you use, then hand off the task of filing and deleting. You will save hours every week delegating the non-essential parts of the e-mail process.

• Social media is vital to your business, but very time consuming. Your personal assistant should be able to create social media content in your voice, allowing you to concentrate your energies on other matters.
• If you want to oversee what goes out, have your assistant compile posts ahead of time on a site that sends them out automatically, like HootSuite, then approve them. Once you've OK'd all the posts, your assistant can handle the scheduling and posting.

• Unless you really enjoy reading the news every day, you can eliminate having to comb through the paper for important stories by delegating the task to your assistant. Have him or her read through relevant news to your industry and send important stories to you through email.
• If you don't have time to read them yourself, have your assistant record their self reading the important parts and send you audio files, which you can listen to during your commute.
• An assistant can also further refine news for bosses by copying and pasting news stories from curated news apps into an e-mail so that you can get a very distilled and condensed version of what you need to know.

• If you have your personal assistant attend meetings with you, have them take notes and leave your own pen and paper behind. Not taking notes allows you to be fully present and engaged in every part of the conversation.