What to Delegate Before the Christmas Shutdown: A 3-Week Plan
There’s a particular kind of tiredness that arrives in an Australian small business somewhere around the second week of December. The orders are in, the customers are winding down, the team is counting sleeps until the break – and the owner is sitting at the kitchen table at 10pm doing the invoicing, because there’s finally time to do the invoicing.
If that sounds familiar, you’re in very good company. It’s one of the quiet patterns of running a business here: the trading year ends, but the owner’s year doesn’t. The shopfront closes and the admin follows you home.
The encouraging part is that this is one of the more fixable problems in a small business, and the weeks either side of the shutdown are unusually good for fixing it. Here’s a three-week plan you can start whenever you’re reading this, and a reason to be optimistic about January.
Why the quiet weeks are the best training window you’ll get
Most owners try to hand work over in their busiest month, because that’s the month the pain is loudest. It rarely goes well. Training someone takes attention, and in peak season attention is the one thing you don’t have.
The end of the year flips that. Volume drops, the phone slows, and mistakes are cheaper because there’s less riding on each one. Someone learning your invoicing process in the third week of January can get it wrong twice and it costs you almost nothing. The same mistake in June costs you a customer.
So if you’ve been putting off handing something over until things calm down: this is the calm. It’s the only reliably quiet stretch in the Australian business calendar, and it arrives once a year.
Week 1: Write two lists, not one
Before you can hand anything over, you need to know what you’re holding. Set aside an hour – genuinely an hour, not fifteen minutes between jobs – and write down everything you did last week. Not what you meant to do. What you actually did.
Then split that list in two:
- Only me. Work that genuinely requires you: pricing decisions, the relationships you personally hold, anything involving your professional judgement or license, and the direction of the business.
- Not necessarily me. Everything else. Invoicing, chasing payments, inbox triage, scheduling, data entry, ordering, social posts, quote follow-ups, updating the website.
Most owners are surprised by how long the second list is. That surprise is the useful part. It’s not evidence that you’ve been doing it wrong – it’s evidence that you’ve been doing everything, which is what starting a business asks of you and what growing one eventually stops rewarding.
One tip: if a task feels like it belongs in “only me” because the way you do it is specific, that’s usually a documentation problem rather than a delegation problem. Park it in the second list with a note.
Week 2: Document three tasks properly
Don’t try to document everything. Pick three tasks from the second list using this order of priority:
- Highest frequency first. A task you do daily is worth more to hand over than one you do quarterly, even if the quarterly one takes longer.
- Lowest judgement required. Start with work that has a right answer. Save the judgement calls for later, when trust is established.
- Least emotionally attached. Be honest with yourself here. There’s usually one task you’ve convinced yourself only you can do, and it’s usually the one you enjoy. Leave it for round two.
For each of the three, write down the trigger (what makes this task start), the steps in order, the tools and logins needed, what “done” looks like, and what should be escalated back to you rather than decided alone.
That last item matters more than the rest. Most handovers fail not because someone couldn’t do the work, but because nobody told them which decisions weren’t theirs to make.
If writing it out feels slow, talk through the task while recording your screen. A seven-minute recording plus a short checklist is a perfectly good process document, and it takes a fraction of the time.
Week 3: Hand over one task and stay close
Not three. One.
Give the person the documentation, let them do it once while you watch, then let them do it alone while you stay reachable. Check the output, not the process – if they get to the same result by a different route, that’s fine, and it’s often better.
Who that person is depends on your business. It might be an existing team member who’s ready for more, a bookkeeper who already has half the context, a contractor, or a virtual assistant. The plan works the same regardless. What matters is that one task genuinely leaves your desk and doesn’t come back.
Then repeat with the second task, and the third. A task a week is a comfortable pace. By the end of February you’ll have handed over a dozen hours a month, which is roughly half a working week returned to you.
A short list of what usually goes first
If you’re staring at a blank page, these tend to be the safest starting points for a small business owner:
- Invoicing and payment follow-ups. High frequency, clear rules, and the least fun part of most owners’ weeks.
- Inbox triage. Not answering everything – just sorting, flagging and drafting replies for your approval.
- Scheduling and diary management. Especially if you’re currently doing it while driving between jobs.
- Data entry and reconciliation prep. Rules-based, and your bookkeeper or accountant will thank you.
- Social media scheduling. Note: scheduling and posting, not deciding what the brand sounds like. That stays with you for now.
And a few that are usually worth keeping close, at least at first: pricing, anything requiring your professional judgement or license, your key client relationships, and hiring decisions.
Before you close: three practical things
- Sort out the shutdown properly. If your business closes over Christmas and you have staff, the rules about directing annual leave during a shutdown period have changed in recent years and vary by award. It’s worth checking your specific situation with the Fair Work Ombudsman rather than assuming last year’s approach still applies.
- Write tomorrow-you a note. On your last working day, spend ten minutes writing down where things stand and what needs attention first in January. You will not remember. Nobody remembers.
- Actually take some of the break. This one is harder than the others, and it counts. If the year has been heavy, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman collects support resources for owners in one place, and Beyond Blue’s NewAccess program offers free, confidential coaching designed specifically for small business owners.
The point isn’t doing less
Delegation gets talked about as though the goal is to work fewer hours. For most owners that isn’t really the aim, and it isn’t very motivating either.
The better frame is this: every hour you spend on work that someone else could do is an hour not spent on the work that only you can do. The invoicing will get done either way. The decision about what your business looks like in three years only gets made if you make it.
You built something that runs. That’s the hard part, and you’ve already done it. Handing over the first task is a much smaller step than it feels like from where you’re sitting in December – and January is a genuinely kind time to take it.
