Book Review: Not Your Job

Reviewed by Joe Walters

 A must-read for business owners looking to get their time back 

When you first start a business, you’ll do anything you can to make it work. You’ll do the task, the emails, the bookkeeping, the everything. You know what things need to be done and how they need to be done in order for the business to thrive. You know your product better than anyone, and no one is as invested as you in making it work. After all, this could be a thing that funds your life—your family’s life. And you are in charge of it.

Things can go well this way. You can put in the hours and build your brand just as you envisioned. But soon you’ll find out that operating this thing is going to take up more time than you’d initially thought. It’s like you’re working every waking (and sometimes sleeping) second completing orders, answering emails, completing orders, answering emails, completing orders…

You’ve done a great job in making this thing work. Now, it’s time to figure out if the tasks you are completing with your available hours are the ones that best optimize your business.

“Rowing a boat takes skill and strength—perhaps even years of discipline to master—but knowing how to row a boat is not helpful if your ultimate goal is to chart a course across the ocean.”

Not Your Job by Pierce Brantley is a supremely helpful guide on the art of delegation. With humor and clarity, Brantley walks us through the big truth—that time might be your most valuable asset as a business-owner—and what you can do to get it back. 

Brantley has an engaging voice that not only introduces concepts but doubles- and triples-down on them later so that core principles can be remembered and followed easily in practice. He does a particularly excellent job with communicating how much time tasks are really taking you, how to determine whether a certain task can be delegated, and how you can communicate with your employee which things are most important in completing their tasks.

It even speaks to the skeptic in you by discussing the realities of employees doing a task wrong. Brantley isn’t afraid to admit that sometimes it doesn’t work, no matter how communicative you’ve been about it, and teaches you how to deal with it.

This is going to be an excellent fit for so many business owners. It’s one of the rare ones that’ll get you brainstorming throughout the first 3/4ths of the book and then planning (with tactical advice) how you will use it as soon as you put it down. I know that’s what I’ll be doing. 

I’m always so appreciative of a book that changes the way I operate on a daily basis. So, I owe a big thank you to this one. More time with family, friends, books, and basketball? Sign me up.

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