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Consider a new approach and delegate to get your time back
By Bethany Fishbein, OD
Dec. 10, 2025
A colleague recently recommended “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell. There’s a passage in the first chapter or two that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
“I get it—you think you’re the best at everything. No one will do it quite right… To be honest, likely no one will care as much as you do… So here’s what you do. You don’t aim for 100% perfection. Instead, shoot for 80%. Yes, lower your expectations, because here’s the deal: 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.”
Lower your expectations
Is the idea ridiculous? Or is it really kind of incredible? It’s not something most of us think of as acceptable, that’s for sure.
But think about it for a minute: if practice owners were truly challenged with “time vs. money,” most of us know we should choose time. Our evenings, families, hobbies, self-care and sleep matter far more than the incremental benefit we might gain by reviewing every insurance claim or patient message. Or by personally handling the bigger things like hiring and firing, patient complaints or staff conflicts.
Yet so many of us don’t choose time or feel like we can’t. We default to doing it all ourselves, sometimes right up to (or beyond) the point of burnout—the point where selling the practice and working for someone starts to sound strangely appealing. When the administrative weight feels unmanageable, it’s easy to fantasize about handing the whole thing to someone else—giving up all of the autonomy and potential upside, just to no longer have to be responsible for everything.
Can you let go to feel better?
It’s a situation of our own making and one that feels incredibly challenging to escape. But it raises an important question. If it feels like fantasy to work in a business where someone else does everything, is it so hard to give up even a few things to save you time and make your life a little easier?
Most practice owners didn’t just buy a business—they built one. Whether you built a cold-start from an empty shell or took over a practice and adjusted it to your own vision, you’ve likely poured a large amount of money and plenty of blood, sweat and tears to help “your baby” grow. It’s no wonder that our practices become parts of our identity.
Often, your incredibly high standards are part of what made your practice successful. But there comes a point where the perfectionism that served you well in the early days of your practice becomes unsustainable. When you feel that 100% is the only acceptable standard (and you’re the only one capable of giving 100%) you create a system that relies entirely on your personal effort. As the practice grows, this requires more and more of your effort to maintain, often at the same time as your life outside the business and your desire for freedom become greater.
What if the real problem isn’t the increasing stress itself, but the belief that you’re the only one who can personally carry all of it? If you make yourself the central pillar holding everything together, letting go of even a tiny piece feels impossible, like it will cause the whole structure to collapse.
An identity shift
Sometimes it goes even deeper. Many practice owners unconsciously get their sense of worth from being the person who knows everything, fixes everything and catches everything. It feels good to be the person who swoops in and saves the day. It feels validating to know there’s something that will fall apart without you. Some equate busy with important and always having lots to do after hours and on weekends validates just how important you are.
But the truth is that the same perfectionism that built your practice, may now be the thing holding it back. For many, delegation isn’t just a shift in workflow. It’s a shift in identity.
The struggle to delegate has very little to do with other peoples’ competence (or incompetence!) and everything to do with the stories we tell ourselves about the disasters that will surely befall us if we let someone who’s not quite as detail-oriented, intelligent or invested as we are handle any decision-making in the practice. Delegation threatens the version of yourself you’ve relied on to keep the practice alive!
Delegate to get your time back
Lowering your standard (and accepting 80% from someone else) isn’t giving up on success. It’s just giving up the illusion that you’re the only one responsible for reaching the success you envision.
Your associates, your practice leaders and your team members won’t think exactly like you, and they don’t need to. They probably won’t care as much as you do. You can’t expect them to. They will screw up. So did you, probably many times along the way.
Your biggest value to your business isn’t to execute perfection; it’s about creating a business that doesn’t require your perfection to function! Delegation isn’t about just getting tasks off your plate. It’s about becoming the kind of leader who can trust others enough to let them contribute.
Be a better leader
Being this kind of leader isn’t just healthier for you—it’s healthier for your team. When you grip everything tightly, you unintentionally cap the growth of the people around you. When you let go, even a little, you create space for people to learn, to make decisions, to develop judgment, and to feel genuinely invested. People do their best work when they feel trusted. Delegation gives them that trust and gives your practice future leaders instead of permanent dependents.
Once you can release the identity of being the only one who has to carry everything, 80% done by someone else stops feeling like compromise and starts feeling like freedom.
Read another article by Dr. Fishbein here.
Check out “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell. available on Amazon.
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Bethany Fishbein, OD, is a practice owner, practice management consultant and certified executive coach. She can be reached at bethany@leadersofvision.com |
