Barbara and Matt explain that the tool not only helps identify your genius zone but also clarifies your true hourly rate. If a task can be done for 75% or less of that rate, you should delegate it to focus on higher-value work. However, many resist delegation because it forces them out of their comfort zone—they must embrace selling, marketing, or growth activities that better use their time. This ties back to mindset: stepping outside comfort zones is essential for business growth.
The stop doing list – part two: unpacking and creating your stop doing list so you can step into your genius zone
Virtual Success Show
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Episode breakdown
In the second episode of our three-part special on The Stop Doing List book, author Matt Malouf talks about the key to understanding where you are spending your time and how to categorise those tasks to get clear on where you should be spending more time – your Genius Zone. During this episode, Matt explains that the more time you spend in your ‘genius zone’, the more you’ll love your business, the more profitable your business will be and the more freedom you will have long-term.
- The importance of determining the value of your time – your hourly rate – and the process to do so
- Understanding your genius zone – those tasks and activities that you love doing, that you do really well and that have a positive financial return to you and the company
- How to filter your tasks through the focus funnel in order to determine which tasks you should, delegate, automate or eliminate to create your ultimate Stop Doing List
It's just investing that time and energy in order to move forward faster later rather than tomorrow.
In this episode
00:00 - Introduction
Barbara and Matt kick off part two of their three-part series on The Stop Doing List. Barbara shares how impactful the book has been for her and explains that this episode focuses on how to actually create a stop doing list—something many business owners struggle with, especially when deciding what tasks to delegate to a support assistant. Matt emphasizes that growth starts with letting go of tasks, using support assistants or technology to avoid burnout. Barbara adds that freeing up time is essential for strategy and scaling. They reference a past episode, Think You’ve Only Got Five Hours to Delegate? Think Again, and Matt is invited to outline the key steps from this part of the book.
02:30 – Unpacking and creating your Stop Doing list
Matt explains that this part of the book focuses on identifying where your time goes, calculating your hourly rate, and using it as a guide to decide which tasks you should or shouldn’t be doing. By logging time for at least two weeks, you gain clarity on task value, then work toward spending more time in your “genius zone”—tasks you love, excel at, and that generate positive financial returns. Doing so leads to greater enjoyment, profitability, and long-term freedom in your business.
03:55 – Understanding your genius zone
Part two of the book explains the four levels of work—genius, excellence, competence, and incompetence—and emphasizes using the focus funnel (eliminate, automate, delegate, or focus/procrastinate) to decide what to stop doing. A key challenge arises when people misjudge the special skills needed for tasks, often expecting support assistants to handle expert-level work like graphic design or website building. Barbara highlights that while support assistants can manage simpler tasks, specialized roles require specialists. They also stress that a true “genius zone” must combine passion, skill, and financial return—enjoying a task isn’t enough if it doesn’t drive business results.
08:00 – Calculating your hourly rate
10:25 – Determining your opportunity cost
Matt explains that the tool also calculates opportunity cost, showing how much money is lost annually if you keep doing low-value tasks instead of delegating them. Barbara shares a client example where this exercise revealed a $247,000 yearly loss, which motivated him to hire a support assistant properly and scale his business. The tool, available for free at StopDoing.com.au, makes these costs and gains very clear. The book further explains the theory and guides readers on focusing on their genius zone for growth.
12:35 – Wrapping things up
Matt and Barbara emphasize that while many tasks lack systems, a good support assistant can help create them if given time and patience. They stress the importance of slowing down to speed up—investing two to three months in onboarding and system-building leads to smoother delegation later. This sets the stage for the next part of their series, which will focus on the crucial process of how to actually stop doing tasks, since many business owners still struggle even after building systems. They close by inviting feedback, ratings, and participation in their private Facebook group.
Podcast Transcript:
The stop doing list – part two: unpacking and creating your stop doing list so you can step into your genius zone
Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work? Are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource this task so you can focus on your business.
This is the Virtual Success Show. We bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts, Matt Malouf and Barbara Turley.
Barbara: Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Virtual Success Show, where I’m joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. How’s it going, Matt?
Matt: It’s going well, Barb, and yourself?
Barbara: Really good. I’m very excited about today’s show and to delve into part two of our three-part series on your The Stop Doing List book, which has just been a pivotal book for me to read recently. All the things that— I thought I knew lots about this, but I’ve just learned so many things from delving into your book again.
So guys, last show we did was part one of The Stop Doing List, where we talked about the mindset— and it’s such a detailed show on the specific steps and the specific mindsets that you need to get into in order to actually stop doing. And then in today’s show, we’re going to talk about actually unpacking and creating your stop doing list, which— one of the key questions we get at Virtual Angel Hub is, “How do I know what to put on my list to give a VA?” So it’s a really big question that we get asked, and I’m sure, Matt, you get asked this question all the time as well.
Matt: Absolutely. And also, those that are wanting to grow their companies— this is the starting point. Everyone’s looking for, “What do I need to do? I need to do more, do more.” But unless you let go of some of these things first and utilise a virtual assistant, or even employing technology and the like to help you with this, it’ll just burn you out.
Barbara: Yeah, and you don’t have the space and time to strategise and move forward. You actually need to free up your time effectively first. It’s like the number one thing you need to do, I think, before you start trying to grow and scale.
The Stop Doing List – Part Two: Unpacking and Creating Your Stop Doing List So You Can Step Into Your Genius Zone
So, now, we did a show— a couple of shows back, we did a show that we delved into quite a lot of what this second part of the book talks about. So Matt, can you just run through— I think it was the show called, “Think You’ve Only Got Five Hours to Delegate? Think Again.” So it’s a great show on how to figure out how much you’re actually doing that you need to stop doing.
So Matt, can you give us— just kind of run through the key steps in this part of the book.
Unpacking and Creating Your Stop Doing List
Matt: Absolutely. So, this part of the book is really about you starting to understand where you’re spending your time and then how to categorise those tasks to get clear on where you should be spending more time. And so, the only way to start that process is to get absolutely clear on your hourly rate, getting clear on the value of your time. If you actually go to the StopDoing.com.au website, you can download the ultimate stop doing list tool, and it actually steps you through this.
So what we recommend is that you do a time log for a minimum of two weeks to get clarity on where you’re spending your time. You then calculate your hourly rate, so you’ve got a yardstick against which to measure where you should or shouldn’t be spending your time. And then this section of the book talks about getting into what we call your genius zone, and your genius zone are those tasks and activities that you love doing, that you do really, really well, and have a positive financial return to you and the company.
And it steps through and says the more time you spend there, number one, the more you’ll love your business; number two, the more profitable your business will be; and number three, the more freedom you will have long-term.
Understanding Your Genius Zone
And so, section two of the book, or part two of the book, helps you start to understand what your genius is, and there’s four levels there. There’s the genius, the excellence, the competence, and the incompetence. And I won’t go through it in detail, it’s all in the book. I want you to go through it. What it then helps you do is— it’s all well and good to sit there and go, “Okay, well, here’s a list of tasks and here’s what my time is worth. What do I do now?”
And then, in the last show, we talked about the focus funnel. We talked about putting your tasks through the focus funnel, which is a methodology from Rory Vaden’s book, Procrastinate On Purpose. And he talks about if a task comes in, you ask yourself, “Can we eliminate this? Can we automate this? Or can we delegate this?” And if it gets through those three layers, then the choice is: am I going to focus on it, or am I going to procrastinate and do it later?
And so, in order to get clear on what you need to stop doing, you need to filter your tasks through the focus funnel. And then I think it gets really, really interesting because, again, I think that up to that point is very straightforward and very logical, but this is where I think a lot of stop doing falls over. And on the tool, we talk about and ask you the question, “Are there special skills required for the task?” And I think, Barb, you probably find this with assigning virtual assistants to people, is that people aren’t clear on the special skills required. So that whole myth of the super VA comes back again. My VA can do everything, yet they don’t necessarily have the special skills required to do the task that you’re asking of them.
Barbara: Yeah, and sometimes it’s very interesting— sometimes people say to us— we highlight that in the interview process and through the thing, and clients will say to us, “Oh, that’s fine. Yeah, I know they’re not trained in that. That’s okay. I’ll do some work with them.” And then they come back a month later and complain bitterly that the VA’s not able to execute on the thing that we just discussed. And we’re like, “That’s because you need an expert. You need a graphic designer.”
Okay, our VAs can do some Canva images for social media and all that stuff, but they can’t design a brochure because that’s actually a graphic designer job, or they can’t build a website. That’s another one we get quite a lot. Like, you know, build a website in WordPress— yeah, you could just get a template and sort of drag a few pieces in there, but you’re not going to get a quality piece of work. And if you’re happy with that, that’s fine, but you can’t blame the VA for that, or us, because we didn’t train on it. So we see that all the time.
The other one I see a lot, Matt— it’s funny, I loved that you said your genius zone is the stuff that you love doing, you’re very good at, and it has a good financial return for the company. Because what we see a lot of people doing is maybe they love doing social media, they are very good at it, but does it bring a financial return to the company if they’re spending all their time just creating Canva images with tips and quotes on it?
So this is this whole running back— we talked about the comfort zone in the last show, part one of the book— and I sometimes feel that’s people saying, “Well, my genius zone is X,” but they’re not considering the financial return piece.
So just because you’re good at it and you love to do it, you’ve got to ask yourself, though: is it a good use of your time from a business perspective?
Matt: Absolutely, absolutely. Until you get your company to a point where others can do maybe the most positively financially returning tasks and you can do whatever you choose to do— but I mean, really, until a company’s probably turning over somewhere between five and ten million dollars a year, you can’t afford the luxury of that often.
Barbara: Yeah, you’re working.
Matt: That’s right.
Calculating Your Hourly Rate
Barbara: So what I love about your tool is that it actually— so it helps you to identify what is your genius zone, but also it helps you to identify another question I get all the time, which is, “How do I know what my hourly rate is?” So your tool helps you to get to that realisation of what your hourly rate is and therefore what is the financial return of you spending your time on X, Y, or Z.
Matt: Absolutely.
Barbara: Even if you love it.
Matt: And what the tool will do, too, is if a task can be done for an hourly rate of 75% or less of your hourly rate, then it recommends that you stop doing that task because the financial gain is not there. Your time is better spent in your genius zone doing tasks that return your hourly rate or above.
Barbara: And you know, I love that this ties us back to the mindset piece because I can imagine so many people will avoid delegating that, even though they’ll know that their hourly rate is higher and they should, because it means that they themselves have to go out and sell more or have to go out and actually see their own value. Because obviously, I think that’s the running back to the comfort zone thing that we talked about in part one of this series. There’s an up-levelling involved in saying, “Well, I’m not going to do this stuff anymore, and therefore what am I going to do with my time?” Would you find that in your coaching?
Matt: All the time. People have the desire to either make more money or spend more time with their partner, their loved ones, etc., and then when you create that time for them, they’re like, “Well, I don’t really know what to do. I’ve not done that.” So it’s actually really, really interesting.
Barbara: Yeah, I can imagine people would fall into that. And like I said, because it usually involves you should be spending your time on scaling, growing, out doing marketing, sales, talking— whatever it is that you’re the face of the business or whatever’s going to be doing— but that can push you out of your comfort zone. So you’ve got to go back to stage one again and think about how far outside of my comfort zone am I willing to go right now in order to grow my business.
There’s a whole— we’ve circled back to part one of this again.
Determining Your Opportunity Cost
Matt: Absolutely. And again, as you step through as well, it calculates an opportunity cost. If you keep doing the task, it will show you a per annum calculation of what you’re actually losing or potential loss as opposed to getting someone else to do that task at a lower hourly rate. And again, this is to reiterate the investment versus cost mindset as well.
Barbara: You know, a client of ours did this exercise— just separate from this, I recall a conversation I had about a year ago— and he had calculated, he’d never actually done that exercise before, and then he got a VA through us, and he calculated that actually it was $247,000 per year that he was— the opportunity cost of him running himself into the ground trying to do everything. Now, he had tried to get a VA before and it hadn’t worked and failed, and he came to us and we taught him how to do it properly, and we got him a great person and put all the support systems in place, and his business just totally took off after he did this exercise. Because it gave him the hunger. He thought, “Oh my God, look at all of this money I could be making if I actually get my act together, stop doing this stuff, and get after the real stuff.” So it transformed him completely, yeah. So it’s well worth doing this.
Matt: And the tool will actually make that really, really clear to you. Really clear.
Barbara: So StopDoing.com.au is where you can download that tool. Is it— obviously the resources section of that website?
Matt: It is, yes, it is. And it’s very simple and straightforward.
Barbara: And it’s free— sorry, it’s free, we should tell them it’s free!
Matt: And the book steps you through the theory behind it as well.
Barbara: And we’ll actually have a link— there’s a link below this show to the site where you can actually download that, and obviously the book— yeah, the book’s great on this area, actually, because it steps you through that whole genius zone stuff as well.
So, Matt, to wrap up, anything else— before we lead into part three of the book, which is the next show— anything you just want, any concluding points on this part of the book?
Wrapping Things Up
Matt: One thing that the tool asks as you go through is, “Is there a system for the task?” And often when I’m working with clients and they start saying no, no, no all the time, it starts getting them down, or they start thinking that they’ll never get it off their list. Be okay with that because bringing in a strong virtual assistant that understands that’s the lay of the land and that part of their role is to help you build the systems— and as long as you’re clear on that and you’re patient with them about that, you can still move to the next stage of stop doing all of these tasks. It’s just going to take you a little bit more time.
Barbara: Yeah, like we talked about before, sometimes people, when they get a VA— we often find they want to hit the ground running on day one. And we sort of go, even if we were to give you a highly— even if I was to give someone off my team, highly experienced, knows exactly what to do to get in there, it would still take two to three months because it’s a new business. All the IP is usually in the head of the business owner. So that takes time to get through that little hump, but you’ll fly after that. So again, it’s just investing that time and energy in order to move forward faster later rather than tomorrow. That’s a mindset thing, of course, too.
Matt: Absolutely. So it’s taking the time— and it’s what you were saying earlier about slowing down to speed up— and actually doing the work here to give you the clarity on whether you’re ready to stop doing or not, and also preparing to be able to then work with a virtual assistant from Virtual Angel Hub or someone from within your existing team to start to delegate and move these tasks to them.
Barbara: Absolutely. And that brings us on to the next show that we’re going to do, which is probably— well, all of these parts are really critical, but the interesting one about the next part of this series is actually how to stop doing, because so many people— and I see this all the time— clients will come in and be like, “But I did everything you told me to do, and we built the systems, we’ve got the processes, we’ve put everything down.” And they’re still struggling, and it’s because they haven’t figured out this final piece, which is so important, is the how to stop doing, because there actually is a whole process for that as well.
So we’re going to delve into that in the next show as the final piece of the book.
Matt: Absolutely, and I’m going to step you all through exactly how to stop doing and what’s holding you back from getting others to do these tasks for you. So please be sure to tune into the next show.
But also, please feel free to give us— we’d love your ratings and comments about the show. We’ve also got a private Facebook group. So join the conversation with us, and we’d love to hear more about what would you like us to talk about on this show. This show is about you. We want to give real-life experiences and help you succeed with your virtual team. So we’d love your input, love your feedback, and until next time— Barb, thank you so much. I’m really enjoying this three-part series and looking forward to the next part.
Barbara: Yeah, thanks, Matt. Me too. See you guys.
Matt: See you.
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