Calculate your actual hourly rate before deciding what's worth your time

Martell's foundational exercise asks readers to calculate a concrete dollar figure for their own time based on income and working hours, then use that number as a filter for every task: if a task can be done by someone else for less than your calculated rate, keeping it yourself is a losing trade, even if it feels productive in the moment.

This reframes delegation from a vague aspiration into an explicit arithmetic decision. Someone earning the equivalent of $200 an hour who spends three hours a week on bookkeeping a bookkeeper could handle for $30 an hour isn't being frugal by doing it themselves — they're losing money relative to what those hours could generate redirected toward higher-value work.

Martell acknowledges the emotional resistance this creates: many entrepreneurs feel virtuous doing everything themselves, especially early on, and the number alone doesn't dissolve that feeling. But making the tradeoff explicit and quantified, rather than left as a vague sense of being "too busy," is what actually motivates change.

Takeaway: any task you can pay someone less than your rate to do is quietly costing you money to keep.