Stop Building the System Until You Drop the Hot Potatoes

The advice you keep hearing is incomplete

Every productivity book, every business coach, every delegation framework you have ever come across starts in roughly the same place. Build the system first. Document the process. Create the structure. Get it all mapped out, and then hand it off.

And I get it. That advice is not wrong, exactly. But I think for a lot of service providers in the grind right now, it is the wrong starting point. And Joanna Zhang's story is a pretty clear illustration of why.

Joanna built what is now called a fractional VA service before anyone had a name for it. A panel of judges at the Stevie International Business Awards coined the term in 2024 after reviewing her model. She had been running it for years before that, out of necessity, because full-time and part-time staffing models did not fit where she was in the business. So she figured out a different way. That is kind of her pattern, actually. She identifies a problem, finds that no existing solution fits, and creates one.

But here is the part that caught my attention in our conversation. You can hear all of it in the full episode, and I want to pull out one thread in particular because I think it speaks directly to where a lot of capable people get stuck.

Why you cannot build while you are still on fire

Joanna talks about a four-stage delegation framework she built from her own experience. And the first stage is not "build the system." The first stage is what she calls the hot potatoes.

Hot potatoes are the things on your plate right now that are generating a low-level, persistent stress. They are not always urgent in the dramatic sense. But they are always there, quietly eating your bandwidth. A pile of unedited podcast episodes. A CRM nobody is maintaining. A client onboarding process that still runs through your personal inbox. You know you need to deal with them. You just never quite get there because there is always something more pressing.

Joanna shared an example from a client who was a podcast host. She was recording constantly, loving every conversation, but episodes were piling up unedited and unscheduled. She felt fine, she said. But the pile was there, and it was creating what Joanna described as hidden stress. Once Joanna's team stepped in and cleared the backlog, the client said she finally felt like she could breathe. That was it. Not a new strategy. Not a rebuilt funnel. Just the removal of something that had been quietly draining her.

So when you are sitting there wondering why you cannot seem to make progress on the bigger vision, it might not be a strategy problem. It might be a hot potato problem.

The real reason the system never gets built

Here is what I think happens. We hear the advice to build the system, so we try. We sit down to document the process or map the workflow, and we just cannot get traction on it. Then we decide we are not disciplined enough, or not ready, or not smart enough to figure it out.

But the real issue is usually that we are trying to build the machine while we are also the one putting out every fire inside it. You cannot think clearly when you are reactive. And when every day is reactive, you never get the mental space to step back and actually design something.

Joanna puts it in terms of energy management, which she believes is more powerful than time management. And I think that framing is right. The question is not whether you have enough hours. The question is whether you have enough clear, unencumbered mental energy to do the kind of thinking that moves things forward. Hot potatoes steal that energy slowly, quietly, and constantly.

The four stages in order

Joanna's framework is worth laying out plainly, because the sequence matters.

Stage one is identifying and offloading the hot potatoes. The urgent, draining, piling-up tasks that are stealing your focus. You deal with these first, before anything else, because they are the reason you have no room to build.

Stage two is creating momentum. Once you have breathing room, you start building small systems inside the business. Social media, lead generation, customer service routines. Little machines that can run without you constantly touching them.

Stage three is structuring the whole machine. Now you can zoom out and look at the business as an interconnected system. Procedures, structures, the kind of thing that makes the whole thing sustainable and scalable.

Stage four is staying in your genius zone. This is the ongoing work of keeping yourself focused on vision, direction, and the things only you can do, and letting the machine handle the rest.

Notice that you cannot do stage three until you have done stage two. And you cannot do stage two until you have cleared stage one. The sequence is the point.

What this actually looks like

When I was shifting my work from fitness into the performance and business coaching space, I spent a long stretch consuming everything. Books, courses, podcasts, every framework anyone would share. And I kept waiting for the right system to appear so I could build from it. It never did, not because the systems were not out there, but because I had not made a decision about what I actually wanted to create. That indecision was my hot potato. And until I cleared it, I could not build anything.

Joanna's point about courage speaks directly to this. She does not define courage as the absence of fear. She defines it as making a decision in spite of the fear, and then letting action follow. That small reframe changes a lot. Because if you are waiting to feel ready, you are waiting for the wrong thing. Courage comes after the decision, not before it.

One clear next step

Before you touch your systems documentation or your delegation workflow, take ten minutes and write down every task, responsibility, or pile of unfinished work that is quietly stressing you out right now. Not the big strategic problems. The stuff that sits in the back of your mind and drains a little energy every day.

That list is your hot potatoes. Start there. Because you cannot build anything meaningful while you are still holding them.

And if you want to hear Joanna walk through this in her own words, including the mentor question that cracked something open in her own business and changed how she shows up for every client, go listen to the full episode. Pay attention to what works for you.