“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” — David Allen
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” — Theodore Roosevelt
“If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.” — John C. Maxwell
Delegate to amplify effectiveness, not to abdicate responsibility.
If you can afford to, delegate it. If you can’t yet afford to, automate it. Time is the most precious resource.
“The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist.” — Elon Musk
- Never automate something that can be eliminated.
- Never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.
Every task on your plate should first be challenged: Does this need to exist at all?
Some tasks require judgment, tacit knowledge, or contextual awareness that cannot be fully captured in a written process. For these, you need structured hand-off methods.
- Complex
- Sensitive to quality or context
- Performed infrequently (so documentation alone won’t suffice)
- onboarding a teammate
- transferring a client relationship
- teaching a specific workflow or judgment call.
- Schedule a focused session where both people work together on the task.
- Observe and narrate: the person teaching explains decisions out loud.
- Swap roles or let the learner take the lead partway through.
- Compare results and explicitly discuss differences.
- Repeat 3–4 iterations until the learner reliably produces acceptable results.
