The Delegation Audit
Map a real week. Find the work that should not require you. Choose the first hand-off worth building.
Why it matters
The problem
Most owners can name three jobs they should stop doing. The expensive list is usually much longer. Without seeing the whole week, you delegate whatever feels most annoying, not what returns the most capacity.
This audit gives you the evidence to choose properly.
Step by step
The method
Log the week you actually had
For five working days, capture every block of 30 minutes or more. Do not rely on your calendar; it misses the drafting, reading, switching, chasing and fixing. Describe what happened in plain language.
Sort every block
- Judgement: only you can make the call.
- Relationship: it needs you today, but perhaps not forever.
- Craft: someone, or an AI, could do it with the right context and checks.
- Admin: it follows a repeatable process and does not need your judgement.
Be hard on the Craft category. It is where owners often confuse familiarity with necessity.
Price the gap
Apply your effective hourly rate to every Craft and Admin block, then annualise it. That total is the cost of keeping delegable work on your desk. For example: at $150 an hour, eight hours a week of Craft and Admin work comes to roughly $60,000 a year.
Rank by annual hours recovered
A two-hour weekly task consumes more of the year than a one-day quarterly task. Rank by annual capacity returned, then consider risk and ease of implementation.
Choose one hand-off
Pick the highest-value job that can be handed off safely. Define what good looks like, where a person approves the work, and when the system must stop and ask. Build that one before starting another.
What you will have
- 01A written inventory of the week, sorted by type
- 02One annual figure for the cost of delegable work
- 03A ranked shortlist with the first hand-off chosen
- 04A shared vocabulary for discussing work with your team
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