Distinguish ONLY ME by necessity from ONLY ME by default…

Before delegating a task, verify it is not ONLY ME by default rather than by necessity—if the task requires your unique judgment only because you've never built documentation, systems, or relationships to make it delegable, it's a disguised delegation candidate.

When This Fires

When classifying tasks using Classify every task as ONLY ME, COULD DELEGATE, or SHOULD…'s ONLY ME / COULD DELEGATE / SHOULD NOT EXIST taxonomy
When you notice a large ONLY ME category and want to verify it's genuinely non-delegable
When feeling overwhelmed by tasks "only you can do" — many may be delegation infrastructure deficits
When someone asks "why can't someone else handle this?" and you can't articulate a necessity-based reason

Common Failure Mode

Conflating accumulated dependency with inherent uniqueness: "Only I understand this system well enough to make these decisions." Maybe — but is that because the decisions genuinely require your unique judgment, or because you never documented how the system works? If a competent person with good documentation (The competent stranger test) could make 80% of these decisions, the task is ONLY ME by default, not necessity.

The Protocol

(1) For each ONLY ME task, ask: "Why does this require me specifically?" (2) If the answer references your unique judgment, values, relationships, or strategic position → ONLY ME by necessity. Retain. (3) If the answer references undocumented knowledge, unshared context, or missing infrastructure ("because I'm the only one who knows how...") → ONLY ME by default. This is a disguised delegation candidate. (4) For default-ONLY-ME tasks: estimate the one-time investment to make it delegable (documentation, training, introduction, system setup). (5) If the investment is less than 3 months of continued personal execution → make the investment now. The ROI is permanent attention recovery.