What is delegation decision framework?

Delegation decision framework is a concept in personal epistemology: Use clear criteria to decide what to delegate, what to automate, and what to keep.

Example: You are a product manager who writes weekly stakeholder updates, reviews pull requests, designs sprint roadmaps, and mentors two junior team members. Every Friday afternoon you feel crushed under accumulated tasks, unable to prioritize. One week you apply a delegation decision framework: you score each task on irreversibility, identity-centrality, and cognitive load. Stakeholder updates — low irreversibility, low identity-centrality, moderate cognitive load — get delegated to your project coordinator with a template. Pull request reviews — moderate irreversibility, moderate identity-centrality, high cognitive load — get split: you review architecture decisions, a senior engineer reviews implementation details. Sprint roadmaps — high irreversibility, high identity-centrality, high cognitive load — stay with you. Mentoring — low irreversibility, high identity-centrality, moderate cognitive load — stays with you but shifts from ad hoc to structured weekly sessions. Within a month you reclaim eight hours per week without losing quality on what matters. The framework did not tell you to do less. It told you to do less of the wrong things.

This concept is part of Phase 27 (Delegation Patterns) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for delegation patterns.