Question
What is when to delegate tasks?
Quick Answer
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 Delegation Patterns in the How to Think curriculum.
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Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of Delegate to AI Without Losing Judgment — a guided sequence of 16 lessons.
After completing this path you will run a working delegation boundary: a criteria framework for what goes to AI versus what stays with your judgment, specifications clear enough that AI output comes back usable, a verification practice that catches errors without redoing the work, and the warning signs of over-delegation before your judgment atrophies.
Start the path →