How do I decide what to automate vs what to delegate?

The situation

Your team is overloaded. Tool options are endless. Decisions about automation versus delegation feel noisy. If you automate a broken process, you scale confusion. If you delegate everything, coordination overhead explodes.

You're spending high-value time on repetitive administrative flow. You're unsure which work needs software versus human judgment. You're seeing process inconsistency across the team. Too many manual handoffs. Repeated admin tasks. Uneven quality in judgment-heavy work. Your attention is split across both.

Emotionally it creates decision fatigue. Every new tool feels promising. Every handoff feels risky. The real issue is usually sequence: teams buy tools before clarifying process, or delegate before defining standards. Both paths fail.

One fast diagnostic: if a task happens more than three times a week with the same trigger and same output, it's usually automation-ready. If it changes based on client context or tradeoffs, it's usually delegation-ready.

What changes

Use one practical rule. Automate repeatable sequences. Delegate judgment-heavy work.

Scheduling, reminders, routing, invoicing—usually workflow automation. Strategy prep, client context interpretation, tradeoff decisions—usually with people, guided by SOP and explicit ownership.

Before: everything manually managed, founder-mediated. After: repetitive flow runs automatically; people focus on decisions that need judgment. No magic. Just the right execution mode for each task type.

Believable improvement targets: reduce admin handling time by 30–50 percent and handoff errors by 20–35 percent in one quarter.

Levers

Five levers keep decisions clean:

• Workflow automation — Automate tasks with clear triggers and deterministic outputs.
• Administrative automation — Remove repetitive overhead from founder and team time.
• Delegation — Assign tasks that require context and judgment.
• SOP — Document process first; then choose software or owner.
• Operational efficiency — Track cycle time, error rate, and owner load after changes.

Why it feels hard

The hard part is sequencing. Clarify process before you buy tools. Define standards before you delegate. Founders often try to prove value through task involvement. The upgrade is proving value through system clarity—so the right work goes to the right place.

Where to start

Pick the one that's already biting:

Then choose one repeatable workflow to automate and one judgment-heavy task to delegate with a written SOP this month.