Each task brings three options. But first, let’s be clear what we mean by “delegate.”
If I can hire someone to do a task so well that my customer can’t tell, I can choose to delegate this work.
The Uber driver is probably capable of changing the oil in the car, but if the passenger can’t tell, doing it herself is a choice, not a requirement. Same goes for the restaurant that buys pre-minced garlic, or the executive who has her team do much of the work…
If it can be delegated, doing so is a choice and an opportunity.
So, the three options:
Delegate everything. Find people or AI systems to do every delegatable task, reserving for yourself only the work that can’t be delegated.
Delegate some things. Hire yourself to do some of the delegatable tasks. Perhaps it’s to build up insight or skill or reputation that will help you serve people in the future. Or perhaps you are hiring yourself as a way to hide from other, more difficult tasks, or because it’s fun.
(And it might be because you don’t want to support some of the encroaching systems that offer outsourcing–our work and our dollars are also a vote about the future we’re building).
Delegate no things. Do the work with your own two hands, because the craft and the doing are giving you joy and satisfaction.
It’s a choice. Now, more than ever, it’s a choice because access to freelancers and AI lowers the cost and increases the quality of the work we delegate.
The opportunity is to use leveraged delegation to create opportunities that cannot possibly be delegated. To make our craft more particular, more human and more distinctive.
The alternative is to race to the bottom. That’s no fun.