It's Time To Work #

Delegation is often used as a way to give other people the tasks someone don't want to deal. In all these cases they are tasks and duties that require the context and decision making power of the person delegating the tasks. Worse even, in most cases the person who receives the tasks doesn't have a set of rules to makes decisions.

"Read my emails and create the appointments in my calendar" instead of "You manage my schedule and here are the rules and I will abide by your decisions".

"Write the code X and Y functionality" instead of "Here what the component should do and these are the guardrails you have to say in-between".

This approach to delegation fails on both sides, the delegator and the delegatee because neither can develop the full picture. The delegator is missing on the details that might affect the bigger picture and the delegatee doesn't have know the bigger picture in order know what decisions to make about the details. The delegatee might do the best job for the task assigned but fails to make the decisions according to the bigger picture.

Nor is this a problem of white collar vs blue collar job type. Either setting suffers from the same problem. The same way you can't delegate to someone to write a chunk of code, you can't ask someone to just hammer-in some nails.

Without the ability nor spending the time to acquire the whole context, one cannot make the best decisions for the work at hand. Constantly sharing the information acquired between people for decision making takes up a lot of energy, is never done on a timely fashion and it often is missing key elements that one party thought not to be relevant for the other one.

This is getting worse in the age of AI in which we try to solve this problem by brute forcing communication. One tries to transform a bullet point list into a long format post and the other one summarizes the long format into a bullet point list. It fails even harder when the matter at hands needs to be understood through the subjective lens of interpersonal relations developed over time within the group context. Neither AI, nor a human, could just can't recognize intentions only by reading a text.

"LoOk mA'!, wE cOmMuNiCaTe aNd StUfF!".

I'm very skeptical of the code generation AI tools or the summarize this or that with AI buttons because you stop developing the context necessary to process the information. The best way to learn to code is the slowest way; by typing letter by letter the tutorial you are following, pausing whenever you need and making small changes testing out if your assumptions were true or not. The same goes for communicating with your peers, your team and your clients; reading the messages, re-reading the entire thread if necessary, highlighting phrases, taking notes, mixing that information with other information you have from other sources and distilling into an actionable outcome. This is the only way to realize that you might not even be on the right path and that you need to course correct.

If you run out of time, pick the responsibilities that you must keep and take care of yourself and delegate all the rest to other people. Fully. Do not split everything you do in small chunks and make an AI Agent or another person do it for you. For as long as it is your responsibility you will be held accountable for the outcome regardless of what or who did it.

And for those responsibilities that you end up keeping, spend the time to gather context, spend the time to analyze, spend the time to make the right decision.