Only I Can Do This

Sound familiar?

• A forty-hour week and no idea how many of those hours only they could do.
• Knows they should delegate but can't write the instructions, so does it themselves for speed.
• Every decision, small or large, passes through them, so everything waits.
• Two weeks away and something breaks, without knowing exactly what.

Each chapter answers one question

1. Chapter 1: I'm busy all week, but doing whose work?

   Of the 40 hours last week, how many went on work only I can do?

   If you cannot measure your own time, every growth plan is a dream.

2. Chapter 2: Why shouldn't I hand off what I hate first?

   Which task do I do every week that takes over two hours and could be written up as instructions?

   The first thing to delegate is not the work you hate, but the work that repeats and can be described.

3. Chapter 3: Which decisions should I let go of?

   If this decision is wrong, how long would it take to fix, and does the answer change who should decide?

   Founders should keep the decisions that are hard to reverse and let go of the reversible ones.

4. Chapter 4: Did I hire wrong, or not know what I needed?

   Can I describe this role's 90-day results without using adjectives?

   A bad hire almost always starts with a job description nobody made clear.

5. Chapter 5: Do I own a business, or just a job?

   If I disappeared for two weeks without contact, what would break first?

   The only test of a system is the absence of the person who built it.