When leaders start using AI, they usually pick whatever is in front of them. An email that needs writing. A question they are curious about. That works for a minute, then the novelty wears off and nothing has actually changed about their week.
The leaders who get real leverage start somewhere else. They start with the work that keeps coming back.
Step one: list what repeats
Write down everything you do more than once a month. Not projects. Recurring work. The weekly email, the meeting recap, the report, the social posts, the follow-up after every new contact. Most people find fifteen to thirty items in ten minutes.
If you get stuck, look at your calendar and your sent folder from last week. The repeating work hides in plain sight.
Step two: ask three questions about each one
1. Does it need your judgment?
Some work only you can do: the hard conversation, the final call on a hire, the vision for next year. If a task truly needs your judgment, keep it. AI can help you prepare, but the work stays yours.
2. How often does it happen?
Weekly work is worth far more to hand off than something you do twice a year. Frequency is where the hours hide.
3. Could you explain it in ten minutes?
This is the question most people skip. If you could sit a new hire down and explain the job in ten minutes, it can be delegated. If it's fuzzy even to you, AI'll struggle too, and that's a sign to clarify the work before handing it off.
Step three: sort it
- Keep: it needs your judgment.
- Hand off: it doesn't need your judgment and you could explain it in ten minutes.
- AI assists: everything in between. You stay in the loop, but AI does the heavy lifting.
Then pick one task from the hand-off list that happens every week. That's your first delegation.
The bottleneck was never the tools. It's that nobody writes the brief.
What a good first task looks like
The best first tasks are frequent, clear, and low risk. A weekly newsletter draft from your notes. A meeting recap with action items. A first draft of social posts from a longer piece you already wrote. When it works, you get time back every single week, and you learn the skill you'll use for everything else.
The next step is writing the brief. That's where most attempts fall apart, and it's the subject of the next guide: how to write an AI role brief.
Do it in a few minutes
I built a free tool that runs this exact test for you. List your recurring tasks, answer the three questions, and it sorts everything into keep, assist, and hand off, then writes a role brief for your top task.