February 26, 2026
Hi Everyone,
When you're running a company, tasks accumulate from every direction — upward from your team, sideways from peers, downward from your board or investors.
You're busy, but you're contributing in places where someone else could deliver a similar result, while the high-leverage work waits.
As a top leader, you need to focus your personal time and effort on things that only you can do - everything else should be owned by someone else.
So, what on your list can only you do?
The "Only You" filter
Set aside 10 minutes today or before your first meeting on Monday.
Step 1: List everything on your plate this week. Meetings, tasks, decisions, reviews, calls – write them all down. Don't filter yet. A complete list usually has 15-25 items.
Step 2: For each item, ask one question. "Would the outcome be meaningfully worse if someone else handled this?"
Be honest with yourself here. "Meaningfully worse" means a real difference in quality, speed, or result – not a slight preference for how you'd do it.
Step 3: Sort into three groups:
- Keep – the outcome depends on your judgment, your authority, or your relationships. These are the items where you're genuinely the right person. Strategy decisions, key hires, important client conversations, and anything where your team doesn't yet have the context or authority to act.
- Hand off – someone on your team can handle this with a short briefing. The result might look slightly different from what you'd produce, but it'll be good enough, and your team gets better at it each time.
- Drop or defer – this doesn't need to happen this week, or at all. Recurring meetings with no clear purpose, reviews you attend out of habit, and tasks you keep because you enjoy them (even though they're no longer your job) belong here.
Step 4: Take action. For every "hand off" item, name the person and send them a message today with the context they need. For every "drop" item, cancel it or remove it from your list.
Why letting go pays off
Handing off work means accepting that your team will do it differently from you.
A Gallup study of 143 Inc. 500 CEOs found that founders who were strong delegators generated 33% more revenue than those who weren't – and their companies grew faster.
The tasks you keep that aren't truly yours take time away from the top priorities that genuinely need your attention, and they stop your team from developing the judgment they need to grow.
Go deeper
👉 Harvard Business Review: Why It's So Hard to Delegate — and How to Improve – a good breakdown of why smart leaders still struggle to let go, and what helps
👉 Tim Ferriss / Matt Mochary: The CEO Coach – practical advice on delegation, decision memos, and how to stop being the bottleneck
👉 McKinsey: How CEOs Navigate Their Six Core Responsibilities – a useful map of where CEO time should actually go
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow, we'll look at why 95% of AI investments return nothing and share a simple gate you can use before approving the next one.
That's it for today!
P.S. If you ran the exercise, how many items ended up on your "keep" list? Let us know the number – we're curious what a typical week looks like for you.