Human Delegation Audit
Use with The Delegation Audit: What Should Stay Yours. Run this before you paste a task into an AI tool, not after you notice something feels off.
The six questions
For any task, rate each dimension Low / Medium / High:
- Consequence — if the output is wrong, who is harmed, and how badly?
- Authorship — does this need to represent your own voice, judgment, or credentials, in a context where someone relies on that being genuinely yours?
- Relationship — is a specific person owed your direct attention here, rather than a polished proxy?
- Skill — is this a task you are actively trying to get better at?
- Privacy — does this require typing in someone else’s private information, a child’s data, or confidential material?
- Reversibility — if this goes wrong, can you catch and fix it before it matters?
Two or more High ratings — treat the task as keep or assist (you stay accountable for the judgment), not a quick full delegate. Reserve never for tasks that fail the relationship, consent, or irreversibility tests even with heavy human review.
Worked log
| Task | Consequence | Authorship | Relationship | Skill | Privacy | Reversibility | Verdict (keep / assist / delegate / never) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Quick reference: the ten examples from the article
| Task | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Routine work email draft | Delegate |
| Summarizing a long PDF for your own use | Delegate |
| Performance review of someone you manage | Assist |
| Telling a friend their plan is a bad idea | Keep |
| Comforting someone who is grieving | Never |
| Eulogy drafted from your own notes | Assist |
| Scoring or ranking job candidates | Never (without accountable human process) |
| Practicing a new skill | Assist, carefully |
| Reconciling a shared budget spreadsheet | Delegate the mechanics |
| Apologizing to someone you hurt | Never |
Before you paste anything in
- I checked the privacy dimension: no other person’s private data, no child’s data, no confidential employer material in this prompt.
- If consequence or reversibility scored High, a human (possibly someone other than me) will review the output before it is used.
- If relationship scored High, I am doing this myself, not asking a model to stand in for me.
Review this audit
Revisit it monthly. The specific tasks you delegate will change as tools improve; the six questions should not.