# Human Delegation Audit

Use with [The Delegation Audit: What Should Stay Yours](/articles/what-not-to-delegate-to-ai). 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:

1. **Consequence** — if the output is wrong, who is harmed, and how badly?
2. **Authorship** — does this need to represent your own voice, judgment, or credentials, in a context
   where someone relies on that being genuinely yours?
3. **Relationship** — is a specific person owed your direct attention here, rather than a polished proxy?
4. **Skill** — is this a task you are actively trying to get better at?
5. **Privacy** — does this require typing in someone else's private information, a child's data, or
   confidential material?
6. **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.