Most founders try to delegate by writing the perfect operations manual. They block off a Saturday, open a blank Notion page, and try to describe every workflow they run from memory. By noon the page is three sections deep and the will to live is gone. The manual never gets finished. The work never gets handed off. Six months later they are still triaging the same inbox.
Here is the version that works.
Pick five tasks you do every week
Not the most important five. Not the most strategic five. The five you actually do every week without thinking. Inbox triage. Calendar Tetris. Travel booking. The Monday team digest. Submitting expense reports. The boring five. The ones that fill 40% of your calendar while contributing 0% of your leverage.
Record yourself doing each one. Once.
One Loom each. Ten to fifteen minutes per task. Talk through what you are doing as you do it. Do not edit. Do not re-record. The first take is the one that captures the actual decisions you make, including the ones you cannot articulate in a document.
Five recordings. Around 75 minutes of your time, total. That is the manual. The reason this works and the written version does not is that recording forces you to surface the decisions you make on autopilot. The tone you use when an investor emails. The order you scan calendar conflicts. The fields you check on an expense before submitting it. None of this lives in a written SOP. All of it lives in the recording.
Hand the five over on day one
Your assistant watches the recordings, runs the five tasks for one week with you reviewing the output, and from week two takes them over. Your account manager runs the QA loop on every assignment. By week three you are spending zero hours on the boring five and the recordings are the institutional memory.
Start there. Not with the perfect manual. With five recordings and a Monday handoff.
