Skills fade, playbooks do not
Five lessons in, you know the shift. Ask for the finished thing. Write a brief with five parts. Attach the material. Plan before running. Check what comes back.
Here is what happens next if you stop now. On Monday you use it beautifully. On Wednesday you are busy and you type "tips for handling a difficult stakeholder" out of pure habit. By the following month you are back to the search box.
The cure is not discipline. It is a file. Write down the jobs you hand over and the exact briefs that produce them, and the habit stops depending on your memory or your mood.
In plain English
- Playbook:
- Your own list of jobs you delegate weekly, each with the brief that works.
- Reusable brief:
- A brief written once with the changeable parts left as blanks.
- Trigger:
- The moment in your week that tells you to reach for a particular brief.
Build it outside this site
Nothing here is stored and there are no accounts, so your playbook lives with you. A note app, a document, a pinned message to yourself, an index card taped inside a drawer. Any of those work. The only requirement is that it opens in two seconds, because a playbook you have to hunt for is a playbook you will not use.
MY DELEGATION PLAYBOOK
JOB: [name it, e.g. Monday team update]
TRIGGER: [when it happens, e.g. every Monday before 10am]
I SUPPLY: [what I paste in: last week's notes, the numbers, my past example]
BRIEF:
FINISHED THING: [exact artefact and format]
AUDIENCE: [who reads it, what they know]
GOOD LOOKS LIKE: [one sentence]
CONSTRAINTS: [length, tone, structure, must not include]
GAPS: use placeholders and list open questions at the end
CHECK BEFORE SENDING: [the two or three things I always verify]
Repeat this block for each job. Aim for five.
Checkpoint
A playbook is a list of jobs plus the briefs that produce them, kept somewhere you can open in two seconds. Written down beats remembered every time.
Pick the right five jobs
Do not try to delegate everything. Look for jobs with three qualities: they repeat, they have a predictable shape, and you dislike doing them. That intersection is where the hours are.
Strong candidates for most office roles: the weekly update nobody reads but everyone would notice missing. Turning meeting notes into actions with owners. First drafts of replies to routine enquiries. Summarising a long document you have to have an opinion about by Thursday. Reformatting the same information for a different audience. Drafting the agenda. Writing the job advert. Chasing the unanswered email.
Weak candidates: anything where the thinking is the work, anything one-off and unusual, anything requiring judgement about a specific person, anything where the stakes make a full review as slow as writing it yourself.
Look at last week's calendar and last week's sent folder. Anything you did more than once is a playbook candidate. Anything that made you sigh is a priority one.
The prompt pack
These four cover most of what a normal working week throws at you. Copy them into your playbook file and edit the brackets.
Produce my weekly team update.
AUDIENCE: [my team / my manager], who already know [what].
GOOD LOOKS LIKE: someone skimming on their phone gets the point from the
first three lines.
CONSTRAINTS: under [200] words. Three sections: what moved, what is stuck,
what I need from you. Plain English, no corporate filler, no phrase like
moving forward or circling back.
MY NOTES FROM THE WEEK:
[paste]
MY USUAL STYLE, FOR VOICE:
[paste one past update]
GAPS: if something in my notes is unclear, use a placeholder and ask at the end.
Turn these meeting notes into a decisions and actions list.
Two tables: DECISIONS MADE, and ACTIONS with owner and due date.
Only include things actually said. If an owner or date was never stated,
write NOT STATED rather than guessing who should do it.
At the end, list anything discussed that was left unresolved.
NOTES:
[paste]
Work only from the document below.
Produce: a one-page brief for someone who will not read the original.
Structure: what it says in three lines, the parts that affect [my team],
the three questions I should ask about it, and anything it conspicuously
does not address.
Do not add outside information. Mark anything unclear as NOT IN THE SOURCE.
DOCUMENT:
[paste]
Rewrite the material below for a different reader.
ORIGINAL AUDIENCE: [who it was written for].
NEW AUDIENCE: [who it is for now, and what they do not know].
Keep every fact identical. Change only vocabulary, length and emphasis.
Length: [half the original / under 150 words].
Flag anything you had to simplify in a way that loses accuracy.
MATERIAL:
[paste]
Paste this at the top of any job, or save it as a custom instruction.
HOW I WANT YOU TO WORK WITH ME
Give me the finished thing, not advice about it.
Ask before assuming: use placeholders and list open questions at the end.
Plain English. No filler openings, no summary of what I just asked.
If you used a fact I did not give you, mark it UNVERIFIED.
For any job with more than three steps, show me the plan first and stop.
That last block is worth pinning wherever your assistant lets you keep standing instructions. Most tools now have a settings field for exactly this, so the rules apply to every conversation without you retyping them.
The first week
Do not launch a five-job playbook on Monday. Pick one. Write the brief, run it, fix the brief based on what came back, and only then add a second. A brief that has been through two rounds of correction is worth ten written from scratch.
Give yourself one rule for the first fortnight: if you type a question starting with "how do I" or "tips for", stop and rewrite it as a job. That single interruption is most of the habit.
Finish the course and the Delegator badge is yours. The better trophy is the file you just built, which will still be saving you afternoons long after you have forgotten which lesson taught you what.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why write a playbook down rather than just remembering the technique?