Mark nondelegable

Before you hand work off, flag the parts where you personally doing them is part of the result, and keep those.

Your father is coming home from the hospital on Friday with nine new medications, a walker, and a follow-up list four pages long. You have a sister who wants to help, a pharmacy app that syncs refills, a paid aide three mornings a week, and a shared calendar. Sunday night you start assigning things. Somewhere in the sorting, the conversation about whether he still wants the aggressive treatment plan gets folded into a task called "discuss with care team," and it drifts to whoever is free.

Mark nondelegable is the move where you flag, in writing, the pieces that only work if you are the one doing them, and you do it before you look at who or what is available. The cue is the moment you feel relief at how much can be handed off. Three steps. List every piece of the work. Circle each one where a human presence is part of the outcome itself: consent, accountability, real relationship, bodily presence, meaning, or a skill you are trying to build. Write those on a short separate list with your name on it, then sort everything else freely. What changes is that the treatment conversation stops being schedulable and the refill tracking stops being sacred. False alarm when you mark something yours out of guilt or habit rather than because your presence changes the result, which is how caregivers burn out doing pill counts.