DELEGATE

Assign a bounded piece of work with clear authority, acceptance criteria, and accountability.

Every Sunday night you load the dishwasher yourself because your 14-year-old "does it wrong," and every Sunday you resent it. The truth is you have never actually handed the job over. You have hinted, hovered, and redone. He has never owned a task with real authority and a real standard, which is also, you realize, something he needs to learn before he leaves your house.

Delegate means assigning a bounded piece of work with clear authority, acceptance criteria, and accountability. The cue is work someone else could own that you are carrying out of habit or perfectionism. The operation: define the bounded packet, such as "kitchen reset every evening, done by 9," state what done means concretely, like "counters clear, dishwasher running, sink empty," grant matching authority, meaning he decides how and you stop hovering, and agree how completion gets checked. Then let him fail and adjust without you reclaiming the job. When it works, the task leaves your head entirely, and he gains a real responsibility rather than a supervised chore. The spec's boundaries: authority must match the task, since giving an assistant unrestricted bank access to pay bills grants power far beyond the packet, and some acts cannot be delegated at all, because the human doing them is the point.