The Delegation Test
How much of your job could AI actually do today?
Twelve questions. Two minutes. Be honest — nobody sees your answers but you.
Answer each: Yes / Partly / No.
Could a competent stranger run your inbox for one day using only written instructions you’ve already got?
Do your rules for what gets answered first exist anywhere outside your head?
Could someone else tell, from documentation, which of your relationships need velvet and which need steel?
When you decide something “feels off,” could you list what you checked to get there?
Does “done” have a written definition for the three pieces of work you repeat most?
Could an assistant — human or AI — tell what you’d escalate versus absorb, without asking you?
If you left tomorrow, would the things only you know survive the week?
Do you know which four hours of last week didn’t need to be you?
Could anyone else reconstruct your priorities on a travel week, when everything slips?
Is the way you sound — to a board, to a client, to your team — written down anywhere?
When AI tools have disappointed you, could you say precisely what they didn’t know?
Have you ever successfully handed off a judgment call — not a task, a judgment?
Score yourself
Yes = 2. Partly = 1. No = 0. Out of 24.
19–24 — You’re rare. Your work is unusually well documented. Teaching it to an AI would be fast, and the returns immediate — you’ve already done the hard part.
10–18 — The familiar middle. Parts of your work could be handed over tomorrow; the valuable parts run on instinct. This is exactly who the Forge was built for.
0–9 — Fully instinctive. Everything that matters lives in your head — which is another way of saying you’re extremely senior and completely irreplaceable. Both halves of that sentence are the problem.
The point: whatever your score, notice that the ceiling was never the AI. It’s that the instructions don’t exist. You’d never expect a new assistant to perform without an induction — and no one has ever given your AI one. They can’t be typed into a chat box. But they can be drawn out of you. That’s the craft.