The morning you stopped approving everything
When the volume of small decisions becomes the job, delegation is not a shortcut. It is the only way back to the decisions that matter.
The first hour of the day used to disappear into a queue of “can you sign this”, “is this fine” and “which one of these two”. Every one of them was small. Every one of them was, in isolation, almost free. And together they ate the whole morning.
The cost hides in the pile
A decision that takes two minutes costs two minutes. A pile of forty of them costs the shape of your day, because each one arrives with its own interruption, and each interruption resets your attention far more than the two minutes imply.
What makes it worse is that most of these small decisions have already been made elsewhere, by a rule you have not written down yet. The approval is the ritual, not the thinking.
What delegation actually buys
Delegating the volume does not mean giving up control. It means moving the control to where it belongs: the rules you set once, and the few cases that genuinely need you.
The result is not a shorter list of decisions. It is a different list. Same desk. Fewer approvals. More of the ones that only you can make.