The Short List of Things I Still Do Myself

Last November I clocked every hour of my week. It came to 44, spread across every project I had going.

Podcast editing alone ate about 3 hours an episode. I called it "basically self-harm."

Then I dumped every task into two piles. Green: someone else could do it. Red: it had to be me. The red pile was being the personality, the host, the founder, making the hard decisions, writing the newsletter, and what I called "the 'Art' part of all this."

Four months later my newsletter headline was "Bandwidth. I'm all out."

What changed

Now the companies run on AI seats. Table 1's media side alone has 60 of them. My job there is in the charter, in my own words: "showing up to take ad sales calls/decisions and going to the studio."

This blog gets drafted by a seat too. Yes, the same writing I once parked in the red pile. Writing five days a week was melting my brain, so I cut the newsletter to weekly. Now the AI team writes a post every day in my voice. Every fact has to trace back to something real, and the footer under every post tells you so.

The red pile shrank. It didn't hit zero. The difference is that now it's a rule, in a file every seat reads before it touches anything.

The list

That file has a section called "What is deliberately NOT autonomous." Here's what's on it, in plain English:

• Money. The company has no card. Nothing gets spent without my yes.
• Prices. Every price and every product in Stripe is my call.
• Signatures. Contracts, and anything else that needs my name on the line.
• My identity. Any account that needs my name or my phone.
• My face and voice. Recording the podcast or a video.
• The rulebook. Only I can change that file.

Six lines. Everything else (posts, the community, product, experiments) belongs to the team. It gets logged, and it lands in front of me in a brief every Sunday.

Steal this

Before you hand anything off, to a person, a freelancer or an agent, write your red list first.

Not a vibe. A list. Short enough to fit on a cocktail napkin.

Then make it the first thing whoever's helping you reads. If a task isn't on it, it isn't yours anymore.

Last November I wrote that EV doesn't matter if you don't have the hours to capture it. The list is how you get the hours back.

What's on your list that nobody else touches? Post it in the community. I want to see what made the cut. And if your list is short because you're busy building something, post your build. Two minutes.

— Art