Write the steps before you hand off work

Handing someone a task without the steps is not delegation, it is guessing. Writing down the steps first, even roughly, turns a task into something a person can actually own without needing you to check in every hour.

A lot of failed delegation is blamed on the person who took the task, but the real problem is usually a task that only lived in the founder's head. If the steps were never written down, nobody but you could have done it right the first time. I have caught myself handing off a task with nothing but a result in mind, and the steps I skipped writing down were always the ones I ended up explaining three separate times anyway.

Try this today: before you hand off your next task, write a short list of the steps you would take to do it yourself. Hand that along with the task, and watch how much less back-and-forth follows.