Agents taught me how to delegateI was never good at delegating with a human team. I'd have people ready to help, and I'd still end up doing most of the work myself. Part of it was people management. I've never been strong at that. But the real problem sat underneath. I'm a perfectionist, and I'd look at a task and assume someone else wouldn't do it the way I wanted. So I'd take it back. That habit followed me through Great Dane, the music production house I ran in Portugal before AI disrupted that industry and I closed it, and into every project since. Then I started running agents, and something shifted.
1 / Agents remove the excuseWith a human, I could tell myself the job needed my personal touch. With ten agents running at once, that story falls apart fast. There's no version of doing it all yourself. You write the brief, you hand it off, you check what comes back. That's the only way to work. 2 / Delegating becomes the whole jobSome days I have ten or twenty agents running at once. One is drafting a proposal, another is checking a client's website, another is sitting in a research task I asked for an hour ago. My job stops being the work itself. My job becomes handing things off, checking in, and handing off again. Honestly, it gets confusing. I jump from one agent to the next so often that I sometimes lose track of what I asked which one to do. But that confusion is the point. It means I'm not doing the work. I'm managing the work, all day, at a scale no human team of mine ever forced on me. 3 / The muscle was always the same oneClear instructions. Trust the process once it's running. Review instead of redo. That's the exact skill I never built managing people, and agents forced it out of me in a few months, not a few years. 4 / It's changing how I work with partners and freelancersI'm a solopreneur, so I don't have staff. But I do work with partners and freelancers, and when one of them takes on something now, I catch myself reaching for the same habits. Write the brief properly. Let it run. Review, don't redo. Agents gave me the reps I never got with a team.
I spent years thinking my perfectionism was a quality problem. It was a delegation problem wearing a quality costume. Agents didn't lower my standards. They gave me a way to hold the standard without doing everything myself. Talk soon, P.S. If you're running agents and still doing everything yourself anyway, reply and tell me where you get stuck. That's usually the real bottleneck.
The AI Solopreneur • AI Strategy for European SMBs |
