Most People Don't Know How to Assign a Task
I was working with a vendor recently who was assigning me tasks in their project management tool. I had blocked two hours that week to knock out their assignments, which should have been more than enough.
I spent most of that time just trying to figure out what they were asking me to do.
The tasks had no context. No links to the files or documents I needed. Half of them didn't even describe what the actual deliverable was. So instead of doing the work, I was pinging them on Slack, digging through shared drives, and reverse-engineering what they meant. Two hours of execution turned into two hours of clarification.
This happens everywhere. And honestly, if you've ever delegated to a team member or an assistant and felt like the handoff was clunky, there's a decent chance the problem wasn't the person you delegated to. It was the task itself.
The Five Rules
I posted something on LinkedIn this week that hit a nerve, probably because most people know they're guilty of this. Here are the rules we follow at FreedUp, and the same ones we train our assistants and clients on:
1. Every task needs a verb. "Send...", "Create...", "Draft...", "Schedule..." If the task doesn't start with an action, the assignee has to guess what you actually want them to do. "Q3 budget" is not a task. "Review Q3 budget and flag any line items over $5k" is a task.
2. Every task needs enough context that a future version of you could complete it. This is the one most people get wrong. You write the task while the context is fresh in your head, and you forget that the person reading it doesn't have that context. Imagine someone picking this up two weeks from now with zero memory of the conversation that created it. Could they still do it? If not, add more detail.
3. Every task needs links to whatever the assignee needs. If you're asking someone to review a doc, link the doc. If you're asking someone to respond to an email, link the email. If they have to go hunting for the thing you're referencing, you've already failed. The ten seconds it takes you to paste a link saves them ten minutes of searching.
4. Every task needs one clear owner. Not a team. Not "us." One person. If two people are responsible, nobody is responsible. You can have collaborators, but one human owns the outcome and the deadline.
5. Every task needs a deadline. If it doesn't have a deadline, it's either not important enough to track, or you haven't thought hard enough about when it actually needs to be done. A task without a deadline will sit in someone's list and rot. Just pick a date.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
These rules sound basic. That's because they are. But the amount of time and energy I've watched people waste because of bad task hygiene is staggering.
Think about the math. If you assign five tasks a week and each one takes your team member an extra 15 minutes to decode because the context is missing or the ask is unclear, that's over an hour a week of pure waste. For one person. Multiply that across a team and it adds up to days of lost productivity every month, not because people are slow but because the instructions were bad.
At FreedUp, we built this into our operating system early on. Every client and every assistant gets trained on these standards because delegation falls apart without them.
The Uncomfortable Part
Here's where it gets a little uncomfortable: you have to enforce this. It's not enough to have standards. You have to call people out when they don't follow them.
If someone on your team assigns a task with no verb, send it back. If a vendor gives you a task with no context, tell them. If your assistant creates a task with no deadline, flag it. Not to be difficult, but because every time you let a bad task slide, you're accepting the friction that comes with it.
And to those of you who don't track tasks at all, well, I don't even have a category for you in my brain.
The Bottom Line
Delegation is a system, and the task is the smallest unit of that system. If the smallest unit is broken, the whole system is broken. You don't need a fancier tool. You don't need Notion or Asana or Monday or whatever the hot new thing is. You need five rules and the discipline to enforce them.
Start there. Everything else gets easier.
Happy Friday,
Aaron