What to hand over

A photographer shoots a wedding on a Saturday. What follows is seven hundred images, a cull to four hundred, a colour treatment, an export, a gallery, a link sent to a couple, a backup kept for five years, and an invoice. Six of those seven steps are machinery. One is not: which four hundred images, and how they are treated, is the work she is paid for.

Deciding where that line falls is the whole skill of this course.

The test

Ask one question of any step: *could a competent person who has never met the client look at the result and say whether it is right?*

If yes, it is machinery. Chasing a document until it arrives is machinery. Applying a fixed rule to a set of numbers is machinery. Rekeying a name and address from one system into another is machinery. Watching for a date and starting the work is machinery.

If no, it is judgement, and it stays with a person. Choosing which image is the one. Deciding whether a client's plan is sensible. Telling somebody that the price is going up.

What is plainly machinery

*Waiting.* Watching a date, a trigger, a status, a mailbox.
*Fetching and rekeying.* Moving a figure from a statement into a reconciliation.
*Assembling.* Collating documents into a file that has to exist.
*Applying fixed rules.* Client owes more than ninety days, therefore escalate. Certificate expires in sixty days, therefore start renewal.
*Chasing on a schedule.* The second request, the third request, the polite fourth.
*Keeping the record.* What was done, when, and what was attached.

None of that requires taste, and all of it requires attention, which is exactly what a person runs out of first.

What stays with a person

*Anything that changes a person's legal position.* A tax filing, a signed contract, a professional opinion, a legal notice. Machinery can prepare every part of it. Authorising it is a person's act.

*Professional judgement.* A market trader deciding whether to take a bigger stall at a higher rent. An accountant deciding whether a client's treatment of an expense is defensible. An architect deciding whether a design meets the brief.

*Relationship.* The apology, the negotiation, the difficult conversation. Machinery can schedule the call. It cannot have it.

*Anything that cannot be checked.* If nobody can state the criterion for success, the work cannot be handed over safely, because there is no way to know whether it was done well.

Three boundary rules worth keeping

*Hand over tasks, keep decisions.* A system can chase the documents. The decision about what to do when the third chase fails is a person's.

*Hand over the preparation, keep the signature.* Every step up to and including the final draft is machinery. The signature is not.

*Hand over the watching, keep the meaning.* A system can tell you a balance has aged past ninety days. Whether that client is worth the trouble is a judgement, and it changes with what you know about them.

What actually changes

When the machinery is carried elsewhere, what remains in a working week is a smaller number of decisions, each of which wants attention. That is not a smaller job. It is a different one, and it is closer to the work the person originally chose.

One caution, honestly stated: handing over the wrong thing is worse than handing over nothing. Work that is carried badly by a system fails silently and repeatedly. The next four lessons are about how to describe the work, how to check it, where to sign, and what happens when nobody looks.

Try it

Take one recurring outcome and list its steps, in order, in one column.

Beside each step, write M for machinery or J for judgement.
For each J, write who does it and what they need in front of them to decide.
Circle the first M in the list that currently consumes the most time.

Five minutes. The circled step is the one worth describing properly, which is the next lesson.