Every life stage has work to do and a distance that can be calculated.
Split your week into checkable artefacts and accountable decisions, then delegate only the artefacts.
It is not “I am behind on AI.” It is: your workload is mostly monitoring, inventorying and preparing, and nobody ever showed you which layer of it is checkable and which layer carries your name.
Verification signals (two or more and the need is real):
· You can name the artefact the task produces: a list, a table, a draft
· You can check that artefact in under two minutes
· The decision that follows is irreversible and signed by you
Verification cost + organic composition of capital
Delegation pays when checking costs less than doing; it is a trap when it also moves the decision. Monitoring job postings, tabulating skills and assembling an income inventory all produce artefacts you can audit. A pay negotiation produces a consequence you cannot undo.
Marx’s rising organic composition of capital explains the order of events: the tasks that get automated first are the ones that can be specified and checked. That is exactly why the checkable layer is where you should start — and why staying only in that layer is the real risk. You do not win by doing the checkable work faster; you win by moving your hours into the layer that cannot be specified.
Basis taken from the cell framework. All three must pass; a failed test is a stop, not a warning.
Can I hand <monitoring a specific risk signal> to an agent?
Basis: Verification cost economics
If any fails, monitor manually once a week instead.
Can I hand <drafting a specific document> to an agent?
Basis: Task decomposability
If it does not split, write the outline yourself first.
Can I hand <preparing a specific negotiation position> to an agent?
Basis: Accountability
If any fails, keep the preparation and use the agent only for lookup.
Stop doing work a checklist can do
Keep the part that needs my judgement
Know what to learn next without reading two hundred postings
What to look at
Hours per week on checkable artefacts · decisions made per week that only you could make · non-labour income share
How to judge
If the agent vanished tomorrow, which of your outputs would you have to rebuild by hand?
Healthy state
≥50% of checkable work delegated · one judgement-heavy decision per week · non-labour income above zero
Ask an AI what to do with your career —— it will answer, and the answer will be generic
Automate the monitoring and the decision together —— the two layers have different costs of being wrong
Delegate the negotiation —— you cannot outsource the consequences
Learn tools to keep the same job —— that is staying inside the layer being automated
List last week and mark every item A (checkable artefact) or B (accountable decision)
Hand over A with a two-minute check you actually run
Keep B, and write one line on why it is B
Re-sort the list monthly — items move between layers
Put the recovered hours into B, not into more A
This page does not ask for your salary or your employer’s data. It discusses which layer of your work you own.