Podcast Summary: Special Ops with Emma Rainville

Episode: Automate, Delegate, or Kill? The Truth Behind Task Automations
Date: October 28, 2025
Host: Emma Rainville (Guest hosting by Richard & Tiago from Shockwave)

Episode Overview

This episode of Special Ops takes a tactical deep-dive into the critical business question: Which tasks should you automate, delegate, or eliminate ("kill")? Regular host Emma Rainville hands the mic to Richard and Tiago from the Shockwave team, who unpack practical strategies—using real business examples—to help founders and operations leaders make their teams more efficient. The aim is to clarify how to decide among automating, delegating, or killing a task, so that your most valuable resource—time—is spent with maximum impact.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Double-Edged Sword of Automation

• Automation Isn’t Always the Answer:

  • Richard: "Automation on some level takes information away from you. That can be a very good thing, that can also be a very bad thing." (00:00)
  • Automating tasks means you lose a tactile sense of what’s really happening. For critical areas (like daily workshop signups and ad performance), the hands-on approach can yield actionable insights that automation might obscure.

• Criteria for Automating a Task:

  • Tiago: Three critical questions to ask before automating:
    1. Does the task truly need to be done?
    2. Does it require standardized execution?
    3. Is the task frequent enough to justify the setup time?
       (04:00)

• Good Automation Subjects:

  • Low-variation, high-frequency tasks like email deliverability checks.
  • Tedious processes assigned to junior staff, e.g., manual copy-pasting between apps or systems.

2. Delegation: Moving Tasks to the Right People

• Delegation vs. Automation:

  • When automation can’t handle the cognitive, context-specific, or customer-centric aspects of a job, delegation is the next move.
  • Richard: "If you don't have those, that kind of hands-on view, stuff gets away from you. It's just the nature of the thing." (03:50)

• How to Decide What to Delegate:

  • Task does not require the founder’s unique skills or experience.
  • Task can be systematized, standardized, and monitored by others.
  • Prioritize delegating tasks that are simple but consume a lot of time due to their frequency.

• Practical Exercise:

  • Make an “accountability chart.”
    • List every responsibility currently handled by the founder or manager.
    • Identify which roles could be hired or developed to take tasks off your plate.
    • Start delegating high-frequency, low-complexity tasks to reduce both workload and context switching.
      (10:02)

3. Killing: Challenging Traditions and Redundant Work

• Eliminating Unnecessary Tasks:

  • Richard: "How easy it is to build up these traditions that don't really need to be followed at all. Like, okay, why am I doing this? Well, I've always done it." (11:35)
  • Regular business review or bringing in an outside perspective (consultants, new hires) gives the distance needed to identify legacy processes that make no current sense.

• The Value of Perspective:

  • Tiago: “If you can get more time for you, you'll also get the ability to change the perspective because you have time to think at a different pace and quality and analyze.” (12:17)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Purpose of Automation/Delegation:

  • Richard: “The point of automation, the point of delegation, the point of all of this is to free up valuable time and push that to places where it can be more efficiently used.” (07:02)

• Real-World Example:

  • Workshop registrations: Previously handled in detail by the owner; after mapping and selectively automating processes, plus delegation, the owner now has “a lot more thinking free time.” (08:41)

• Founders Limiting Themselves:

  • Tiago: “It won't make sense once you write it down...” (10:02)
    (Referring to the moment a founder lists out all their roles and realizes how fragmented their time is.)

• On Building Accountable Teams:

  • Start by delegating entire contexts or related clusters of tasks to minimize context-switch costs, rather than just one task at a time.

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00-03:17 – The risks and reasoning behind automation; when too much distance is a problem
• 04:00-05:46 – Tiago’s three questions for automation; evaluating task complexity and frequency
• 07:02-08:07 – Delegation: what to move off your plate and how to structure escalation
• 08:41-10:02 – Founder’s self-assessment: accountability charts and context-switch elimination
• 11:35-12:17 – Killing: the power of periodic process review and letting “traditions” die
• 12:17-12:49 – The importance of outside perspective and time to think

Final Takeaways

• Use automation for repetitive, standardized, high-frequency tasks—but beware the loss of firsthand insight.
• Delegate anything that doesn’t require your unique skill—and focus on systematizing and monitoring, not just offloading.
• Routinely review ongoing tasks and kill those that are only alive by inertia; an outside perspective helps.
• Always tie back to the goal: freeing up your best people (including you) for the highest-impact work.

This summary captures key ideas, processes, and actionable frameworks as discussed by Richard and Tiago, preserving their practical, operation-focused approach—and providing founders and managers tactical clarity on automating, delegating, and eliminating tasks.