Every question an assistant asks the boss costs the boss a little attention. One question is nothing. Hundreds a day, and the boss stops thinking about the big goal and spends the day answering. My AI agents were doing exactly that to me, so we gave them one rule: before you ask me anything, try to take it off my plate yourself.

The three questions every ask passes before it reaches the founder Every ask an agent wants to send enters at the top. Question one: could anyone else do this? If yes, the agent does it or hands it to whoever can, then reports. Question two: is the answer obvious? If yes, the agent does it and reports after. Question three: does it need anyone at all? If no, the ask is deleted and nobody is pinged. Only a real judgment call reaches the founder, as one question with a recommended default and a date. Every ask that gets through is counted daily, reviewed every Friday, and must fall. Every ask an agent wants to send 1. Could anyone else do this? me, another agent, or the teammate who owns it Yes: Do or Delegate then report no 2. Is the answer obvious? a yes they would 100% give, or one on record Yes: just Do it then report no 3. Does it need anyone at all? a status, an FYI or "just checking" is not an ask No: Delete it nobody is pinged no, it needs a real decision Reaches the founder: a judgment call one question, a recommended default, a date Counted every day · reviewed every Friday · must fall Do · Delegate · Delete
Every ask passes three questions. Only a real judgment call reaches me, and every one that does gets counted.

Nibbled to death by ducks

On November 1, 2026, I told my agents: "I'm being nibbled to death by ducks, where agents are distracting me with hundreds of these each day, frittering away my attention on menial things, causing me to lose sight of the big goal and not getting much impact."

A duck is a small ask that should never have reached me. "Should I go ahead?" when the answer is obviously yes. "Reply yes to approve." "Paste this into the other tool." "Can you tell the other agent what we decided?" Each one takes ten seconds. Together they eat the day.

We already had two rules aimed at this. One said never make me the courier who carries text or files between tools. The other said never ask me for a yes I would 100% give. Agents still found new ways to ask. Two rules meant two places to look and two chances to think "this case is different." So on November 2 we folded them into one rule, built on a framework every person on my team already knows.

One rule: Do, Delegate, Delete

When a task lands on a founder's plate, there are only three good moves. Do it, delegate it, or delete it. That is the Do, Delegate, Delete triangle, one of the nine triangles we run the company on.

The new rule says an ask to me is a task landing on my plate, so the agent runs that triangle for me before the ask is ever sent. In practice it is three questions:

  1. Could anyone else do this? The agent itself, another agent, or the teammate who owns that job. If yes, do it or hand it to them. A missing tool is the agent's problem to report, not mine to fill.
  2. Is my answer obvious? If I would say yes without thinking, or I already said yes to the same thing before, the agent does it and tells me after.
  3. Does it need anyone at all? A status update, an FYI or "just checking in" is not an ask. Delete it.

Whatever survives all three is a real judgment call that only I can make. It comes as one question with the agent's recommendation and a date: "Doing X unless you say otherwise by Friday." If I say nothing, the work does not stall. That is the same idea as an unanswered ask never stops the work.

What still waits for me

This rule removes asks agents invent. It does not remove the real gates. Money, passwords and access, deleting things, anything that cannot be undone, and messages to people outside the team that go beyond routine updates still need my yes. So does any safety check or approval step a product puts in front of an agent. Those are not ducks. An agent that hits one stops and tells me in one line, and never looks for a way around it.

The difference matters. A good rule makes the safe things fast and leaves the risky things exactly as careful as before. If you are wiring agents into your own business, read how my agents disclose what they are alongside this, because speed without guardrails is just faster mistakes.

Why it is first principles, not a new policy

We did not invent a new idea. We applied the triangles we already teach, and each one says something about an ask:

  • Do, Delegate, Delete is the rule itself. The founder's attention is the scarcest thing in the company, and this triangle is how any task stays off the founder's plate.
  • Communicate, Iterate, Delegate says to tell me after you act, improve the rule from every miss, and hand over more authority over time. A yes I gave once is written down and never asked again.
  • Content, Checklist, Software says a rule that lives only in an article gets broken. So the rule is this content, a three-question checklist, and software that checks it.
  • Metrics, Analysis, Action says if you cannot count it, you cannot fix it. So we count it.
  • Learn, Do, Teach says every agent learns the rule, uses it on its next ask, and teaches it by writing down what it did.

You can see the whole set in the nine triangles framework. The point is that a new problem rarely needs a new rule. It needs the right old rule, applied all the way.

Count it, then make the count fall

Every day, a small program counts how many asks reached me and how many of them were ducks. It reads the "Needs you" line agents put at the top of every report, plus a log where agents record any ask they send me by email, chat or text. My chief of staff agent sweeps my inbox each evening and logs any ask nobody wrote down.

Every Friday, that count goes into our weekly review. The target has two parts. Ducks should be zero. And total asks have to drop at least 20% from the week before, until they settle at a handful a week. For each duck, the agent that sent it fixes the instruction that produced it the same day, so the next run does the work instead of asking.

The count is a floor, not a census. An ask nobody logged does not show up. That is why the Friday review names any channel nobody swept that week, so a quiet week cannot pretend to be a good one.

Use it in your own company

You do not need AI agents to use this. It works the same with a human assistant, a new hire or a whole team. The most common way assistants go wrong is training the boss to be their assistant. I wrote about that in the number one VA mistake.

  1. Write the three questions down where everyone who works for you can see them.
  2. Keep a list of decisions you already made. If a question is on the list, nobody asks it again.
  3. Ask for one question, a recommendation and a date. Never "what do you want to do?"
  4. Count the asks every day and look at the number every Friday.
  5. Fix the source of every duck. A duck means an instruction somewhere was unclear. Fix the instruction, not the person.

The full operating guide for how my agents work together is in how the agents run the company. The rule itself is free to install in your own agents from our public skill pack.

The lesson

Your attention is the one thing in your company nobody can make more of. Every ask spends some. The best people and the best agents protect it by doing the work, handing it to the right person, or deciding it never needed to be asked. Then they bring you the one question only you can answer.