How does a founder document their daily tasks so they can hire an operations manager?
Document your daily tasks by recording yourself doing them for one full week. Don't write from memory — use a workflow capture tool to record your actual browser-based work, and keep a running log of non-digital tasks. The output becomes the operations manager's onboarding playbook and job description, based on what you actually do rather than what you think you do.
Why is founder documentation so difficult?
Founders resist documentation for three reasons:
- "It's faster to just do it myself" — True today, catastrophically false at scale
- Unconscious competence — Founders skip steps they don't realize they're taking
- No established processes — Many founder workflows are improvisational, not standardized
The solution: capture first, systematize later. Recording your actual work reveals the real processes, including the ones you've never consciously recognized.
What is the step-by-step process?
| Day | Action |
|---|---|
| Monday | Install Glyde. Record every browser-based task you do today. |
| Tuesday-Thursday | Continue recording. Keep a running list of non-browser tasks (calls, decisions, vendor interactions). |
| Friday | Review the week's recordings. Categorize tasks: daily, weekly, monthly, ad-hoc. |
| Weekend | Identify which tasks require your judgment vs. which are procedural. Procedural tasks are what the ops manager will own. |
| Next week | Convert recordings into SOPs for the top 10 delegatable tasks. These become the ops manager's week-one onboarding. |
The output has a dual purpose: it serves as the job description for the hire (here's what this role actually does) and as the onboarding material (here's how to do it). Founders who document before hiring consistently report that their new ops manager reaches independence 2-3x faster than those who try to train through verbal hand-off.
This answer is part of our guide to capturing and preserving team knowledge.