Sometimes it's obvious that I should do something myself. If it will take several times longer for a subordinate to complete something, I'll do it myself. (I don't have an exact multiple worked out in my head, but it has to be pretty high - probably above five times longer - before I'll do something myself for no reason other than that it will take a subordinate longer.)
Or if it will only take a little bit longer for a subordinate to do a job, and I trust my subs to do a good job, then I'll let them do it.
But I've been struggling recently when it comes to how to structure the working environment. I see a large part of my role as setting up a working environment in which it's easy for my subs to be productive. I've invested a lot of time in creating tutorials and instructions, for example, and I teach my more experienced subs to mentor the newer ones. Those are one-time investments that pay off handsomely in terms of saving me time.
It's not so easy to decide whether to spend time myself, though, when it comes to creating our list of things for subs to work on. I generate reports of new To Do items for my subs. Without going into excessive detail, they used to have to go three separate places to find (1) their previously-assigned items, (2) current tasks for them to work on, and (3) larger projects for them to work on when they finish their simple tasks.
It seems clear that this is unnecessarily complicated, but I allowed this situation to last for a while because it will take me more time to work all of those sources into our one main project management solution (Teamlab.com). And this extra time won't be a one-time investment; I'll have to spend this extra time every single day. And I usually work very hard to get rid of things that cost me extra time every day.
So in this case, because my role is to make their working environment easy, I did decide to shift everything into Teamlab, even though it will take me more time. But I still face other similar decisions that are even tougher. How do you all decide the value of your time in comparison to the value of the time of your subs?