Busy-ness must be the most common challenge that managers face, in fast-growing companies. Not just from my personal experience, but from most managers I have been working with. Growing a startup can feel like endless firefighting, where the urgent constantly takes priority over the genuinely important.
The often-recommended solution is to delegate. Which is typically seen as: get someone else to do the not-so-important jobs. But delegation is an art in itself. And when person A delegates a task to person B, it still leaves the organisation exposed to a critical risk: the reliance on a single person to complete the task (bus factor 1).
An alternative
Computer systems exist to perform tasks: whether processing, storing or transmitting data. Just like organisation, computer systems struggle when a single computer has too many tasks to perform, and computer science came up with pretty smart solutions to this problem.
In a distributed computer system, several computers are organised to share a large task, with multiple benefits including scalability (the pool of computers can grow or reduce as the workload varies) and resilience (any single computer can have an issue or die without affecting the overall system).
When to distribute
Distributing a task from one person to several, rather than delegating 1-to-1, has those added benefits of scalability and resilience.
Distributing, rather than delegating, will work better if:
The task can be sliced into several, similar chunks
Each chunk can be handled by a different person, with as little coordination as possible
Individual mistakes, for any of the chunks, are acceptable
Performing a chunk actually allows people to learn a useful new skill
A few examples:
Code reviews are typically performed by pools of reviewers (usually, but not necessarily, more experienced developers)
Recruitment interviews can (and should) be performed by multiple interviewers
Spreading the word about your organisation, for example by giving talks at conferences, can be better handled by multiple people in your team, rather than just by yourself
So have a look at what you should delegate, by all means - but consider distributing them instead!