Work rarely dies while someone is doing it. It dies in the gap between one person and the next, where the objective survives and the reasoning does not.
Think about the last thing that stalled on you. Odds are it did not stall because the work was hard. It stalled because it moved: to a subcontractor, to your bookkeeper, to a new employee, to yourself three weeks later after four other things happened in between.
What gets handed over is almost always the task. What gets lost is everything around it: why you chose this approach over the obvious one, which two options you already ruled out, what the customer said on the phone that is not written anywhere, and which decision is still genuinely open.
So the next person redoes your thinking. Or worse, they do not, and they cheerfully re-make the decision you already rejected for a good reason.
Why "just write it down" does not work
Everyone knows the answer is documentation. Almost nobody does it, and the reason is not laziness. It is that a blank document is an unbounded ask. Write down what? How much? For whom? At the end of a long day, facing that question, the rational move is to send a three-line email and hope.
The fix is not more discipline. It is removing the blank page by fixing the shape of the thing in advance.
The objective, in one sentence
Not the task. The outcome that makes the task worth doing. These are different, and the difference is where most substitutions go wrong.
Current state, honestly
What is actually done, what is half done, and what looks done but is not. The half-done things are the expensive ones to discover later.
Decisions already made, with reasons
This is the section people skip and the one that pays. A decision without its reason gets reopened by the next person. A decision with its reason gets respected, or overturned deliberately.
Open questions, named as open
The things you did not decide. Marking them explicitly is what keeps the next person from assuming they were settled.
Who owns it now, and what they may decide alone
Authority stated plainly, so nobody sits waiting for permission and nobody commits you to something you would not have agreed to.
Where AI actually helps here
Not by deciding anything. By doing the compression. You have the raw material already: the email thread, the notes, the messages, the quote you sent. Assembling that into the fixed shape above is genuinely repetitive work, and repetitive work is the only kind worth automating.
You read the result, correct the parts that are wrong, and add the one thing that was only ever in your head. That last part is not automatable and should not be.
The test
Hand the page to someone competent who was not in the room. If they can start without calling you, it worked. If they call you within an hour, the missing answer belongs in the template permanently.