Can I take a step back from day-to-day work while still deciding whether to sell?

Yes, and doing this thoughtfully can actually help your eventual decision, since stepping back, even partially, tests something you'll need to know regardless of what you decide: whether the business can run without your daily involvement. If it holds up reasonably well, that's useful information whether you end up selling, bringing in a partner, or just changing your own role permanently. If it doesn't, that tells you something important to address before any exit, not a reason to abandon the idea.

The nuance is doing it deliberately rather than drifting away out of exhaustion, which is a different thing entirely. A planned step-back — delegating specific responsibilities to specific people, with a clear sense of what you're watching for — gives you real information. Quietly checking out because you're burned out risks the business actually suffering while you're not paying attention, which then colours your view of whether it's sellable at all.

If you're genuinely stepping back to test this, it's worth documenting what you delegate and to whom, partly for your own clarity and partly because a buyer will later want to see that any delegation was a considered structure, not an accident.