Every decision that waits for you is a day your business did not move

Make a list tomorrow. Every time somebody asks you to decide something, write it down. Not the big questions. The small ones.

Can I give this party five percent. His material is short by two kilos, should we send it. He wants delivery on Saturday, is that all right. Can I take Friday off. The payment has come, should I release the order.

By evening you will have fifteen to twenty items, and most of them will be things you decided the same way you decided them last week.

The cost is not your minute

Your minute is cheap. The waiting is expensive.

Someone asked you at eleven. You were in a meeting, you replied at four. For those five hours that order sat still, and so did the person who asked. Multiply that across twenty decisions a day and you are not running a slow team. You are running a team that spends a good part of its day waiting for you.

And there is a second cost that shows up later. People stop deciding. Not because they cannot, but because asking is safer than being wrong. Two years of that and you genuinely do have a team that cannot decide anything, and you built it yourself, one small approval at a time.

What to do with the list

Go through it and put each item in one of three piles.

Things anybody can decide, with a written rule. Discounts under ten percent, leave under two days, delivery changes within the same week. Write the rule down once and it stops being a question.

Things one named person decides. Not you, and not whoever is nearest.

Things that genuinely need you. This pile is always much smaller than people expect. That is the point of the exercise.

Keep that list tomorrow. At the end of the day, how many of those decisions genuinely needed to be yours?

Turning everyday approvals into rules the system can hold is routine work for us. Send us your list and we will show you how much of it can leave your desk.