Two decisions are sitting on your desk this week. One is whether to buy this month’s stock from a new supplier who is 10 percent cheaper, and the other is whether to sign a one-year contract for the warehouse. You have put both aside until you feel sure.
But those two are nothing alike. If the new supplier’s goods turn out badly, next month you go back to the old one. If the warehouse contract is wrong, you are stuck with those terms for a year.
Make the reversible decision the same day
A reversible decision is one you can undo cheaply if it turns out to be wrong. Don’t spend weeks deciding these, because the information you are waiting for usually only arrives once you have tried it.
Say you buy 50 million toman of stock a month and the new supplier is 10 percent cheaper. Every month you don’t decide, 5 million toman is gone. You will never see that cost in your accounts, because you didn’t spend anything. You simply didn’t keep money you could have kept.
Take your time over the irreversible one
A decision that is expensive to undo, like the year-long warehouse contract or hiring someone key, deserves that slowness. Rushing here means living with your mistake for a year.
Before decisions like these, write down what you expect to happen and when you plan to look at the result. Read that note again three months later, because without it you only remember what you decided, not why you decided it.
Where does your deciding time go?
McKinsey asked more than 1,200 managers about this, and 61 percent said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted. In a small business most of that time goes on repeat decisions, like how much discount this customer gets or which order gets prepared first.
Those decisions should never reach you at all. In delegation I wrote about setting a clear rule for each of them and handing the decision to your team. Every repeat decision taken off your desk frees your time and attention for the few heavy ones.
In business management I said to set aside one hour a week for working on your business, and that hour is the best time for those few heavy decisions. Make them between two phone calls in the middle of the daily work and they come out rushed and unfocused.
Where to start
Write down the decisions sitting on your desk right now and work out one thing for each: what undoing it would cost you if it turned out wrong. Make the cheap-to-undo ones today.
And if every decision looks heavy and none of them is moving, in a free diagnostic session we will work out together where the problem is.