Grab a coffee. This one's a Sunday kind of thing.

There's a list in your head right now of decisions you haven't made. You might not call it that. You probably call it "stuff I'm thinking about."

The team member who isn't working out. The software you keep meaning to switch. The client you're pretty sure you should let go. The price you know is too low. The second location, or the new service, or the partner who keeps floating a deal. The website that's embarrassing but not embarrassing enough to fix this week.

Some of those have been on the list for months. A couple of them, if you're honest, for a year or more.

Here's what nobody tells you about that list. Every item on it is charging you rent. Every single day.

Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, quiet, grinding way. The underperformer is still underperforming, and now the good people on your team are watching you tolerate it. The bad software is still costing you twenty minutes a day. The wrong client is still eating the Friday afternoon that should have gone to the right ones. And somewhere in the back of your brain, a little piece of your attention is always parked on each of those things, waiting.

That's decision debt. Most owners are carrying a lot more of it than they realize, and it's one of the biggest reasons a business feels heavier than its numbers say it should.

Q4 started this week. You've got thirteen weeks left in the year. Let's clear the backlog before it follows you into January.

It's usually not laziness. Most of the owners I know who sit on decisions are the opposite of lazy. They're busy. That's the problem.

A decision that's hard gets pushed behind a task that's easy, because the easy task makes you feel productive and the hard decision makes you feel uncomfortable. Answer the emails, fix the invoice, jump on the call. Tomorrow you'll think about the hire. Then tomorrow shows up with its own emails.

The other reason is that we tell ourselves we need more information. Sometimes that's true. Most of the time it isn't. Most of the time we already know the answer and we're waiting for the answer to feel less expensive. It won't. It gets more expensive the longer you wait.

Here's the question I ask clients when they say they need more time to think about something: "What specific piece of information would change your mind?"

If they can name it, great. Go get it, and put a date on it.

If they can't name it, and they usually can't, they don't need more time. They need permission. So consider this your permission.

Block forty five minutes today. Phone in another room. A blank page, or a blank doc if you're a keyboard person.

Write down every decision you haven't made. Big ones, small ones, business, personal if it's bleeding into work. Don't solve anything yet. Just get it out of your head and onto the page.

If you're stuck, walk through these prompts.

Who on my team would I not rehire today, knowing what I know now?

Which client would I not sign again?

What am I paying for every month that I'm not sure is working?

What price have I known is wrong for more than ninety days?

What project is "almost started" and has been for a while?

What opportunity keeps coming back that I haven't said yes or no to?

What's the thing I bring up to my spouse, my partner, or my accountability group over and over without doing anything about it?

That last one is usually the biggest item on the list. If you've been talking about it for months, you already know the answer.

Most people end up with somewhere between twelve and twenty five items. Don't panic. You're not doing all of them today. You're sorting.

Go down your list and label every item one of two ways.

Door. A decision you can reverse without much pain. Try the new tool for sixty days. Test the new price on new clients. Move the weekly meeting. Hire a contractor for a project instead of a full time person. If it doesn't work, you walk back through the door.

Wall. A decision that's genuinely hard to undo. Signing a five year lease. Taking on a partner. Selling a division. Firing someone who's been with you for eight years.

Here's what you'll notice. Almost everything on your list is a door. Usually eighty percent or more. We treat doors like walls because they feel heavy, but the actual cost of getting a door wrong is small and temporary.

So here's the rule. Doors get decided today. Right now, in this sitting. Give yourself two minutes per door. Pick the option you'd pick if you had to choose by five o'clock, write it down, and put the first action on your calendar for this week.

You're going to get a couple of them wrong. That's fine. That's the whole point of a door. You'll learn more in two weeks of doing than you would in six more months of thinking.

The real walls deserve more care. But care doesn't mean forever.

For each wall, write down three things.

The one question that matters. Not ten questions. One. "Can this person do the job we need in six months?" "Does this partnership make me more money per hour than what I'm doing now?" "Will this lease still make sense if revenue drops twenty percent?"

What you need to find out to answer it, and by when. A conversation. A number from your bookkeeper. A reference call. Whatever it is, put a date next to it that's inside the next three weeks.

The default. This is the part that changes everything. Write down what happens if you still haven't decided by the deadline. "If I haven't decided about the second location by October 31, the answer is not this year." "If I haven't decided about the partnership by October 24, I tell them no."

The default does two things. It stops the decision from dragging on forever, because now doing nothing is a choice with a real outcome. And most of the time, once you write the default down, you'll realize immediately whether you're okay with it. If you're relieved, that's your answer. If your stomach drops, that's your answer too.

If you're still stuck on something, run the cost of waiting.

Let's say it's the underperforming hire. They're paid $55,000 a year. They're doing maybe sixty percent of the job. That's roughly $1,800 a month you're paying for work that isn't getting done, before you count the time you spend covering for them and the damage to morale on the rest of the team.

You've been "thinking about it" since June. That's four months. Call it $7,000 so far, plus the stuff you can't put a number on.

Or the software that doesn't fit. $400 a month, plus twenty minutes a day of workarounds from three people. That's about twenty hours a month. At $40 an hour, you're burning $1,200 a month on a decision you could make in an afternoon.

Most delays look cheap when you look at a single day. They look ridiculous when you add up the months.

Once you start making decisions faster, you need a way to not relitigate them every Tuesday.

I keep a simple log. One line per decision, five columns.

The date. The decision. The one sentence reason. What would make me revisit it. The date I'll check back.

It lives in Notion for me, but a spreadsheet works fine. The magic isn't the tool. It's that when your brain starts reopening a closed decision at eleven at night, you can look at the log and see that you already decided, why you decided, and when you agreed to look at it again. Then you can go back to sleep.

It also makes you a better decision maker over time. Every quarter, scroll the log. Which calls were right? Which were wrong? Were the wrong ones wrong because of bad information or because you waited too long? You'll start to see your own patterns, and they're almost never the ones you'd guess.

A lot of decisions actually get made in meetings and then evaporate. If you record your calls with Fathom, have it pull out the decisions at the end of every meeting and paste them straight into the log. If you want something that holds the context across your whole workday so you're not digging back through notes to remember why you chose what you chose, Littlebird is worth a look.

Here's the uncomfortable part. A big chunk of your decision debt probably isn't yours.

It's decisions your team could make, but they bring them to you because you've never told them they're allowed not to. So they wait. And you become a bottleneck, and every one of those small decisions sits in your queue next to the big ones.

Give your people a simple ladder. For any type of decision, they operate at one of four levels.

Level one: Bring me the information and I'll decide.

Level two: Bring me a recommendation and I'll approve it.

Level three: Decide, then tell me what you decided.

Level four: Decide, and don't bother telling me.

Then go through the common decisions in your business and assign a level to each one. Refunds under $200, level four. Scheduling changes, level four. Discounts over ten percent, level two. New vendor over $1,000 a month, level one.

Write it down and share it. You'll be amazed how many decisions stop arriving in your inbox within a couple of weeks.

Clearing the backlog once is great. Not building a new one is the real win.

Put twenty minutes on your calendar every Sunday or Monday morning. Look at anything new that's come up that you haven't decided on. Label it door or wall. Decide the doors. Give the walls a deadline and a default. Check your log for anything whose review date has arrived.

That's the whole system. Twenty minutes a week, and the list never gets long enough to bury you again.

If you want to see where your time actually goes while you're doing this, Rize will track it quietly in the background. It's usually a little humbling to see how much of the week went to shallow work while the big decision sat there untouched.

I'll tell you what I've noticed, in my own business and in just about every owner I've worked with.

When you clear the list, you don't just get the results of the decisions. You get your head back. That low hum of background worry goes quiet. You sleep better. You show up to your family with more of yourself. Your team stops tiptoeing around the thing everybody knows needs to happen.

And almost every time, the decision you were dreading the most turns out to be the one you're most relieved you finally made.

Go make your list today. Decide the doors before dinner. Put deadlines on the walls.

Then enjoy the rest of your Sunday with a little more room in your head.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with DECIDE and tell me the one decision you've been sitting on the longest. You don't have to give me the backstory. I'll send back the one question I'd ask you if we were sitting across the table, and in my experience that question is usually enough.